SpaceX Sunday’s launch attempt of a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with a primary launch window from 1:32pm ET (18:32 UTC) to 2pm ET (19:00 UTC), is significant for a number of reasons. For one, this will be the company’s 19th launch of 2018, and if successful, it will break SpaceX’s record for most missions flown in a calendar year. With a handful of launches remaining on its manifest in…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1421039
Please enjoy jwz mixtape 2ØØ.Two hundred!By the numbers: that’s 1,625 audio tracks on the first 75 mixtapes, and then 2,732 videos on the next 125 mixtapes, for a total running time of just over 12 days. That averages out to pretty close to my goal of 90 minutes each, at an average of one every six weeks.I wanted to do something to commemorate the bicentennial (bicentapial?) so here’s a double-length mixtape (a pair of C90s)…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/11/jwz-mixtape-200/
When the EU started planning its new Copyright Directive (the “Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive”), a group of powerful entertainment industry lobbyists pushed a terrible idea: a mandate that all online platforms would have to create crowdsourced databases of “copyrighted materials” and then block users from posting anything that matched the contents of those databases. At the time, we, along with academics and technologists explained why this would undermine the Internet, even as…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/yes-eus-new-copyrightdirective-all-about-filters
A growing movement wants to amend the US Constitution and weaken its due process protections in its ill-advised pursuit of victims’ rights. Alongside the major criminal justice reform headlines that came out of the midterm elections, a quieter trend also gained momentum through the ballot box: a budding, national threat to due process and the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. On Nov. 6, six states adopted, through ballot initiatives, what is known as “Marsy’s…
The election of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries as House Democratic Caucus chair on Wednesday represented a symbolic and substantive comeback for the wing of the party that had suffered a stunning defeat last June, when Rep. Joe Crowley was beaten by primary challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Jeffries, who represents a Brooklyn district next door to Crowley’s, bested Rep. Barbara Lee of California, who had the support of the insurgent movement that had ousted Crowley. A protege of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/hakeem-jeffries-joe-crowley-house-democratic-caucus-chair/
At the start of this decade, US lawmakers drafted several controversial bills to make it easier for copyright holders to enforce their rights online. These proposals, including SOPA and PIPA, were met with fierce resistance from the public as well as major technology companies. They feared that the plans, which included pirate site-blocking measures, went too far. The public protests columnated in a massive Internet blackout. This had the desired effect, as the bills were…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/music-industry-asks-us-govt-to-reconsider-website-blocking-181127/
Kevin Williamson writes an ode to the benefits of competition and capitalism, one of his themes being the changing fortunes of Apple and Microsoft over the last two decades. I’m mostly sympathetic, but in a hurry to decry “government intervention in and regulation of the part of our economy that is, at the moment, working best”, he forgets or neglects to mention the antitrust actions brought by the US government against Microsoft in the mid-to-late…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2018/11/capitalism-competition-and-microsoft.html
If you’re building a computer, your options are nearly limitless. You can get a motherboard with red LEDs, with blue LEDs, green LEDs, or if you’re feeling spendy, RGB LEDs. You can get custom-milled heat spreaders in any shape you want, as long as it’s angular and screams ‘gamer’. If you want a motherboard that doesn’t use x86 — either AMD or Intel — you’re kind of out of luck. Either it doesn’t exist, or it’s…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/11/26/a-sub-1000-non-x86-motherboard/
Amnesty International has announced a new protest campaign calling on Google to cancel its controversial plan to launch a censored search engine in China. The human rights group on Monday launched a petition against the search engine and said that on Tuesday, it will stage demonstrations outside Google offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Spain. Google’s plan for China would “irreparably damage internet users’ trust…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2018/11/26/google-dragonfly-project-china-amnesty-international/
DNA Lounge update, wherein it’s our birthday, and SF is losing another venue.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/11/dna-lounge-update-406/
