The Death of the Mind

Last month, Maine used ranked choice voting for president, the first state ever to do that.  Howie Hawkins, the Green Party nominee, polled slightly over 1.00% in Maine last month.  That made Maine his best state, by far.  His second highest percentage was Hawaii, with .67%, and no other state was higher than .52%. One might say that Maine is always supportive of Green Party presidential nominees, and that is true, but not to that…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2020/12/26/ranked-choice-voting-appears-to-have-greatly-increased-the-howie-hawkins-vote-in-maine/

Philadelphia is facing a housing crisis with little help from the Democratic city council, mayor, or governor. In the city, 5,700 people are currently unhoused. Almost a thousand sleep on the streets on a given night. But more than that, this year has already seen 4,400 evictions filed in Philly courts. Another 2,000 renters are facing the very real threat of eviction and becoming part of the unhoused. This multifaceted crisis of housing is taking place as the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://popularresistance.org/housing-activists-are-fighting-evictions-in-the-streets/

It seems as though we still can’t hit the ceiling on better control schemes for 3D Printers. Input Shaping is the latest technique to land on our radar, a form of resonance compensation that all but eliminates the ghosting (aka: vertical ringing) artifacts we see on the walls of printed parts. While the technique has been around for decades, only recently did [Dmitry Butyugin] both apply it to 3D printer control and merge their hard…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/12/24/control-theory-spellcasting-banishes-the-3d-printing-ghosts/

It’s been a turbulent year and 2020 is certainly ending interesting in the Linux/open-source space… If it wasn’t odd enough seeing Sony providing a new official Linux driver for their PlayStation 5 DualSense controller for ending out the year, there is also a new Linux port to the Nintendo 64 game console… Yes, a brand new port to the game console that launched more than two decades ago…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nintendo-64-Linux-2020-Port

This year has been the year of home video conferencing. If you are really on the ball, you’ve managed to put some kind of green screen up so you can hide your mess and look as though you are in your posh upper east side office space. However, most of the consumer video conferencing now has some way to try to guess what your background is and replace it even without a green screen. The…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/12/22/the-world-is-your-green-screen/

Yesterday, Senator Thom Tillis helped ram through a gift for Hollywood: getting the felony streaming copyright bill that he’d only released a week earlier included in the must-pass omnibus funding bill despite literally no discussion or debate about the problems with the bill. This morning, he really doubled down. As announced last month, Tillis has now released a draft of his DMCA overhaul, which appears to be exactly what he had hinted at last month…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201222/09404045933/senator-tillis-releases-massive-unconstitutional-plan-to-reshape-internet-hollywoods-image.shtml

An Australian radio telescope picked up unusual signals back in 2019 and thinks they originated from Proxima Centauri, a scant 4.3 light years from our blue marble. Researchers caution that it almost certainly is a signal of human or natural origin and that more analysis will probably show it didn’t come from Proxima Centauri. But they can’t yet explain it. The research is from the Breakthrough Listen project, a decade-long SETI project. The 980 MHz…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/12/21/did-et-finally-call-us/

Over the last couple years, it’s become increasingly clear that facial recognition technology doesn’t work well, and would be a civil liberties and privacy nightmare even if it did. But that’s not stopping the Trump administration from moving forward with its dangerous plans to expand the technology’s use at U.S. airports and other ports of entry.U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has proposed a new rule that would massively expand the use of face surveillance…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/cbps-plan-to-expand-face-surveillance-at-airports-is-a-civil-liberties-disaster-in-the-making