The California Assembly Elections Committee will hear AB 2808 on Wednesday, April 6, at 9 a.m. That is the bill to ban charter cities and charter counties from using ranked choice voting. … Continue reading →
Union of Concerned Scientists: if the EPA shuts its web archive, that will harm science and accountability.
Can anyone find a petition campaign to change the EPA’s decision?
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-jan-apr.html#22_March_2022_(EPA_shutting_down_its_web_archive)
In remarks to the annual conference of the National Association for Business Economics in Washington, Powell continually returned to the issue of what he called a “hot” and “very tight” labour market.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/23/powl-m23.html
The branding of Vladimir Putin as a war criminal by Joe Biden, who lobbied for the Iraq war and staunchly supported the 20 years of carnage in the Middle East, is one more example of the hypocritical moral posturing sweeping across the United States. It is unclear how anyone would try Putin for war crimes More
The post The Lie of American Innocence appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/22/the-lie-of-american-innocence/
People are returning to buying CDs again — sales are increasing.
Now all we need is to bring back the large record stores which offer a great variety of CDs that you can buy anonymously with cash.
CDs don’t have to be sold in plastic “jewel boxes” that break. Some are sold in cardboard boxes which are more robust and probably better for the environment.
If this is driven by the obligatory giving of copies to people who don’t actually want them, that’s sad, but it means more used copies to be sold to people who really do want them.
The author displays a fundamental shallowness by describing listening to music or reading books as…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-jan-apr.html#22_March_2022_(CD_sales_rising_again)
A completely paralyzed man has been able to communicate entire sentences using a device that records his brain activity. The man was able to train his mind to use the device, which was implanted in his brain, to ask for massages, soup, and beer, and to watch films with his son. It is the first time a completely locked-in person—someone who is conscious and cognitively able but completely paralyzed— has been able to communicate in this way, say the researchers behind the work. Brain-computer interfaces record the electrical signals inside a person’s brain and convert them to commands that control a device. In recent years, BCIs have enabled partially paralyzed people to control prosthetic limbs or…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/22/1047664/locked-in-patient-bci-communicate-in-sentences/
Enlarge / Google CEO Sundar Pichai uses his phone during the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 12, 2018, in Sun Valley, Idaho. (credit: Getty Images | Drew Angerer )
The US Department of Justice and 14 state attorneys general yesterday asked a federal judge to sanction Google for misusing attorney-client privilege to hide emails from litigation.
“In a program called ‘Communicate with Care,’ Google trains and directs employees to add an attorney, a privilege label, and a generic ‘request’ for counsel’s advice to shield sensitive business communications, regardless of whether any legal advice is actually needed or sought. Often, knowing the game, the in-house counsel included in these Communicate-with-Care emails does…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1842804
When The Onion’s editorial board convened to discuss the tumultuous events of the previous month, one conclusion became evident: The world stands at a crossroads. Two visions of our collective future stand before us: On one side is a free and enlightened society, dedicated to the principles of openness,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/in-defense-of-mass-censorship-1848673776
Enlarge / The US Food and Drug Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency)
Vaccine-makers Moderna and Pfizer have now both submitted requests to the US Food and Drug Administration to authorize fourth doses—second boosters—of their COVID-19 vaccines.
Pfizer and its vaccine partner BioNTech announced Tuesday that they had asked the FDA to authorize fourth doses for adults age 65 and above. The move followed days of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla saying in press interviews that a fourth shot is “necessary” for everyone.
Late Thursday, Moderna announced that it, too, had asked the FDA to authorize fourth doses—for all adults. In the announcement, Moderna described the request as intended to “provide…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1842232
The best election law bill in Congress is HB 3863, which Virginia Congressman Donald Beyer introduced on June 11, 2021. It would convert most U.S. House elections to the Single Transferable Vote system, and would create much larger U.S. House districts. If enacted, it would substantially ease the gerrymandering problem. Unfortunately, it has not gained any co-sponsors other than the original seven co-sponsors.
Millions of dollars are being spent by wealthy individuals to promote state initiatives to abolish partisan primaries and create top-four or top-five systems. It is unfortunate that those same individuals aren’t instead promoting HR 3863.
