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/
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…
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/
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/
“MY PACKAGE THIEF HAS BEEN ARRESTED!!!,” reads a post on Neighbors, a “neighborhood watch” social network run by Ring, which is a home security systems company owned by Amazon. The post shows two side-by-side images: one is of a man as captured on a home security camera, and the other is of someone who appears to be the same man, as photographed in a mugshot. “This man stolen my packages along with my neighbors packages…
A few weeks ago I was chatting with someone who works security at Slim’s. He said something to the effect of, “Goldenvoice is terrible, but our contract with them is only for another year or two, so maybe after that things will go back to normal.” I didn’t have the heart to say to him, “How’s that going to happen when you no longer have a booking or promotions department? They fired everybody!” Slim’s, Great…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2019/02/06.html
At the start of his linux.conf.au 2019 talk, Kristoffer Grönlund said that he would be taking attendees back 60 years or more. That is not quite to the dawn of computing history, but it is close—farther back than most of us were alive to remember. He encountered John McCarthy’s famous Lisp paper [PDF] via Papers We Love and it led him to dig deeply into the Lisp world; he brought back a report for the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/778550/rss
The EU’s on-again/off-again Copyright Directive keeps sinking under its own weight: on the one side, you have German politicians who felt that it was politically impossible to force every online platform to spend hundreds of millions of euros to buy copyright filters to prevent a user from infringing copyright, even for an instant, and so proposed tiny, largely cosmetic changes to keep German small businesses happy; on the other side, you have French politicians who…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/05/death-sentence-for-the-web.html
Early adopters of LED lighting will remember 50,000 hour or even 100,000 hour lifetime ratings printed on the box. But during a recent trip to the hardware store the longest advertised lifetime I found was 25,000 hours. Others claimed only 7,500 or 15,000 hours. And yes, these are brand-name bulbs from Cree and GE. So, what happened to those 100,000 hour residential LED bulbs? Were the initial estimates just over-optimistic? Was it all marketing hype? Or,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2019/02/05/what-happened-to-the-100000-hour-led-bulbs/
The 3D printers we’re most familiar with use the fused deposition process, in which hot plastic is squirted out of a nozzle, to build up parts on a layer by layer basis. We’ve also seen stereolithography printers, such as the Form 2, which use a projector and a special resin to produce parts, again in a layer-by-layer method. However, a team from the University of North Carolina were inspired by CT scanners, and came up…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2019/02/05/3d-printing-with-tomography-in-reverse/
Back in 1947, decades before cat memes became a way of life, experimental documentary filmmakers Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid gave us a lovely glimpse of the “Private Life of a Cat.” From Archive.org: RECORDS FEMALE CAT & HER 5 KITTENS AS MOTHER CAT APPROACHES LABOR, KITTENS ARE BORN & OBTAIN MILK & MOTHER CAT THEN CARES FOR THEM IN LEARNING & GROWING PROCESS, IN WHICH TOM CAT OCCASIONALLY PARTICIPATES. (via r/ObscureMedia) Previously: Maya Deren’s…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/05/watch-the-private-life-of-a-ca.html
As previously noted, on January 11, a Wisconsin state trial court ruled in favor of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and Jill Stein in Elections Systems and Software v Election Commission. The issue was whether Stein’s experts, who are permitted to look at the voting software in connection with Stein’s recount of the 2016 presidential vote, are free to comment on that software afterwards. The trial court had ruled that they may comment, as long as…
Braintree Payments uses PostgreSQL as its primary datastore. We rely heavily on the data safety and consistency guarantees a traditional relational database offers us, but these guarantees come with certain operational difficulties. To make things even more interesting, we allow zero scheduled functional downtime for our main payments processing services.Several years ago we published a blog post detailing some of the things we had learned about how to safely run DDL (data definition language) operations…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4kZ
I would never betray the trust of customers, says man perhaps doing exactly that Comment Some would argue he has broken every ethical and moral rule of his in his profession, but genealogist Bennett Greenspan prefers to see himself as a crime-fighter.…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/01/familytreedna_fbi_link/
The Living Computers museum in Seattle has a Xerox Alto, the machine famous for being the first to sport a mouse-based windowing graphical user interface. They received it in working condition and put it in their exhibit, but were dismayed when a year later it ceased to operate. Some detective work revealed that the power supply was failing to reach parts of the machine, and further investigation revealed an unlikely culprit. Electromigration had degraded the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2019/02/03/fail-of-the-week-electromigration-nearly-killed-this-xerox-alto/
NBC News published a predictably viral story Friday, claiming that “experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.” But the whole story was a sham: the only “experts” cited by NBC in support of its key claim was the firm, New Knowledge, that just got caught by the New York Times fabricating Russian troll accounts on behalf of the Democratic…
Release YouTube, you beast! (credit: 123pendejos) The latest beleaguered Google product to get a death date is Google+. Google’s controversial Facebook clone is shutting down on April 2. Google has been backing away from the service for years, but it gave the site a death sentence in October, after revelations of a data leak were made public. Now we have a concrete shutdown date for the service. Google’s support page details exactly how the G+…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1449009
One of the most influential ideas in urbanism today is that the key to addressing the housing crisis is reforming zoning and building codes to allow for taller buildings and higher population densities.A growing chorus of market urbanists and YIMBYs make the case: Restrict supply, and demand and therefore prices go up. So, it follows, liberalizing codes to make it easier to build—and to permit taller, denser structures—will increase supply and cause prices to fall,…
