The Supreme Court’s Failure To Protect The Right To Assemble Has Led Directly To Violence Against Protesters Techdirt.

Aug 222020
 

It appears the Supreme Court is unwilling to address a another problem it created. The first major problem created by the Court has been discussed here quite frequently. Qualified immunity was created by the Supreme Court in 1967 as a way to excuse rash decisions by law enforcement if undertaken in “good faith.” Since then, it has only gotten worse. Fifteen years later, the Supreme Court added another factor: a violation of rights must be…

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 2020-08-22  Comments Off on The Supreme Court’s Failure To Protect The Right To Assemble Has Led Directly To Violence Against Protesters Techdirt.

Electric glove for police to handle “rough characters” Boing Boing

Aug 222020
 

In September 1935, Modern Mechanix covered a new “electric glove” invented by Cirilo Diaz of Cuba. According to the report, it’s intended for “use by police while handling rough characters or in quelling riots…” Persons contacted by an officer wearing the glove receive a 1,500-volt shock, sufficient to remove all traces of flight.” (Archive.org via Weird Universe)

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 2020-08-22  Comments Off on Electric glove for police to handle “rough characters” Boing Boing

Regulators Are Ignoring How Low Orbit Satellite Broadband Is Trashing The Night Sky Techdirt.

Aug 222020
 

As previously noted, Space X, Amazon, and others are pushing harder than ever into the low-orbit satellite broadband game. The industry, pockmarked by a long road of failures, involves firing thousands of smaller, cheaper, lower orbit satellite constellations into space to help supplement existing broadband services. The lower orbit means that LO satellite service will offer lower-latency broadband than traditional satellite offerings, which for 15 years or so have been widely maligned as expensive, slow,…

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 2020-08-22  Comments Off on Regulators Are Ignoring How Low Orbit Satellite Broadband Is Trashing The Night Sky Techdirt.

Can You Help us Make the 19th Century Searchable? Internet Archive Blogs

Aug 222020
 

In 1847, Frederick Douglass started a newspaper advocating the abolition of slavery that ran until 1851.  After the Civil War, there was a newspaper for freed slaves, the Freedmen’s Record.  The Internet Archive is bringing these and many more works online for free public access. But there’s a problem:  Our Optical Character Recognition (OCR), while the best commercially available OCR technology, is not very good at identifying text from older documents.   Take for example, this…

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 2020-08-22  Comments Off on Can You Help us Make the 19th Century Searchable? Internet Archive Blogs

The iconic Arecibo Telescope goes quiet after major damage Ars Technica

Aug 162020
 

That’s a big dish! The Arecibo radio telescope in its salad days. (credit: NSF) Early Monday morning, a cable suspended over the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico broke and left a 100-foot-long gash in the dish of the iconic radio telescope. The 3-inch-diameter cable also caused damage to the panels of the Gregorian dome that is suspended hundreds of feet above the dish and houses the telescope’s receivers. It is unclear what caused the cable…

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 2020-08-16  Comments Off on The iconic Arecibo Telescope goes quiet after major damage Ars Technica

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data The Register

Aug 072020
 

Spreadsheet woes spanning 16+ years force official update Geneticists have issued new guidelines in naming human genes – after spending years wrestling with Microsoft Excel and similar software that automatically converts the names of genes to dates.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/08/06/excel_gene_names/

 2020-08-07  Comments Off on Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data The Register

Georgia School District Inadvertently Begins Teaching Lessons In First Amendment Protections After Viral Photo Techdirt.

Aug 072020
 

There’s this dumb but persistent meme in American culture that somehow the First Amendment simply doesn’t exist within the walls of a public school district. This is patently false. What is true is that there have been very famous court cases that have determined that speech rights for students at school may be slightly curtailed and must face tests over “substantial disruption” of the speech in question in order to have it limited. Named after…

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 2020-08-07  Comments Off on Georgia School District Inadvertently Begins Teaching Lessons In First Amendment Protections After Viral Photo Techdirt.

Tracking Apps are Unlikely to Help Stop COVID-19 American Civil Liberties Union

Aug 072020
 

Proposals to use the tracking capabilities of our cell phones to help fight COVID-19 have probably received more attention than any other technology issue during the pandemic. Here at the ACLU, we have been skeptical of schemes to use apps for contact tracing or exposure warnings from the beginning, but it is clearer than ever that such tools are unlikely to work, and that the debate over such tracking is largely a sideshow to the…

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 2020-08-07  Comments Off on Tracking Apps are Unlikely to Help Stop COVID-19 American Civil Liberties Union

FSF News: Geoffrey Knauth elected Free Software Foundation president; Odile Bénassy joins the board Planet GNU

Aug 062020
 

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Wednesday, August 5th, 2020 — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the addition of a new director to its board, and the election of a new president. Long-time free software activist and developer Odile Bénassy, known especially for her work promoting free software in France, was elected to the FSF’s board of directors. Geoffrey Knauth, who has served on the FSF’s board for over thirty years, was elected president. On…

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 2020-08-06  Comments Off on FSF News: Geoffrey Knauth elected Free Software Foundation president; Odile Bénassy joins the board Planet GNU

Sony Shuts Down Its Digital Paper Division The Digital Reader

Aug 062020
 

My competitor is reporting that Sony has thrown in the towel on its writing slate division, and he is very likely correct. The main landing page for the Digital Paper devices has been removed from Sony’s website, and neither the 10.3″ Sony DPT-CP1 or the 13.3″ DPT-RP1 are available from Sony’s authorized retailers such as Amazon or B&H. In fact B&H lists both models as discontinued. The first model in this product line was announced in 2013, and shipped…

