Feb 272019
 

For our latest “Voices & Choices” podcast, Lawrence Lessig and Adam Eichen of Equal Citizens sat down with Nancy Lavin, FairVote staff writer, to talk about their efforts to bring ranked choice voting to New Hampshire’s presidential primaries: how it works and why it matters. The pair also share the origins of their interest in electoral reform, and Lessig looks back on his own presidential run in 2016. The following is an excerpt from that…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fairvote.org/larry_lessig_and_adam_eichen_talk_ranked_choice_voting_in_new_hampshire_presidential_primary

 2019-02-27  Comments Off on Larry Lessig and Adam Eichen talk ranked choice voting in New Hampshire presidential primary What’s New – Fairvote
Feb 222019
 

When activists in New York get together to send letters to their elected officials, they pool together money to pay for postcards, stamps, and even pizza to chow on as they do their work. Printing out flyers to advertise their events can also cost a pretty penny. These efforts are almost always volunteer-funded, but if Gov. Andrew Cuomo gets his way, activist organizations will have to register as lobbyists if they spend $500 a year on…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/02/21/andrew-cuomo-budget-proposal-lobbying-reform/

 2019-02-22  Comments Off on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Budget Proposal Would Force Grassroots Activists to Register as Lobbyists The Intercept
Feb 222019
 

After months of investigations and media reports into possible absentee-ballot fraud, we finally have a decision in the disputed election in the North Carolina 9th Congressional District: There will be a new election. This will be the first time that a congressional election has been redone since 1975. On Thursday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections voted 5-0 to hold a do-over election after hearing evidence that an illegal absentee-ballot scheme cast doubt on…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/north-carolina-is-getting-a-do-over-election/

 2019-02-22  Comments Off on North Carolina Is Getting A Do-Over Election Features – FiveThirtyEight
Feb 202019
 

Law enforcement agencies love their automatic license plate readers. ALPRs do what cops physically can’t: scan millions of plates a year and run them against a number of shared databases. The systems are black boxes. The public is often given little information about how many plate images databases store or for how long. Law enforcement agencies rarely audit the data, providing zero insight on the number of false positives ALPRs return. Non-hit photos are sometimes…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190217/08240241618/deputies-sued-after-false-alpr-hit-leads-to-guns-out-traffic-stop-california-privacy-activist.shtml

 2019-02-20  Comments Off on Deputies Sued After False ALPR Hit Leads To Guns-Out Traffic Stop Of California Privacy Activist Techdirt.
Feb 202019
 

Beware of Using Young People’s Blood to Halt Aging:”There is no proven clinical benefit of infusion of plasma from young donors to cure, mitigate, treat or prevent these conditions, and there are risks associated with the use of any plasma product,” the FDA said in a statement from Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and Peter Marks, head of the agency’s biologics center.The idea of infusing young blood to fight aging has attracted technology entrepreneurs like billionaire Peter…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/02/fda-rebukes-noted-vampire-peter-thiel/

 2019-02-20  Comments Off on FDA rebukes noted vampire Peter Thiel jwz
Feb 202019
 

Bernie Sanders is running for president again. His message is simple: there’s a class war raging and working people need to win it. Bernie Sanders speaking at an event in Phoenix, Arizona on July 18, 2015. Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia It’s finally happening. Bernie Sanders just announced that he’ll be running for president again. Judging from its early entrants, the politics of this upcoming Democratic presidential primary will be the most progressive in decades. All…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/bernie-sanders-presidential-primary-democratic-party/

 2019-02-20  Comments Off on Bernie Is Running, Thank God Jacobin
Feb 172019
 

San Francisco’s iconic Anchor Brewing Company is now the scene of a unionization fight. We spoke with Brace Belden, one of the organizers. Yumi Kimura / Flickr Anchor Brewing Company is often called the first craft brewery in America. It operates the largest factory in San Francisco, and the company has deep historical roots in the City by the Bay. But then, so does the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Last week, workers at…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/anchor-brewing-unionization-drive-craft-beer/

 2019-02-17  Comments Off on “There Wouldn’t Be Craft Beer If It Weren’t For Us” Jacobin
Feb 162019
 

President Donald Trump admits he’s making his move because he didn’t get his way with Congress, and in the process, he hurts American communities. After more than a month of threats, a government shutdown, and bipartisan action by Congress, President Trump has finally declared a national emergency to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on his border wall obsession. In response, the ACLU will file a lawsuit early next week challenging this blatantly illegal executive action.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.aclu.org/blog/executive-branch/there-no-national-emergency-border-and-trumps-declaration-illegal

 2019-02-16  Comments Off on There Is No ‘National Emergency’ at the Border, and Trump’s Declaration Is Illegal American Civil Liberties Union
Feb 162019
 

Charter schools are like tree roots growing into cracks in the building of public education. If not stopped, they will bring it crashing down. Teacher’s strikes are weakening the political support that charter schools have obtained in the plutocratist system.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2018-nov-feb.html#16_February_2019_%28Charter_schools%29

