The Death of the Mind

Regular readers know that I’m fascinated with how non-coders use Emacs and especially how (prose) writers leverage it to remove friction from the writing process. Phil Daniels over at The Copytist is a professional writer who’s working on a longish book of about 400 pages. His writing environment was centered on Microsoft Windows running Google Docs. It had, apparently, been working well for shorter projects but Google Docs just couldn’t handle the larger manuscript. Daniels…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://irreal.org/blog/?p=7621

3D models drawn in Blender work great in a computer animated virtual world but don’t always when brought into a slicer for 3D printing. Slicers require something which makes sense in the real world. And the real world is far less forgiving, as I’ve found out with my own projects which use 3D printed parts. Our [Brian Benchoff] already talked about making parts in Blender with his two-part series (here and here) so consider this…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/11/14/3d-printering-blender-tips-for-printable-objects/

Thousands of Google staff demand the company respect the rights of employees that make accusations of sexual harassment. I support this cause, but since the victims of this particular wrong are limited to Google’s workers, I think that Google’s injustices to its users (nonfree software, surveillance and tracking, soon perhaps censorship in China) are overridingly bigger wrongs. The “solutions” Google promotes for surveillance and tracking, which include “transparency” (“We tell you roughly how much we…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2018-sep-dec.html#11_November_2018_%28Thousands_of_Google_staff_protest%29

Sessions’ Justice Department systematically undermined civil liberties and civil rights. Under almost any other circumstances, the firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions would be a moment for dancing in the streets. Sessions oversaw a Justice Department that systematically undermined civil liberties and civil rights. But his departure portends no improvement on these fronts. And the fact that President Trump fired him, notwithstanding his faithful advancement of the president’s agenda, should raise alarm bells. Sessions leaves the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.aclu.org/blog/executive-branch/jeff-sessions-leaves-dark-mark-justice-department

The case could drastically alter longstanding precedent protecting the separation of church and state and send a devastating message to non-Christians Last Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it will decide whether a state government’s display of a gigantic, 40-foot Latin cross as a war memorial in Bladensburg, Maryland, violates the separation of church and state. On the surface, the case appears to be about one religious monument located at one busy intersection in one…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.aclu.org/blog/religious-liberty/government-promotion-religion/supreme-court-will-decide-whether-maryland-can