Were you looking for an emulated collection of promotional material for now-defunct media properties that sully the good name of screen savers? Internet Archive has you covered!
“Screensavers continued to be made and sold long after the issue was a problem, because they were enjoyable to look at.”
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/software-library-screensavers/
A National Labor Relations Board ruling sheds light on a highly secret anti-union campaign at Google, that a top executive explicitly described as an initiative to “convince [employees] that unions suck.” The campaign was called Project Vivian, and ran at Google between late 2018 and early 2020 to combat employee activism and union organizing efforts at the company, according to court documents. Google’s director of employment law, Michael Pfyl, described Project Vivian as an initiative “to engage employees more positively and convince them that unions suck.” In his January 7 ruling, a NLRB judge wrote that Google must “immediately” produce 180 internal documents that he reviewed related to Google’s Project Vivian campaign, including the document…
Backed by the RIAA, several major music industry companies have taken some of the largest U.S. Internet providers to court.
The music companies accuse these providers of failing to terminate the accounts of the most egregious pirates by ignoring millions of copyright infringement notices. To make them whole, the labels demand hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation.
This has already resulted in a massive windfall in the case against Cox, where a jury awarded a billion dollars in damages. The same music companies now hope to get the same outcome against and RCN, Charter, Bright House, and Grande Communications.
Rightscorp Evidence
Many of these lawsuits are centered around evidence from the anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp. The Delaware company collected settlements…
With new CDC guidelines and apparent indifference from the White House, scores of workers in the United States find themselves with no choice but to go back to work while still suffering from COVID.
An art teacher at Yung Wing School PS 124 with students in her classroom on January 5, 2022 in New York City. (Michael Loccisano / Getty Images) Lately, I’m hearing from a lot of people who are frustrated about how working in-person with COVID has become the norm at their job.
Right now, that dilemma is most visible among educators. As Business Insider reported, New York City teachers received an email from the Department of Education that said…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/covid-new-cdc-guidelines-quarantine-symptoms/
SRFI 232 is now in final status.Scheme lacks a flexible way to create and apply curried procedures.
This SRFI describeslambda*, a variant of
lambdathat creates true curried procedures which also
behave just like ordinary Scheme procedures. They can be applied to
their arguments one-by-one, all at once, or anywhere in between,
without any novel syntax.lambda*also supports nullary
and variadic procedures, and procedures created with it have
predictable behavior when applied to surplus arguments.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-232/srfi-232.html
On January 7, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, and New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, issued a joint press release, mentioning election law changes they support. Their list includes letting nominating petition signatures be gathered electronically. Unfortunately they also want to bring back the straight-ticket device. Here is the list. Thanks to Rick Lass for the link.
Their list, unfortunately, does not include adding the statewide initiative. New Mexico and Hawaii are the only western states without the initiative process. Also their list says nothing about abolishing the petition for convention nominees. New Mexico is the only state in which a convention nominee, after being nominated, must submit a petition to be on the…
For the past few days, the IT news has been abuzz with announcements from CES. As usual, I’m following them on Engadget. I must admit, that there were just a very few announcements which really caught my attention. And my favorite announcement is the most boring of them all 🙂
Foldable tablet by ASUS: I still use my Google Pixel C tablet almost every day. It’s almost six years old and waiting for replacement. The ASUS tablet is larger and has more accurate colors, two features for the photography maniac in me. Being folded gives it a more book-like feeling when using it for reading. It also has an optional keyboard accesory, just like the Pixel C,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://peter.czanik.hu/posts/ces-2022-amd-ryzen-syslog-ng/
Starbucks baristas at the coffee giant’s first unionized cafe in the country walked off the job on Wednesday to demand greater COVID-19 protections. Late Wednesday, the Starbucks workers sent a letter to their district manager stating their demands. “We, the undersigned partners at Elmwood Starbucks, are on strike due to concerns over Covid safety protocols,” the letter, obtained by Motherboard, states. “We believe that Starbucks should close our store and pay our partners until we can re-open safely and fully staffed, with those who have been exposed having the opportunity to isolate and stop the spread.” The strike comes about a barista tested positive for COVID-19 at the newly unionized location—and roughly 10 others who were…
It’s been one year since supporters of then-President Donald Trump breached the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss, and pretty much everyone has thoughts about it. The Onion sifts through the many Jan. 6 essays published by lesser news organizations to find the smartest and most worthwhile…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/must-read-reflections-on-the-january-6-capitol-riot-1848310918
As always, the only way to get a corporation to behave ethically is to create a PR disaster for their comms team:Starting today we are reviewing if and how our current policy on crypto donations fits with our climate goals. And as we conduct our review, we will pause the ability to donate cryptocurrency.I am happy for whatever part I played in getting them to rescind that terrible decision.Cryptocurrencies are not only an apocalyptic ecological disaster, and a greater-fool pyramid scheme, but are also incredibly toxic to the open web, another ideal that Mozilla used to support.So I hope that after they “conduct their review”, the conclusion they reach is the obvious one: “Bury…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/mozilla-blinked/
Today the workers of Image Comics voted 7-2 in favor of unionizing with the Communications Workers of America. Previously, management refused to voluntarily recognize what is now, officially, the first union in comics. Comic Book Workers United, the union of Image Comics workers, previously told Motherboard that it had a supermajority of workers eligible to vote. It’s appropriate that Image is the first comics shop to unionize, despite the fact that the company didn’t recognize the union and has generally been reticent to say much about it. As we wrote in November: “Image was founded in 1992 as a response to the predatory relationship between publishers and creators. Superstar artists working for the traditional publishing…
It’s been four years now since the US finally started allowing old works to enter the public domain after decades in which cultural landlords continually moved to actively remove works from the public domain. Every year since the US got back into the public domain business, we’ve happily run a game jam, encouraging people to make use of these newly public domain works, and this year is no different (check out the Gaming Like It’s 1926 game jam page if you’re interested!).