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 2020-08-06  Comments Off on Sony Shuts Down Its Digital Paper Division The Digital Reader

We Deserve Better Than Trump Versus Biden Jacobin

Aug 062020
 

In the past week, two separate and very painful videos have circulated showing Donald Trump and Joe Biden the presidential nominees of the two major US political parties in action. Watching them, there’s only one conclusion we can reach: we’re so screwed. President Trump 2020 and Joe Biden 2020 sweatshirts displayed for sale on the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey. (Mark Makela / Getty Images) In the past week, two videos have appeared showing the…

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 2020-08-06  Comments Off on We Deserve Better Than Trump Versus Biden Jacobin

Geoffrey Knauth elected Free Software Foundation president; Odile Bénassy joins the board Planet GNU

Aug 062020
 

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Wednesday, August 5th, 2020 — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the addition of a new director to its board, and the election of a new president. Long-time free software activist and developer Odile Bénassy, known especially for her work promoting free software in France, was elected to the FSF’s board of directors. Geoffrey Knauth, who has served on the FSF’s board for over thirty years, was elected president. On…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fsf.org/news/geoffrey-knauth-elected-free-software-foundation-president-odile-benassy-joins-the-board

 2020-08-06  Comments Off on Geoffrey Knauth elected Free Software Foundation president; Odile Bénassy joins the board Planet GNU

Scientists Created the Brightest Fluorescent Material Ever Known Motherboard

Aug 062020
 

Behold: The mesmerizing glow of the brightest fluorescent material ever made. These colorful bundles of light may look like visions from a dream of the 1980s, but they are real 3D-printed objects illuminated by a new class of materials called SMILES, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Chem. SMILES, which stands for small-molecule ionic isolation lattices, are crystals scaffolded by star-shaped structures that can brighten the light of fluorescent dyes to…

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 2020-08-06  Comments Off on Scientists Created the Brightest Fluorescent Material Ever Known Motherboard

Wine Windows jwz

Aug 062020
 

Medieval ‘wine windows’ reopen, reviving Italian plague traditionThus, the “wine windows,” or buchette del vino, of Tuscany. They are just as they sound: pint-size hatches, carved into the concrete walls of urban wineries and shops, where beverage merchants would serve sips at a safe social distance.First introduced in the 1600s, their true purpose went untapped for centuries after the plague — that is, until a new one came along this year.Previously, previously, previously, previously.

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 2020-08-06  Comments Off on Wine Windows jwz

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating crucial data The Register

Aug 062020
 

Spreadsheet woes spanning 16+ years force official update Geneticists have issued new guidelines in naming human genes – after spending years wrestling with Microsoft Excel and similar software that automatically converts the names of genes to dates.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/08/06/excel_gene_names/

 2020-08-06  Comments Off on Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating crucial data The Register

Copyright Expert on Publishers Lawsuit: “The idea that lending a book is illegal is just wrong” Internet Archive Blogs

Jul 282020
 

On July 22, 2020, Pamela Samuelson, Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley, spoke at a press conference about the copyright lawsuit against the Internet Archive brought by the publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House. These are her remarks: Good afternoon. Very happy to be here with you today. The Authors Alliance has several thousand members around the world and we have endorsed the controlled…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2020/07/28/copyright-expert-on-publishers-lawsuit-the-idea-that-lending-a-book-is-illegal-is-just-wrong/

 2020-07-28  Comments Off on Copyright Expert on Publishers Lawsuit: “The idea that lending a book is illegal is just wrong” Internet Archive Blogs

Google extends homeworking until this time next year – as Microsoft finds WFH is terrific… for Microsoft The Register

Jul 282020
 

You see, there is a COVID-19 silver lining. For employers. For the rest of us, welcome to the machine Google has gone all-in on its work-from-home policy, telling techies they don’t need to return to the office until July 2021 at the earliest.…

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 2020-07-28  Comments Off on Google extends homeworking until this time next year – as Microsoft finds WFH is terrific… for Microsoft The Register

How Mexico’s New Copyright Law Crushes Free Expression Deeplinks

Jul 282020
 

When Mexico’s Congress rushed through a new copyright law as part of its adoption of Donald Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), it largely copy-pasted the US copyright statute, with some modifications that made the law even worse for human rights. The result is a legal regime that has all the deficits of the US system, and some new defects that are strictly hecho en Mexico, to the great detriment of the free expression rights of…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/how-mexicos-new-copyright-law-crushes-free-expression

 2020-07-28  Comments Off on How Mexico’s New Copyright Law Crushes Free Expression Deeplinks

San Francisco Police Accessed Business District Camera Network to Spy on Protestors Deeplinks

Jul 282020
 

The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) conducted mass surveillance of protesters at the end of May and in early June using a downtown business district’s camera network, according to new records obtained by EFF. The records show that SFPD received real-time live access to hundreds of cameras as well as a “data dump” of camera footage amid the ongoing demonstrations against police violence. The camera network is operated by the Union Square Business Improvement District…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/san-francisco-police-accessed-business-district-camera-network-spy-protestors

 2020-07-28  Comments Off on San Francisco Police Accessed Business District Camera Network to Spy on Protestors Deeplinks
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