 2019-02-16  Comments Off on Charter schools Richard Stallman’s Political Notes
Feb 162019
 

As part of the Image team at GREYC lab (CRNS, ENSICAEN, University of Caen), I implemented the “fill by line art” algorithm in GIMP, also known as “Smart Colorization“. You may know this algorithm in G’Mic (developed by the same team), so when they proposed me to work with them, I wanted to implement this algorithm in GIMP core. Thus it became my first assignment. The Problem The concept of filling by line art is…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://girinstud.io/news/2019/02/smart-colorization-in-gimp/

 2019-02-16  Comments Off on Smart Colorization in GIMP Planet GNOME
Feb 162019
 

Revised proposals attempt to address worries over Manifest v3 API changes Google has proposed changes to its Chrome Extension renovation plan that answer some but not all of the concerns its Manifest v3 technical specification.…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/16/google_content_blocking_code/

 2019-02-16  Comments Off on After outrage over Chrome ad-block block plan, Google backs away from crippling web advert, content filters The Register
Feb 162019
 

I already mentioned here having adopted and updated the Raspberry Pi 3 Debian Buster Unofficial Preview image generation project. As you might know, the hardware differences between the three families are quite deep — The original Raspberry Pi (models A and B), as well as the Zero and Zero W, are ARMv6 (which, in Debian-speak, belong to the armel architecture, a.k.a. EABI / Embedded ABI). Raspberry Pi 2 is an ARMv7 (so, we call it…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://gwolf.org/node/4139

 2019-02-16  Comments Off on Gunnar Wolf: Debian on the Raspberryscape: Great news! Planet Debian
Feb 142019
 

Despite ringing denunciations from small EU tech businesses, giant EU entertainment companies, artists’ groups, technical experts, and human rights experts, and the largest body of concerned citizens in EU history, the EU has concluded its “trilogues” on the new Copyright Directive, striking a deal that—amazingly—is worse than any in the Directive’s sordid history. Take Action Stop Article 13 Goodbye, protections for artists and scientists The Copyright Directive was always a grab bag of updates to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/final-version-eus-copyright-directive-worst-one-yet

 2019-02-14  Comments Off on The Final Version of the EU’s Copyright Directive Is the Worst One Yet Deeplinks
Feb 122019
 

I’ve learned a lot of skills over the course of my career, but no technical skill more useful than SQL. SQL stands out to me as the most valuable skill for a few reasons: It is valuable across different roles and disciplines Learning it once doesn’t really require re-learning You seem like a superhero. You seem extra powerful when you know it because of the amount of people that aren’t fluent Let me drill into…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4lu

 2019-02-12  Comments Off on Craig Kerstiens: SQL: One of the most valuable skills Planet PostgreSQL
Feb 112019
 

Editor’s note: This story was originally published by Grist. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Green New Deal has been championed by advocates for getting the United States running on purely renewable energy right away. Some 600 environmental groups had demanded the initiative set out to ban not just fossil fuels, but also nuclear, biomass power, and large-scale hydroelectricity. So when the resolution made its long-awaited debut on Thursday, it came as a surprise to some that…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/why-the-green-new-deal-may-include-nuclear-power/

 2019-02-11  Comments Off on Why the Green New Deal may include nuclear power Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recent issues
Feb 102019
 

In a win for privacy rights, the Illinois Supreme Court allowed a lawsuit to continue against a company that scanned a 14-year-old’s thumbprint. The Illinois Supreme Court issued an important decision in late January rejecting attempts to gut the state’s landmark law that bars companies from collecting people’s biometric identifiers — including face recognition scans, fingerprints, and iris scans — without providing a written explanation of what they plan to do with the data and…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/ruling-warning-companies-collecting-biometric

 2019-02-10  Comments Off on Ruling Is a Warning to Companies Collecting Biometric Scans Without Permission American Civil Liberties Union
Feb 102019
 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is prepared for the possibility that Democrats in New York could redraw her district after the 2020 election, she told The Intercept in an interview.   Following the 2020 census, every state will draw new district boundaries to reflect changes in the population, the political implications of which will stretch for at least the next decade. In 2014, New York approved a constitutional amendment establishing a nonpartisan redistricting commission, which is set…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/02/09/ocasio-cortez-district-redistricting-2020/

 2019-02-10  Comments Off on New York Democrats Could Eliminate Ocasio-Cortez’s District After 2020 The Intercept
Feb 102019
 

On February 8, a bill to greatly reduce ballot access barriers was introduced in the Georgia House. It is HB 191. The sponsors are three Democrats and one Republican: Dar’shun Kendrick (D-Lithonia), David Stover (R-Newnan), Vernon Jones (D-Lithonia), and Valencia Stovall (D-Forest Park). The bill says that if a party is ballot-qualified for statewide office, then it is automatically qualified for all partisan office. And it lowers the number of signatures for independent candidates and…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2019/02/09/georgia-ballot-access-bill-introduced-5/

 2019-02-10  Comments Off on Georgia Ballot Access Bill Introduced Ballot Access News