Ballot Access News – U.S. Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Challenge to North Carolina Independent Petition Deadline

Feb 232021
 

On February 22, the U.S. Supreme Court revealed that it won’t hear Kopitke v Bell, 20-897, the challenge to the North Carolina independent presidential petition deadline of March 3. That deadline, created in 2018, violates the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1983 decision Anderson v Celebrezze, which struck down Ohio’s March 20 deadline.
The result will create disorder if there is a presidential candidate running outside the major parties in future elections who doesn’t begin his or her campaign until the election year itself.
The court’s action continues its 30-year unbroken record of denying all cert petitions filed by minor party and independent candidates on ballot access. It is as though every member of the U.S. Supreme Court has silently…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2021/02/22/u-s-supreme-court-refuses-to-hear-challenge-to-north-carolina-independent-petition-deadline/

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The Intercept – FBI Seized Congressional Cellphone Records Related to Capitol Attack

Feb 232021
 

Within hours of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, the FBI began securing thousands of phone and electronic records connected to people at the scene of the rioting — including some related to members of Congress, raising potentially thorny legal questions.
Using special emergency powers and other measures, the FBI has collected reams of private cellphone data and communications that go beyond the videos that rioters shared widely on social media, according to two sources with knowledge of the collection effort.
In the hours and days after the Capitol riot, the FBI relied in some cases on emergency orders that do not require court authorization in order to quickly secure actual communications from people who were…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2021/02/22/capitol-riot-fbi-cellphone-records/

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jwz – XScreenSaver version 6 beta 1

Feb 212021
 

I have significantly refactored the XScreenSaver daemon, the component of the XScreenSaver suite that provides screen locking on X11 systems.These changes greatly reduce the amount of code running in the “critical” section: the part of the code where a crash would cause the screen to unlock. That critical section is now only around 1,800 lines of code, a reduction of roughly 87%.Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. — Antoine de Saint-ExuperyMy approach with XScreenSaver, as I’ve written about extensively, has always been to minimize the amount of code in the critical section: to link with as few libraries as possible, and to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/02/xscreensaver-version-6-beta-1/

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Jacobin – School Districts Around the United States Lack Any Real Regard for Educators’ Lives

Feb 212021
 

Throughout the country, teachers are being forced back into schools before it’s fully safe. And while many teachers’ unions are waging valiant fights against unsafe reopenings, too many of them are losing.
Chicago Teachers Union members demand an end to virtual classroom lockouts during a car picket on January 15, 2021. (Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association / Flickr) “This is not the agreement you deserve.”
So said Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Jesse Sharkey, announcing that members had voted to accept a plan to return to school buildings.
Chicago teachers began returning to schools on February 11, after contentious negotiations over whether they would be forced to teach in person. While their district’s animosity…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/school-teachers-unions-return-in-person/

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Howie Hawkins for President | Angela Walker for Vice President – Policy Brief: Cut the Campaign Finance Program from HR 1

Feb 202021
 

Issue Brief on the HR 1 Campaign Finance Program
By Howie Hawkins, February 18, 2021
Overview
The Campaign Finance section is one of three divisions in HR 1, the proposed For the People Act.
Division A deals with Voting, including many good reforms concerning internet and same-day voter registration, eliminating unjust voter roll purges, voter-verified permanent paper ballots, early voting, and no excuse absentee ballots.
Division C deals with Ethics, again with many good reforms such as requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns.
Division B deal with Campaign Finance. It creates a matching funds public campaign finance program for congressional and presidential candidates that simply adds public money on top of a campaign finance system that is dominated by private…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://howiehawkins.us/policy-brief-cut-the-campaign-finance-program-from-hr-1/

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Planet PostgreSQL – Kat Batuigas: Query Optimization in Postgres with pg_stat_statements

Feb 202021
 

“I want to work on optimizing all my queries all day long because it will definitely be worth the time and effort,” is a statement that has hopefully never been said. So when it comes to query optimizing, how should you pick your battles? Luckily, in PostgreSQL we have a way to take a system-wide look at database queries:  Which ones have taken up the most amount of time cumulatively to execute Which ones are run the most frequently And how long on average they take to execute And that’s just a few places you can shine a light on, using pg_stat_statements. pg_stat_statements is an extension that has been…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/50u

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XBMC – Kodi 19.0 “Matrix” – Release

Feb 202021
 

… yes, it’s here! After several iterations of alpha, beta and RC, Team Kodi is pleased to announce that Kodi 19.0 “Matrix” has just been formally released on all supported platforms. Dare you take the red pill, and find out how deep the rabbit-hole goes?
By the numbers, then, this version is the product of:
Nearly 50 individual open source developers contributed code
About 5,000 commits in over 1,500 pull requests since the first release of 18.x “Leia”
Over 5,500 changed files, with some 600,000 lines of code added, changed or removed
Countless hours of dedicated free time conceiving, designing, developing and testing (including all the infrastructure you see around them, including this web site)
… and, of course,very little travelling, obviously -…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://kodi.tv/article/kodi-190-matrix-release

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Hackaday – The Raspberry Pi Pico Can’t Run Linux. But It Can Run Fuzix.

