The Death of the Mind

A startup claims it has launched weather balloons that may have released reflective sulfur particles in the stratosphere, potentially crossing a controversial barrier in the field of solar geoengineering. That refers to deliberate efforts to manipulate the climate by reflecting more sunlight back into space, mimicking a natural process that occurs in the aftermath of large volcanic eruptions. In theory, spraying sulfur and similar particles in sufficient quantities could potentially ease global warming. It’s not technically difficult to release such compounds in the stratosphere. But scientists have mostly refrained from carrying out even small-scale outdoor experiments (though not entirely). And it’s not clear that any have yet injected materials into that specific layer of the atmosphere in the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/24/1066041/a-startup-says-its-begun-releasing-particles-into-the-atmosphere-in-an-effort-to-tweak-the-climate/

Our Christmas present to you: a long-lost Eugene V. Debs article on the famed 1914 Christmas truce, in which German and British soldiers dropped their weapons for a day and played football together — displaying humanity in the face of barbarity.
An illustration of British and German troops suspending hostilities for Christmas in 1914. (Print Collector / Getty Images) The soldiers engaged in the European slaughter have become entirely too friendly with each other. They have in fact fraternized when they have had a chance instead of fratriciding.
And this has been pronounced a crime and threatened with punishment as the following cablegram explains:
The German army authorities have issued a general order…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2022/12/eugene-debs-christmas-day-truce/

Today’s links

2023’s public domain is a banger: Hemingway! Holmes! Woolf! Pooh! Christie! Metropolis! Gershwin!

Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

This day in history: 2002, 2012, 2017

Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

2023’s public domain is a banger (permalink)
40 years ago, giant entertainment companies embarked on a slow-moving act of arson. The fuel for this arson was copyright term extension (making copyrights last longer), including retrospective copyright term extensions that took works out of the public domain and put them back into copyright for decades. Vast swathes of culture became off-limits, pseudo-property with absentee landlords, with much of it crumbling into dust.
After 55-75 years, only 2% of works have any commercial value. After 75…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/20/free-for-2023/

You’re holding your staff meetings the wrong way

Apple has been accused of creating its own labor organization to prevent workers from forming an employee-run union, according to a complaint filed on Friday.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/12/16/apple_decoy_labor_group/

The Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has issued a disappointing ruling in the case of Green v. DOJ. The ruling left intact a law that has stifled speech and innovation for decades and forced researchers, advocates, teachers, and tinkerers to beg for government permission to do their work. The silver lining: it left many issues in the case to be determined another day.
We partnered with law firm Wilson Sonsini to file this case in 2016 because Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act violates the First Amendment by threatening security research, remix video, media literacy education, access to culture for disabled people, and even the right to understand how your car works…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/dc-circuit-evades-important-questions-disappointing-ruling-section-1201-dmca

I’ll be back, or perhaps not

San Francisco legislators this week changed course on their killer robot policy, banning the police from using remote-control bots fitted with explosives. For now.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/12/07/san_francisco_terminates_killer_robots/

It will come as no surprise to any regular reader here when I say that Nintendo is roughly the most annoyingly draconian protector of IP in the video game space. At this point, Techdirt posts discussing Nintendo’s copyright and trademark antics are legion. Notable among those posts for the purposes of this discussion are several online gaming tournaments that Nintendo has allowed to exist, often without a license, but which Nintendo has still been willing to shut down over the use of 3rd party tools that make it possible to stream older games on current hardware and over the internet better. Those shutdowns over the use of tools that have nothing to do with copyright infringement…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/nintendo-shuts-down-smash-world-tour-over-licensing-at-the-last-possible-second/

I’ve been playing with an Orbic Speed, a relatively outdated device that only speaks LTE Cat 4, but the towers I can see from here are, uh, not well provisioned so throughput really isn’t a concern (and refurbs are $18, so). As usual I’m pretty terrible at just buying devices and using them for their intended purpose, and in this case it has the irritating behaviour that if there’s a power cut and the battery runs out it doesn’t boot again when power returns, so here’s what I’ve learned so far.First, it’s clearly running Linux (nmap indicates that, as do the headers from the built-in webserver). The login page for the web interface has some text…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/61725.html