I’m not entirely sure why, but this year, people seem even more interested than in the past few years. We’ve received way more initial signups than in the past, and more community activity as well….
Assange is imprisoned without charge to facilitate an extradition request from the American government, which plotted his illegal kidnapping or assassination.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/01/05/assa-j05.html
Ping-pong balls have many uses: apart from playing table tennis, they have been used for countless art projects, science experiments, and even to raise ships from the bottom of the ocean. As it turns out, they also come in handy as diffusers for LED pixels, allowing the construction of large-size displays without requiring large individual LEDs.
[david] designed an LED ping-pong ball display using 3D printed components, which allows for the construction of arbitrarily-large LED displays thanks to a strictly modular design. The basic unit is a small piece that holds a single LED module and has a cup-like structure for attaching a standard table tennis ball. Twenty-five of these basic units combine together into a panel…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/01/04/modular-design-enables-huge-ping-pong-ball-led-displays/
While most Linux gamers are making use of DXVK these days for efficiently mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan when running Wine/Proton for enjoying Windows games on Linux, Wine developers still maintain WineD3D for going from Direct3D to OpenGL for cross-platform compatibility. Out today is a new patch series improving the WineD3D performance…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=WineD3D-D3D11-CS-Fence
People have been stranded on a Virginia interstate for almost 24 hours after a blizzard, and many are still there as of Tuesday morning. Six tractor trailers crashed along the I-95 roadway on Monday afternoon, according to the Associated Press, and the foot of snow that fell in some places, plus ice on the roads, made it nearly impossible to clear the path for traffic to get through. About 400,000 people lost power in Fredericksburg, Virginia near the backup, making it even harder for transportation authorities to reach people. I-95 has been stalled in both directions from Ruther Glen, Virginia, in Caroline County and Dumfries in Prince William County, a 50-mile stretch. Some drivers reported on…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvnvmm/i-95-virginia-traffic-drivers-stuck
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last 20-odd years, you will have come across The Matrix series of movies, and the cool green ‘digital rain’ effect used frequently. This inspired [Oli Wright] to wonder what it would look like if instead of running the animation on a modern display, using a digitally produced phosphor persistence effect, it was implemented on some retro PC hardware, using an actual high-persistence phosphor Green Monochrome monitor. (Video embedded, below) As luck would have it, [Oli] owns a 40-year-old IBM PC 5150 as well as the matching IBM 5151 monitor, so it was a simple matter to implement the effect in 8088 assembler to create falling sequences of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/01/03/matrix-digital-rain-on-the-ibm-pc-with-a-high-persistence-monitor/
A year ago, Techdirt wrote about an important lawsuit in India, brought by the academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub and the similar Libgen. A couple of factors make this particular legal action different from previous attempts to shut down these sites. First, an Indian court ruled in 2016 that photocopying textbooks for educational purposes is fair use; the parallels with SciHub, which provides free access to copies of academic papers for students and researchers who might not otherwise be able to afford the high subscription fees, are clear. Secondly, the person behind Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, is fighting, rather than ignoring, the case, as she has done on previous occasions.
One manifestation…
A trial will be held this week in North Carolina state court, over whether the new U.S. House and legislative districts constitute an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. The North Carolina Supreme Court has previously ruled that the state constitution prohibits partisan … Continue reading →
We’ve joked in the past about how Republicans hate Section 230 for letting websites moderate too much content, while Democrats hate it for letting websites not moderate enough content. Of course, the reality is they both are mad about content moderation (at different extremes) because they both want to control the internet in a manner that helps “their team.” But both approaches involve unconstitutional desires to interfere with 1st Amendment rights. For Republicans, it’s often the compelled hosting of speech, and for Democrats, it’s often the compelled deletion of speech. Both of those are unconstitutional.
On the Republican side, we’ve already seen states like Florida and Texas sign into law content moderation bills — and both have…
