Anyone got the technical reference manual for this simulation we’re living in?
Physicists in America have confirmed a strange measurement that was first discovered by scientists probing the internal structure of protons two decades ago. …
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/10/23/physicists_proton_structure/
On October 21, the Alaska Supreme Court issued its opinion in Kohlhaas v state. The opinion is unanimous and is 57 pages. It explains why it had ruled on January 19, 2022, that the top-four initiative is constitutional. The oral argument had been on January 18, and the next day the court had said the initiative is constitutional and that it would explain later. Now it has issued its explanation.
The most interesting part of the decision is the Court’s criticism of the Maine Supreme Court’s 2017 decision that had held that ranked choice voting violates the Maine Constitution, as applied to state office. Maine still lacks ranked choice voting for state office, in general elections (but…
The U-Boot list carries
the sad news that Wolfgang Denk, the founder of the U-Boot project, has
passed away.Wolfgang was a pioneer and strong supporter of Open Source, in the time when Linux for Embedded System started its first steps. In many occasions he had strong discussions with customers to explain the advantages of Open Source, and he rejected business contracts if customer was going against his principles. We will miss him.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/912052/
In 1938 a farmer grew pumpkins with realistic human faces. The pumpkins of John M. Czeski beat any Jack-O-Lantern I’ve seen. He created these fabulous pumpkin heads by placing an aluminum mold around a growing pumpkin. The pumpkin would take the shape of the mold until it grew into a human-like face. — Read the rest
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2022/10/23/in-1938-a-farmer-grew-pumpkins-with-realistic-human-faces.html
On October 23, the New York Daily News carried an editorial, criticizing the Second Circuit for refusing to give any ballot access relief to the Libertarian and Green Parties, and for not even explaining its reasoning. As the editorial notes, the opinion is one sentence long, saying there is nothing wrong with the U.S. District Court opinion earlier that upheld the 2020 ballot access rules.
There is much wrong with the U.S. District Court decision. It said that New York is justified in keeping minor parties off the ballot because otherwise the state would need to waste money on public funding for minor party candidates. This was fallacious because the Second Circuit had already ruled in a…
One of my favorite layers to route with pgRouting is the water layer. I am interested
in where water comes from, where it goes, where runoff happens,
and how urban development interacts with this powerful force
of nature. The OpenStreetMap water layer, however,
presents a challenge when routing with PostGIS and pgRouting: Polygons.
Why are polygons a challenge? A routing network using pgRouting is built
from lines (edges).
Now, to state the obvious: polygons are not lines.
Real world waterway networks are made up of both lines and polygons.
Rivers, streams, and drainage routes are predominately (but not exclusively!)
mapped using lines. These lines feed into and out of ponds, lakes, and reservoirs. The following animation shows how much impact the water polygons
can have on a…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5rb
As landlords continue their relentless pursuit of profits, and politicians allow pandemic-era eviction moratoriums to expire, the human toll of a fundamentally brutal housing system is arguably more visible than ever—particularly in America’s largest cities.
Much of corporate media’s coverage of the deepening housing crisis, however, focuses on what are presented as three great evils: that landlords of supposedly modest means are being squeezed; that individuals and families living without homes destroy the aesthetics of cities; and that, in line with the most recent manufactured panic over violent crime, people without homes pose a threat to the lives and property of law-abiding citizens.
By pushing these narratives, corporate media are engaging in a strategy of misdirection. This shields…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://fair.org/home/media-narratives-shield-landlords-from-a-crisis-of-their-own-making/
The display featured a scarecrow wearing a “Can I speak to the manager?” t-shirt and a “Karen” nametag.
Further, the city says the display was not a political statement, nor was it targeted at a specific individual or group, and that they have investigated the issue internally and did not find anyone who participated in the display intended malice.
Moving forward, the city says there will be staff trainings as to why this was “insensitive and offensive to their community.”
(Time to bring back the “we’re a culture not a costume” memes.)
Enlarge / Search through millions of vintage files with Discmaster. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Today, tech archivist Jason Scott announced a new website called Discmaster that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and much more. Discmaster opens a window into digital media culture around the turn of the millennium, turning anyone into a would-be digital archeologist. It’s a rare look into a slice of cultural history that is often obscured by the challenges of obsolete media and file format incompatibilities.
The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1890903
North Carolina law says the State Board of Elections is composed of five members, all of whom must be a registered member of one of the two largest parties. The major party that holds the governorship gets three members, and the other large party gets two members. UPDATE: see this story.
For some time, independent voters and their allies have been trying to win a lawsuit that says it violates the U.S. Constitution that an independent can never be on the board. The first such lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed, and a new lawsuit was filed by Common Cause earlier this year. The State officials who are being sued filed a brief on October 14, arguing that the…
Anybody born before the mid 1990s will likely remember film cameras being used to document their early years. Although the convenience of digital cameras took over and were then themselves largely usurped by mobile phones, there is still a surprising variety of photographic film being produced. Despite the long pedigree, how many of us really know what goes into making what is a surprisingly complex and exacting product? [Destin] from SmarterEveryDay has been to Rochester, NY to find out for himself and you can see the second in a series of three hour-long videos shedding light on what is normally the strictly lights-out operation of film-coating.
Kodak’s first attempt at a digital camera in 1975. The form-factor…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/10/18/kodak-film-factory-revealed/
Recent polls suggest that the Democrats’ sidelining of economic issues to go all in on the Capitol riot hasn’t borne fruit. While voters are most concerned about inflation, they think the party’s main priority is January 6, which barely registers.
