The attack on classical studies is part of a broader assault on the humanities, art and culture in American society.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/06/howa-m06.html
On May 5, the proponents of several Ohio initiatives filed this brief in U.S. District Court, in Thompson v DeWine, s.d., 2:20cv-2129. This is the case over petitioning relief for initiatives. Although the Sixth Circuit denied injunctive relief (and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to get involved), that doesn’t necessarily mean Ohio’s policy is constitutional. The proponents of the initiatives will seek a ruling that Ohio violates the First Amendment by its policy. Here is the brief.
Enlarge / Before you tweet, you might be asked if you meant to be so rude. (credit: Getty Images / Sam Machkovech)
Want to know exactly what Twitter’s fleet of text-combing, dictionary-parsing bots defines as “mean”? Starting any day now, you’ll have instant access to that data—at least, whenever a stern auto-moderator says you’re not tweeting politely.
On Wednesday, members of Twitter’s product-design team confirmed that a new automatic prompt will begin rolling out for all Twitter users, regardless of platform and device, that activates when a post’s language crosses Twitter’s threshold of “potentially harmful or offensive language.” This follows a number of limited-user tests of the notices beginning in May of last year. Soon, any robo-moderated…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1762846
Combined with today’s massive flat panel displays, a nice surround sound system can provide an extremely immersive environment for watching movies or gaming. But a stumbling block many run into is speaker placement. The front speakers generally just go on either side of the TV, but finding a spot for the rear speakers that’s both visually and acoustically pleasing can be tricky.
Which is why [Peter Waldraff] decided to take a rather unconventional approach and hide his rear surround sound speakers in a pair of functioning table lamps. This not only looks better than leaving the speakers out, but raises them up off the floor and into a better listening position. The whole thing looks very sleek…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2021/04/28/lamps-double-as-secret-surround-sound-speakers/
The study found that infection rates in three schools were almost six times higher for students and two-and-a-half times higher for staff than what was recorded through self-initiated tests and reporting.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/scho-a29.html
MQA is an audio format that claims to use a unique “origami” algorithm, promising better quality and more musicality than other formats. At times, it’s been claimed to be a lossless format in so many words, and lauded by the streaming services that use it as the ultimate format for high-fidelity music. With the format being closed source and encoders not publicly available, these claims are hard to test. However, [GoldenSound] wasn’t born yesterday, and set out to test MQA by hook or by crook. The results were concerning. (Video, embedded below.)
To actually put the format through its paces, the only easy way available was to publish music to the Tidal streaming service, which uses the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/mythbusting-tidals-mqa-format-how-does-it-measure-up/
As Raleigh nightlife returns with the proliferation of vaccines and lifting of restrictions, there’s been an uptick in COVID-19 cases among younger folks.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://indyweek.com/news/wake/raleigh-nightlife-returns-covid-19-case-rises/
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to support
H.R. 2509 / S. 1139, which would eliminate the mechanism for the
military draft. Specifically, it would do these things: Repeal the Military Selective Service Act (thereby eliminating Presidential authority to order men to register with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft and eliminating criminal penalties for failure or refusal to register); Abolish the Selective Service System (thereby ending contingency planning by the SSS for the Health Care Personnel Delivery System or any other form of special-skills draft); Prohibit all other Federal agencies from imposing civil sanctions (denial of federal student financial aid, federally-funded jobs, etc.) for nonregistration or using nonregistration as a basis for…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2021-jan-apr.html#21_April_2021_%28Urgent%3A_H.R.2509%2F_S._1139%29
As a law librarian and author, Ben Keele wants to share his expertise on copyright with as many people as possible. His book, The Librarian’s Copyright Companion, 2nd edition (William S. Hein, 2012), coauthored with James Heller and Paul Hellyer, covers restrictions on use of copyrighted materials, library exemptions, fair use, and licensing issues for digital media. (Heller wrote the first edition in 2004.) The authors recently regained rights to the book in order to make it open access. So after years of being available through controlled digital lending (CDL) at the Internet Archive, the book is now available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0), which means that anyone is free to…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2021/04/21/the-librarians-copyright-companion-goes-open-access/
AWS dodges the finger of blame as another open-sourcer tightens things up
Data visualisation biz Grafana is switching its licence model from Apache 2.0 to the Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/04/21/grafana_agplv3/
For the past two months, retail pharmacies like CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid have become the tip of the spear for the COVID-19 vaccination effort in the U.S. Widely available vaccinations at pharmacies have been one of the key reasons America’s pandemic outlook has gotten better. But many pharmacy staff feel they’ve been frogmarched to the frontlines of the pandemic without receiving appropriate resources to do vaccines as well as prescription filling. Meanwhile, their companies are enjoying the financial windfall of their labor. “There was supposed to be a dedicated staff in place. That never materialized,” a Walgreens pharmacy manager in the greater Atlanta area said. Motherboard agreed to keep several sources in this story anonymous…
I did quite some work to have “–enable-altivec” work in ArcticFox. The FireFox AltiVec test did not work because it relies on GCC rejecting it if not supported by the CPU.
