DURHAM, N.C.—The Durham-Orange Light Rail Transit project, or DOLRT, is a planned 17.7-mile line linking Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The plan is two decades in the making—born of an ambitious 1990s scheme to stitch the state’s booming Research Triangle region together via rail.Since then, DOLRT has consumed more than $130 million in public money. In 2011 and 2012, voters in Durham and Orange counties approved half-cent sales taxes to fund transportation improvements, including…
Democrats and progressive groups across the state of New York are pushing back hard against an effort to ban fusion voting, a system that allows multiple parties to nominate the same candidate. The assault, according to those on the receiving end, is being driven by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ongoing hostility toward the Working Families Party, which has been a primary beneficiary of fusion voting in the state. A majority of Democrats in the state Senate,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/03/04/working-families-party-ny-cuomo/
Introduction When I first got involved in managing a Postgres database, I was quickly introduced to the need for replication. My first project was to get our databases up on Slony, which was the hot new replication technology, replacing our clunky DRBD setup and allowing near-realtime read-only copies of the database. Of course, with time and scale, Slony had a hard time keeping up with the write traffic, especially since it ultimately suffered from write…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4mZ
Following months of protests from its employees, Google announced last summer that it would not renew its contract with the military on Project Maven, an initiative to use artificial intelligence to improve the targeting and surveillance capabilities of drones on the battlefield. In an email sent this week by Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president for global affairs, the Silicon Valley giant appeared to hedge on its commitment to fully cut ties with the drone initiative. In an…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/03/01/google-project-maven-contract/
Earlier this month, security researcher Victor Gevers found and disclosed an exposed database live-tracking the locations of about 2.6 million residents of Xinjiang, China, offering a window into what a digital surveillance state looks like in the 21st century. Xinjiang is China’s largest province, and home to China’s Uighurs, a Turkic minority group. Here, the Chinese government has implemented a testbed police state where an estimated 1 million individuals from these minority groups have been…
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…
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/
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/
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…
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/
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/
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/
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.…
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
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/
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/
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
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
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
