On Thursday, Amazon’s Ring surveillance platform announced a new line of products, including a drone with a camera designed to fly around your home, that would expand its surveillance network beyond the Ring doorbell camera.. The Always Home Cam and a new line of Ring security cameras for cars are set to launch next year: the Car Cam, Car Alarm, and Car Connect platform. Amazon says that much like the Ring doorbell surveillance cameras, it’ll…
Have you been following the debate about ranked choice voting (RCV) in Maine? This week, RCV took a major step forward when the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that it can be used in the state’s presidential elections. Here are some of the best articles that have come out about the ruling in the last few days. The Fulcrum reported on the historic nature of the ruling and how RCV can encourage more positive campaigning. “The…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fairvote.org/news_roundup_ranked_choice_voting_comes_to_presidential_elections
Adam Charles Weeks, the Legal Marijuana Now Party nominee for U.S. House in Minnesota’s 2nd district, died recently. Under a unique Minnesota law passed in 2013, the death of the nominee of a qualified party in a partisan race closer than 79 days before an election means the seat can’t be filled until the following February. See this story. Although voters will see the race on their November ballots, the votes in that race will…
Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla’s top exec pay going up 400%Mozilla recently announced that they would be dismissing 250 people. That’s a quarter of their workforce so there are some deep cuts to their work too. The victims include: the MDN docs (those are the web standards docs everyone likes better than w3schools), the Rust compiler and even some cuts to Firefox development. Like most people I want to see Mozilla do well…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/09/this-is-a-pretty-dire-assessment-of-mozilla/
WASHINGTON—Frantically scouring textbooks to find sections in need of revision, members of President Donald Trump’s new patriotic 1776 Commission struggled Wednesday to find ways to improve upon the education system’s existing propaganda. “We cut out every mention of Native Americans, but I’m not sure how else we…Read more…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://politics.theonion.com/new-patriotic-1776-commission-struggling-to-find-ways-t-1845156727
Hang up your car phone and toss that fax machine in the garbage. Even back in the late 80s it was possible to do away with these primitive technologies in favor of video conferencing, even though this technology didn’t catch on en masse until recently. In fact, Mitsubishi released a piece of video conferencing equipment called the VisiTel that can be put to use today, provided you can do a bit of work to get…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/09/23/teleconferencing-like-its-1988-connecting-vintage-hardware-to-zoom/
The New York Times has published a long article about the Green Party. The theme is that the Republican Party in the past and currently has helped in a few states to get the Green Party on the ballot. The story is myopic. The authors take it for granted that it is difficult for a party like the Green Party to get on the ballot. The authors should ask the big question: why should be…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2020/09/22/new-york-times-article-on-green-party/
Enlarge / United States Map – State with glow with malicious code background in a 1970 dot matrix font on a computer screen. 8K Resolution ready. (credit: Matt Anderson Photography | Getty Images) Facebook has said it will take aggressive and exceptional measures to “restrict the circulation of content” on its platform if November’s presidential election descends into chaos or violent civic unrest. In an interview with the Financial Times, Nick Clegg, the company’s head…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1708560
*Meet the doomers: why some young US voters have given up hope on climate.* I agree with their estimation of our future. But they are wrong to give up the fight because of the situation. They are right that avoiding disaster calls for big national efforts which current governments refuse to do. (I call them “planet roasters” because of that refusal.) And it is too late to fully avoid the disaster. But it is not…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#22_September_2020_%28Meet_the_doomers%29
[Mark]’s sand table wisely has a glass top.Most of us have probably seen a video of a sand drawing table at work, in which a steel ball — magnetically-coupled to a gantry under a layer of sand — lazily draws geometric patterns with utter precision and zen-like calmness. That’s all well and good, but [Mark Rehorst] thinks it can also be interesting to crank up the speed and watch the ball plow through sand just…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/09/22/watch-a-fast-sand-plotter-plow-patterns-at-speed/
What happens when a major city allows the coronavirus to rage unchecked? If the Brazilian city of Manaus is any answer, it means about two-thirds of the population could get infected and one person in 500 could die before the epidemic winds down. During May, as the virus spread rapidly in Manaus, the equatorial capital of the state of Amazonas, dire reports described overwhelmed hospitals and freshly dug graves. Demand for coffins ran at four…
A number of recent articles on this web site have spelled out an overall assessment of the 2020 elections and explained why we consider opposition to the Democratic Party to […] The post How should socialists approach the 2020 elections? first appeared on International Socialism Project.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://internationalsocialism.net/how-should-socialists-approach-the-2020-elections/
Joe Biden wants to have it both ways, issuing bold rhetoric about the climate emergency while refusing to adopt a policy agenda to match. But taking the science of climate change seriously means banning practices like fracking — something Biden has so far refused to do. Cuadrilla fracking site, UK. (@tacac0 / flickr) Last week, the popular science journal Scientific American issued its first presidential endorsement in its 175-year history. Much of the editorial, which…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/joe-biden-science-climate-crisis-ban-fracking/
The Democratic Party has long made a habit of preemptively surrendering major fights with Republicans before they even begin. They’ll have to change that right now if Democrats want to block a Supreme Court replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have been signaling that they may not use every last bit of power at their disposal to try to block a Trump SCOTUS appointment that could permanently alter American…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/aoc-chuck-schumer-pelosi-supreme-court-ginsburg/
“This is the most useless thing I have ever made”, writes Teenenggr, the creator of this Arduino-powered typewriter carriage for computer keyboards. The carriage uses solenoids to create the physical sensation of typing on a typewriter, and is extremely loud. There is even a bell. The code and parts list is here. We make Arduino/Raspberry…
There are fewer independent candidates on the November 2020 ballot for U.S. House than at any time since 2004. This is probably mostly due to the health crisis. … Continue reading →
Andrew “bunnie” Huang has announced a new project called “Precursor”; it is meant to be a platform for makers to create interesting new devices. “Precursor is unique in the open source electronics space in that it’s designed from the ground-up to be carried around in your pocket. It’s not just a naked circuit board with connectors hanging off at random locations: it comes fully integrated—with a rechargeable battery, a display, and a keyboard—in a sleek,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/831983/rss
I got my first PC in 1996, and the games to get were Civilization 2 and Quake. Quake had the better soundtrack. NINE INCH NAILS’ SOUNDTRACK TO THE LEGENDARY FIRST PERSON SHOOTER FROM ID SOFTWARE. AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER ON VINYL. REMASTERED 2XLP PRESSED ON 180GRAM VINYL. At $35, it’s a great collector… Read More
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/17/nine-inch-nails-quake-soundt.html
The barriers to organizing a general strike in the United States in response to the myriad miseries American workers are facing are massive. But we can’t move toward such a strike without at least putting the possibility on the table and discussing it — something the AFL-CIO has shown no interest in doing. AFL-CIO Headquarters, Washington, DC. (Matt Popovich / Flickr) Every so often over the past few years, the hashtag #GeneralStrike goes viral, with…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/general-strike-afl-cio/
Published September 18, 2020Once a COVID-19 vaccine is approved for public use, officials around the world will face the monumental challenge of vaccinating billions of people, a logistical operation rife with thorny ethical questions. What if instead of orchestrating complicated and resource-intensive campaigns to vaccinate humans against emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, we could instead stop the zoonotic diseases that sometimes leap from animals to people at their source? A small, but growing number of…