Techdirt. – Sci-Hub’s Creator Thinks Academic Publishers, Not Her Site, Are The Real Threat To Science, And Says: ‘Any Law Against Knowledge Is Fundamentally Unjust’

Jan 032022
 

A year ago, Techdirt wrote about an important lawsuit in India, brought by the academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub and the similar Libgen. A couple of factors make this particular legal action different from previous attempts to shut down these sites. First, an Indian court ruled in 2016 that photocopying textbooks for educational purposes is fair use; the parallels with SciHub, which provides free access to copies of academic papers for students and researchers who might not otherwise be able to afford the high subscription fees, are clear. Secondly, the person behind Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, is fighting, rather than ignoring, the case, as she has done on previous occasions.

One manifestation…

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Ballot Access News – Trial Begins In North Carolina Partisan Gerrymandering Lawsuit in State Court

Jan 032022
 

A trial will be held this week in North Carolina state court, over whether the new U.S. House and legislative districts constitute an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. The North Carolina Supreme Court has previously ruled that the state constitution prohibits partisan … Continue reading →

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Techdirt. – NY Senator Proposes Ridiculously Unconstitutional Social Media Law That Is The Mirror Opposite Of Equally Unconstitutional Laws In Florida & Texas

Jan 032022
 

We’ve joked in the past about how Republicans hate Section 230 for letting websites moderate too much content, while Democrats hate it for letting websites not moderate enough content. Of course, the reality is they both are mad about content moderation (at different extremes) because they both want to control the internet in a manner that helps “their team.” But both approaches involve unconstitutional desires to interfere with 1st Amendment rights. For Republicans, it’s often the compelled hosting of speech, and for Democrats, it’s often the compelled deletion of speech. Both of those are unconstitutional.

On the Republican side, we’ve already seen states like Florida and Texas sign into law content moderation bills — and both have…

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Hackaday – 3D Printed Model Roller Coaster Accurately Simulates the Real Thing

Jan 032022
 

While they don’t give the physical thrill of a real one, model roller coasters are always fun to watch. However, they actually make a poor analog of a full-sized ride, as gravitational force and aerodynamic drag don’t scale down in the same way, model roller coasters usually move way faster than the same design would in the real world. [Jon Mendenhall] fixed this deficiency by designing a model roller coaster that accurately simulates a full-sized ride.
The track and cart are all made of 3D printed pieces, which altogether took about 400 hours to print. The main trick to the system’s unique motion is that the cart is motorized: a brushless DC motor moves it along the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2021/12/30/3d-printed-model-roller-coaster-accurately-simulates-the-real-thing/

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Phoronix – Massive ~2.3k Patch Series Would Improve Linux Build Times 50~80% & Fix “Dependency Hell”

Jan 032022
 

Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar posted a massive set of patches today: 2,297 patches that have been in the works since late 2020 and completely rework the Linux kernel’s header file hierarchy. The goal of this “fast kernel headers” effort is to speed up kernel build times and also clean=up a lot of things in the proces to address the “dependency hell”…

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