The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol on June 16, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) When the Democrats embarked on their January 6 media extravaganza earlier this year, there were two schools of thought.
If you read more Democratic-friendly press outlets, the series of sometimes-prime-time hearings were all part of a canny electoral strategy to fire up the party’s base, while also…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2022/10/democrats-january-6-hearings-capitol-riot-polls-economy-inflation/
We’re investigating a potential lawsuit against GitHub Copilot for violating its legal duties to open-source authors and end users:Here again we find Microsoft getting handwavy. In 2021, Nat Friedman claimed that Copilot’s “output belongs to the operator, just like with a compiler.” But this is a mischievous analogy, because Copilot lays new traps for the unwary.Microsoft characterizes the output of Copilot as a series of code “suggestions”. Microsoft “does not claim any rights” in these suggestions. But neither does Microsoft make any guarantees about the correctness, security, or extenuating intellectual-property entanglements of the code so produced. Once you accept a Copilot suggestion, all that becomes your problem. […]What entanglements might arise? Copilot users — here’s one…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/10/copilot-lawsuit/
On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced it’s thinking about updating its energy labeling rules to require manufacturers to provide people with repair instructions. According to the press release on the FTC website, the commission wants to revise its energy-saving Energy Guide Rules, and is looking for public comment. “We look forward to hearing from the public on our initiative to reduce energy costs, promote competition, and strengthen repairability,” Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in the press release. “As prices rise, the Commission will continue to take aggressive action to protect consumers’ pocketbooks and strengthen their right to repair their own products.” You’ve probably seen the yellow label on…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k7bxaa/ftc-energy-rules-right-to-repair
https://www.loc.gov/item/2019642586/ It’s been over two years since a group of large book publishers sued the Internet Archive over our lending programs. After an expensive and lengthy discovery phase, arguments have now been fully briefed in the district court. What might we learn from the proceedings so far about how publishers see the future of libraries? The first thing we might learn is that the publishers want controlled digital lending declared illegal. At the time the lawsuit against us was filed, much of the commentary and analysis suggested that the case was really about the National Emergency Library–our emergency pandemic lending program. But while the NEL is certainly a part of the lawsuit, it did not take…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2022/10/17/the-cdl-lawsuit-and-the-future-of-libraries/
Biden’s Labor Department has proposed an employment rule that would
classify the drivers of Uber and Lyft as employees.This would be a big step forward for employee’s rights, but it won’t
do anything about the injustice of Uber and Lyft to the passengers:
making them nonfree software (an app) and identify themselves
(enabling surveillance). This should be forbidden.So I will continue to get into an Uber or Lyft car. I go out of my
way to get a real taxi that I can board anonymously and pay with cash.
Or I take a bus. Or I walk.In some places, such as New York City, even taxis are part of a
surveillance machine. A cab driver there told me that all NYC taxis
are…
Aspiring polyglots can be stymied by differing keyboard layouts and character sets when switching between languages. [Thomas Pollak]’s Poly Keyboard circumvents this problem by putting a screen in every key of the keyboard.
In his extensive build logs, [Pollak] details the different challenges he’s faced while bringing this amazing keyboard to life. For example, the OLED screens need glyph rendering to handle the legends on the keys. Since the goal is true universal language support, he used the Adafruit-GFX Library as a beginning and was able to extend support to Japanese, Korean, and Arabic so far in his custom fork of QMK.
The attention to detail on this build is really impressive. Beside the dedication to full glyph…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/poly-keyboard-has-screens-in-every-key/
On Tuesday, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP)—a data visualization project focused on documenting urban displacement and resistance—unveiled a new tool: the Evictorbook, a database of corporate landlords in San Francisco and Oakland that identifies evictors, their shell companies, additional rental properties, and eviction patterns. “As they did after the 2008 housing crash, investors and corporate landlords have taken advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to buy up housing across the country,” the team behind Evictorbook writes on its website. “This disproportionately harms communities of color and limits opportunities for homeownership. Evictorbook is a tool communities can use to combat the systemic racial and economic inequities within our housing system and ensure that housing is for people, not…
The Rockingham County Sheriff’s Department in Wentworth, N.C., is among the law enforcement agencies the AP found using the Fog Reveal location tracking tool. AP Photo/Allen G. BreedGovernment agencies and private security companies in the U.S. have found a cost-effective way to engage in warrantless surveillance of individuals, groups and places: a pay-for-access web tool called Fog Reveal. The tool enables law enforcement officers to see “patterns of life” – where and when people work and live, with whom they associate and what places they visit. The tool’s maker, Fog Data Science, claims to have billions of data points from over 250 million U.S. mobile devices. Fog Reveal came to light when the Electronic Frontier…
I’ve released man-db 2.11.0
(announcement,
NEWS), and
uploaded it to Debian unstable.
The biggest chunk of work here was fixing some extremely long-standing
issues with how the database is built. Despite being in the package name,
man-db’s database is much less important than it used to be: most uses of
man(1) haven’t required it in a long time, and both hardware and
software
improvements
mean that even some searches can be done by brute force without needing
prior indexing. However, the database is still needed for the whatis(1)
and apropos(1) commands.
The database has a simple format – no relational structure here, it’s just a
simple key-value database using old-fashioned DBM-like interfaces and
composing a few fields to form values – but there are a number of subtleties
involved. The issues tend to…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/blog/reproducible-man-db-databases.html
Some folks complained that the display was “offensive to certain type of women,” and city hall was forced to take it down.