The European Union is fumbling towards a final draft of the new “Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive,” including the controversial “Article 13,” which requires all but the smallest online platforms to set up crowdsourced databases of copyrighted works and censor anything a user posts that matches (or partially matches!) the contents of these databases. This is a system that’s ripe for abuse. Where more modest versions of these blacklist systems exist, artists find…
Now that the midterms are finally over, the battle against “Medicare for All” that has been quietly waged throughout the year is poised to take center stage. Internal strategy documents obtained by The Intercept and Documented reveal the strategy that private health care interests plan to use to influence Democratic Party messaging and stymie the momentum toward achieving universal health care coverage. At least 48 incoming freshman lawmakers campaigned on enacting “Medicare for All” or similar efforts to expand…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2018/11/20/medicare-for-all-healthcare-industry/
The time has finally come: I was served an eviction notice from my colo host, so I have moved my server and web sites over to AWS.Many of you have already begun composing a comment starting with, “Instead of Amazon, you know what you oughta do” and — thank you but no, please stop. It is done. I solicited your opinions on this a year ago, you had your chance.You can be helpful in the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/11/old-man-yells-at-cloud/
Regular readers know that I’m fascinated with how non-coders use Emacs and especially how (prose) writers leverage it to remove friction from the writing process. Phil Daniels over at The Copytist is a professional writer who’s working on a longish book of about 400 pages. His writing environment was centered on Microsoft Windows running Google Docs. It had, apparently, been working well for shorter projects but Google Docs just couldn’t handle the larger manuscript. Daniels…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://irreal.org/blog/?p=7621
The New New Anti-Semitism Hiding Israel’s Crimes of State Behind False Claims of Victimization I along with many others am being victimized these days. They are being labeled anti-Semites, and in some instances, self-hating Jews as well. This is a Zionist and Israeli effort to shut down our voices and punish our non-violent activism, with special venom directed at the BDS Campaign because it has become so effective in recent years. This…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2018/11/18/the-new-new-anti-semitism/
3D models drawn in Blender work great in a computer animated virtual world but don’t always when brought into a slicer for 3D printing. Slicers require something which makes sense in the real world. And the real world is far less forgiving, as I’ve found out with my own projects which use 3D printed parts. Our [Brian Benchoff] already talked about making parts in Blender with his two-part series (here and here) so consider this…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/11/14/3d-printering-blender-tips-for-printable-objects/
Over the last few months, I’ve noticed extra calls coming in from local numbers, and if you live in the US, I suspect maybe you have too. These calls are either just dead air, or recordings that start with “Please don’t hang up.” Out of curiosity, I’ve called back on the number the call claims to be from. Each time, the message is that this number has been disconnected and is no longer in service.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/11/12/hello-and-please-dont-hang-up-the-scourge-of-robocalls/
This summer, Nintendo made it totally clear that websites offering access to its retro-games and ROMs will not be tolerated. The Japanese game developer filed a complaint at a federal court in Arizona, accusing LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co of massive copyright and trademark infringement. Faced with millions of dollars in potential damages, the operator of the sites, Jacob Mathias, swiftly took the platforms offline. The legal action also led to the shutdown several other ROM sites,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-wins-12-million-from-pirate-rom-site-operators-181112/
At midnight on Election Day last Tuesday, vote tallies showed Republican candidates ahead in key races in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. However, many votes remained to be counted in all three states. The stakes are high: two Senate seats (Florida and Arizona) and two governorships (Florida and Georgia), plus some lower offices. And as the count has proceeded, the Democratic candidate in each case has gained more votes than the Republican, narrowing the margin or —…
A few weeks ago we published an update about the forthcoming of our Librem 5 development kits when we ran into some issues which caused delays. Today we’re bringing you another update on the hardware fabrication process, as well as some pictures and a video. At the same time as the last update got posted, I was on my way to California, where we are fabricating our development kit and base boards (we are bringing…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-2018-11-hardware-report/