The original co-sponsors are Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Jim Cooper of Tennessee, Ro Khanna of California, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts,…
It’s arguably long overdue, but landing today within Mesa 22.1 is support in the V3D driver for Mesa’s on-disk shader cache functionality. By adding this shader cache to V3D it can help with the performance of this Gallium3D open-source driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer single board computers…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=V3D-On-Disk-Shader-Cache
It still amazes me how unwilling many copyright system supporters are to admit that copyright is regularly used for actual censorship, using the power of the law to suppress speech. The latest example is particularly galling. Over the weekend, a somewhat ridiculous video went viral of a Tesla doing a jump over a hill in Echo Park, and then losing control, smashing into garbage cans and, eventually, a parked car. YouTuber Alex Choi was there and had a whole video about the incident, which I’m not going to link to for reasons I’ll explain down below.
Now I should note that in his video, Choi emphasizes repeatedly that he didn’t know the people in the jumping Tesla,…
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It’s funny because it’s very distressing!Today’s News:
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/scythe
Fish 3.4 is out as the newest version of this popular shell particularly among enthusiasts/hobbyists…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fish-3.4-Shell
A pilot plant near the Salton Sea in California pairs lithium extraction with geothermal energy production. Michael McKibbenGeothermal energy has long been the forgotten member of the clean energy family, overshadowed by relatively cheap solar and wind power, despite its proven potential. But that may soon change – for an unexpected reason. Geothermal technologies are on the verge of unlocking vast quantities of lithium from naturally occurring hot brines beneath places like California’s Salton Sea, a two-hour drive from San Diego. Lithium is essential for lithium-ion batteries, which power electric vehicles and energy storage. Demand for these batteries is quickly rising, but the U.S. is currently heavily reliant on lithium imports from other countries – most…
Western media have reported that Russia’s military deliberately attacked the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, claiming that it was filled with civilians and marked with signs reading “children” on its grounds.
The supposed bombing took place just as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to US Congress for a no fly zone, fueling the chorus for direct military confrontation with Russia and apparently inspiring President Joseph Biden to brand Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, as a “war criminal.”
A closer look reveals that local residents in Mariupol had warned three days before the March 16 incident that the theater would be the site of a false flag attack launched by the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which…
Tuning of the max_wal_size configuration parameter in PostgreSQL can have a profound effect on performance, but it’s often overlooked or not given the priority it deserves in favour of other parameters, such as those that are easier to understand. In this blog we’ll discuss what the parameter does, how to tune it, and how to monitor the system to ensure the tuning is effective. [Continue reading…]
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5hP
On March 3, the Oregon legislature passed SB 1527. Among other provisions, it eases the definition of a qualified party. It lowers the percentage of registered voters needed for a party to remain qualified from one-half of 1% of the total registration, to one-fourth of 1%.
Oregon also lets a party remain ballot-qualified party if it polls 1% for any statewide race at either of the last two elections (although such parties must have registration of at least one-tenth of 1%).
The part of SB 1527 that eases the definition of a party was amended into the bill just a few days before the legislature adjourned. The House passed the amended bill on March 3, and the Senate…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/03/18/oregon-bill-easing-definition-of-a-qualified-party-passes/
At TorrentFreak we do our best to keep readers updated on the latest copyright and piracy news, highlighting issues from different points of view.
We report on the opinions and efforts of copyright holders when it comes to online piracy and have active dialogues with anti-piracy outfits. At the same time, we also make room for those who oppose them. That’s how balanced reporting works in our view.
There is probably no site on the Internet that reports on the negative consequences of piracy as much as we do and but for some reason, the term “pro-piracy” is sometimes attached to our reporting.
In most cases we shrug off these characterizations, concluding that those who portray us in this…
The Open Source Initiative reports
on a ruling in the US Court of Appeals reaffirming the meaning of “open
source” in a software license.The court only confirmed what we already know – that “open source” is a term of art for software that has been licensed under a specific type of license, and whether a license is an OSI-approved license is a critically important factor in user adoption of the software. Had the defendants’ desire to license its software as AGPLv3-only been permissible, its claims of “100% open source” wouldn’t have been false and there would have been no false advertising. But adding the non-free Commons Clause created a different license such that the software could not…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/888291/