Feb 202021
 

The great divide in terms of single board computers lies between those that can run some form of Linux-based distribution, and those that can not. For example the Raspberry Pi Zero is a Linux board, while the Raspberry Pi Pico’s RP2040 processor lacks the required hardware to run everybody’s favourite UNIX-like operating system. That’s not to say the new board from Cambridge can’t run any UNIX-like operating system though, as [David Given] shows us with his Fuzix port.
Fuzix is a UNIX-like operating system for less capable processors, more in the spirit of those original UNIXes than of a modern Linux-based distribution. It’s the work of the respected former Linux kernel developer and maintainer [Alan Cox], and…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2021/02/19/the-raspberry-pi-pico-cant-run-linux-but-it-can-run-fusix/

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Planet Mozilla – “I will slaughter you”

Feb 202021
 

You might know that I’ve posted funny emails I’ve received on my blog several times in the past. The kind of emails people send me when they experience problems with some device they own (like a car) and they contact me because my email address happens to be visible somewhere. People sometimes say I should get a different email address or use another one in the curl license file, but I’ve truly never had a problem with these emails, as they mostly remind me about the tough challenges the modern technical life bring to people and it gives me insights about what things that run curl. But not all of these emails are “funny”. Category: not…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/

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Jacobin – Teachers and Their Unions Are Demanding Truly Safe Schools Reopening — Not “Ignoring Science”

Feb 202021
 

Some prominent academics have taken to lecturing teachers and their unions for insisting that reopening schools is still too dangerous. Those academics are wrong: teachers are insisting on a safe, solidaristic approach to opening schools back up that protects parents, students, staff, teachers, and all of us.
Members of the teachers’ union, parents, and students participate in a march through Brooklyn to demand a safer teaching environment for themselves and for students during the COVID-19 pandemic on September 1, 2020 in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) We’re more than a year into the coronavirus pandemic, but the debate over how to conduct K–12 education in the United States…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/teachers-unions-schools-covid-reopening/

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Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – Why We Can’t Make Vaccine Doses Any Faster

Feb 202021
 

by Isaac Arnsdorf and Ryan Gabrielson ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. President Joe Biden has ordered enough vaccines to immunize every American against COVID-19, and his administration says it’s using the full force of the federal government to get the doses by July. There’s a reason he can’t promise them sooner. Vaccine supply chains are extremely specialized and sensitive, relying on expensive machinery, highly trained staff and finicky ingredients. Manufacturers have run into intermittent shortages of key materials, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office; the combination of surging demand and workforce disruptions from the…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://feeds.propublica.org/link/9499/14294695/covid-vaccine-supply

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The Register – What’s that, Lassie? Dogs show signs of self-awareness according to peer-reviewed academic study?

Feb 202021
 

Canine friends may not be as dumb as they sometimes like to appear

Canine stars of internet videos the world over have another feather in their cap as a scientific study claims they show signs of self-awareness and understanding the consequences of their actions.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/02/19/dogs_self_awareness/

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The Register – Facebook bans sharing of news in Australia – starting now – rather than submit to pay-for-news-plan

Feb 192021
 

As News Corp and Google strike global news payments deal and bill passes lower house

Analysis + Update  Facebook has barred the sharing of news articles in Australia, effectively immediately, because it thinks Australia’s pay-for-news plan is unworkable.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/02/17/facebook_australian_news/

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TorrentFreak – Sci-Hub: Elsevier and Springer Nature Obtain UK ISP Blocking Order

Feb 192021
 

Despite being branded ‘The Pirate Bay of Science’ for offering free access to millions of otherwise paywalled research papers, Sci-Hub is somewhat of an outlier in the piracy scene.
While sites like The Pirate Bay receive almost universal condemnation outside of piracy circles, Sci-Hub regularly receives praise from academics. Since the ultimate goal is to further knowledge and education, including among those who can least afford it, Sci-Hub is often considered to be doing valuable work.
Courts, on the other hand, have yet to rule in the site’s favor so publishers including Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley have been pursuing relentless legal action against Sci-Hub and founder Alexandra Elbakyan in an effort to bring the platform to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-elsevier-and-springer-nature-obtain-uk-isp-blocking-order-210218/

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Jacobin – Andrew Cuomo Is New York’s Richard Nixon

Feb 192021
 

Governor Andrew Cuomo is threatening retribution against progressive elected officials demanding answers about underreported COVID-19 deaths and his effort to help an industry group shield nursing home executives from liability. Between his cover-ups and his bullying, Cuomo might as well be New York’s Richard Nixon.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images) Perhaps the biggest political scandal in America right now is playing out in New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo is in a lot of trouble — and rightly so. The Democratic governor did not merely wildly mismanage his state’s response to the COVID-19 emergency, while netting himself a lucrative book deal and an Emmy. He did…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/andrew-cuomo-scandal-covid-nursing-home-deaths/

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World Socialist Web Site (en) – Another 861,000 US workers file for unemployment as corporations exploit pandemic to restructure operations

Feb 192021
 

A new McKinsey Global Institute report predicts that the decline in business travel and increase in working from home will lead to fewer jobs at hotels, restaurants, mass transit and retail, while corporations employ new labor-saving technologies in factories.

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/19/jobs-f19.html

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Ars Technica – Perseverance on Mars: Where it is, and what the next steps are

Feb 192021
 

Enlarge
In their first press conference following Perseverance’s successful landing on Mars, NASA and JPL scientists revealed some information on where the rover landed and what to expect for the next several days and weeks as it begins its mission in earnest.
Pics or it didn’t happen
One of the first orders of business is getting some of the images, audio, and video taken during the landing back to Earth. For now, doing so requires using a low-gain antenna to transmit data to some of the hardware in orbit around Mars. Jennifer Trosper, the deputy project manager for the rover, said that the Mars Odyssey orbiter should pass overhead briefly within the next few hours, followed by…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1743740

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The Onion – Facebook Takes Down All Posts Spreading Misinformation About Fictional Nation Of ‘Australia’

Feb 192021
 

SYDNEY—Citing potentially dangerous messages suggesting the “hoax country” might pass legislation forcing the tech giant to pay for the content its users share, Facebook took down all posts Thursday that spread misinformation about the fictional nation of “Australia” on the social networking platform. “We had to take…

Read more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/facebook-takes-down-all-posts-spreading-misinformation-1846301464

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