Most of the work was getting the 32bit AltiVec code actually work during a 64bit compile on a PPC970. But what about a non-AltiVec build? WIth some #ifdef’s imported from TenFourFox… I was able to get it and produce, while compiling on a G4, a usable G3 optimized binary for Linux.
Result? A quite current browser for a 21 year old vintage computer! Fun! Not very fast and the beautiful tangerine clamshell has only 160MB of RAM, but still, one can browse Wikpedia!
External feed Read More at the Source: http://multixden.blogspot.com/2021/04/arcticfox-to-browse-on-ibook.html
For decades, a special court—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or “FISC”—has issued secret legal opinions authorizing the U.S. government to conduct sweeping programs of electronic surveillance. These opinions have had a profound impact on Americans’ rights to privacy, free expression, and free association. But many of them are entirely hidden from public view.
Secret law undermines democracy and the legitimacy of the judicial system—especially when the law being withheld from the public affects the rights of millions of people. So today, the ACLU is asking the Supreme Court to order the FISC to publish its secret opinions, redacted only as necessary to prevent genuine harm to national security. The petition—filed by ACLU lawyers, former Solicitor General Ted…
Nearly eleven months after George Floyd was brutally murdered at the hands of Minneapolis, Minnesota police, former officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty Tuesday of murder.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/21/chau-a21.html
I did quite some work to have “–enable-altivec” work in ArcticFox. The FireFox AltiVec test did not work because it relies on GCC rejecting it if not supported by the CPU.
Most of the work was getting the 32bit AltiVec code actually work during a 64bit compile on a PPC970. But what about a non-AltiVec build? WIth some #ifdef’s imported from TenFourFox… I was able to get it and produce, while compiling on a G4, a usable G3 optimized binary for Linux.
Result? A quite current browser for a 21 year old vintage computer! Fun! Not very fast and the beautiful tangerine clamshell has only 160MB of RAM, but still, one can browse Wikpedia!
External feed Read More at the Source: http://multixden.blogspot.com/2021/04/arcticfox-to-browse-on-ibook.html
Facebook announced on Monday that it was “working around the clock” to limit content regarding the verdict in the trial of Minneapolis police officer Derrick Chauvin that “could lead to civil unrest or violence.”
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/21/face-a21.html
This week’s public launch of Grab Holdings, valued at $40 billion, and that of the cryptocurrency trader Coinbase, valued at around $85 billion, are the latest expressions of the speculative bubble fuelled by cheap money.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/16/wall-a16.html
There is a serious problem with Dreamwidth, which is impeding access for many RSS reader tools.
This started at around 0500 UTC on Wednesday morning, according to my own RSS reader cron job. A friend found #43443 in the DW ticket tracker, where a user of a minority web browser found they were blocked.
Local tests demonstrated that Dreamwidth had applied blocking by the HTTP User-Agent header, and were rejecting all user-agents not specifically permitted. Today, this rule has been relaxed and unknown user-agents are permitted. But user-agents for general http client libraries are still blocked.
I’m aware of three unresolved tickets about this:
#43444
#43445
#43447We’re told there by a volunteer member of Dreamwidth’s support staff that this has been done…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/7930.html
Last year, the Firefox platform development team announced plans to remove the built-in FTP implementation from the browser. FTP is a protocol for transferring files from one host to another.
The implementation is currently disabled in the Firefox Nightly and Beta pre-release channels and will be disabled when Firefox 88 is released on April 19, 2021. The implementation will be removed in Firefox 90. After FTP is disabled in Firefox, the browser will delegate ftp:// links to external applications in the same manner as other protocol handlers.
With the deprecation, browserSettings.ftpProtocolEnabled will become read-only. Attempts to set this value will have no effect.
Most places where an extension may pass “ftp” such as filters for proxy or webRequest should…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/04/15/built-in-ftp-implementation-to-be-removed-in-firefox-90/
