News gathered 2023-12-20
(date: 2023-12-20 17:58:03)
The 10 most expensive reported home sales in Los Gatos the week of Dec. 4
date: 2023-12-20, from: San Jose Mercury News
A house in Monte Sereno that sold for $11.8 million tops the list of the most expensive residential real estate sales in Los Gatos in the past two weeks.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/20/the-10-most-expensive-reported-home-sales-in-los-gatos-the-week-of-dec-4-2/ Save to Pocket
Study uncovers presence of CSAM in popular AI training dataset
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
LAION-5B contains 1,008 verifiable instances of illegal pictures of children, likely lots more, say researchers
A massive public dataset that served as training data for popular AI image generators including Stable Diffusion has been found to contain thousands of instances of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/csam_laion_dataset/ Save to Pocket
Negotiations Over US Aid to Ukraine Expected to Stretch Past Christmas
date: 2023-12-20, from: VOA News USA
Capitol Hill — U.S. lawmakers will work into the Christmas holiday next week, seeking to negotiate a deal on border security in return for Republican votes to send more aid to Ukraine.
“Challenging issues remain, but we are committed to addressing needs at the southern border and to helping allies and partners confront serious threats in Israel, Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific. The Senate will not let these national security challenges go unanswered,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a joint statement late Tuesday.
“As negotiators work through remaining issues, it is our hope that their efforts will allow the Senate to take swift action on the national security supplemental early in the new year,” the statement continued.
Schumer told reporters earlier Tuesday that while he is optimistic about the progress of negotiations, lawmakers need more time.
“The details in this matter immensely, because this is not a topic that Congress has tackled in many years. We know that this is going to be not easy to do,” said the Senate’s top Democrat. “But we know too, that we must get it done. And while we’ve made important progress over the past week on border security, everyone agrees on both sides that it takes more time.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also acknowledged the difficulties, noting the last major piece of legislation on immigration and border security became law in the late 1980s.
“We haven’t passed a significant immigration bill since Reagan’s second term. This is not easy. But we’re working hard to get an outcome because the country needs it, and the country needs it soon,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday, referring to former president Ronald Reagan who served in the 1980s.
The United States has already dedicated more than $100 billion to arming and supporting Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, and President Joe Biden has asked Congress to approve another $60 billion. Republicans in Congress have become increasingly skeptical about the need to continue underwriting Ukraine’s defense.
In recent weeks, Republicans in the Senate have conditioned approval of any additional money for Ukraine on the simultaneous strengthening of immigration rules aimed at reducing the number of people illegally entering the United States at its southern border and expelling some who are already in the country.
The White House has warned there is only enough for one more military aid package to Ukraine before funding runs out at year’s end.
“The United States has done the preponderance of military support,” Colin Cleary, an adjunct professor at the George Washington University and a veteran of the Foreign Service who served in Ukraine, told VOA.
“The crisis really would be on the military side if aid didn’t happen. And in those two dimensions — the positional warfare that requires a lot of ammunition and supplies, and also the protection of the civilian infrastructure through air defense,” he said.
Even if an agreement passes in the Senate, it might not survive in the House, where Republicans hold a very narrow majority. A significant group of Republican House members opposes additional aid to Ukraine, and the party recently voted out a speaker who partnered with Democrats to pass legislation.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, who took over after predecessor Kevin McCarthy was ousted, has said that more funding for the border is essential to any Ukrainian aid package; however, he also wants more conditions placed on the aid.
“What the Biden administration seems to be asking for is billions of additional dollars with no appropriate oversight, no clear strategy to win, and none of the answers that I think the American people are owed,” he said last week.
International reaction
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly celebrated the fact that Ukraine appears to be losing support in the West.
“Ukraine today produces nearly nothing; they are trying to preserve something, but they don’t produce practically anything themselves and bring everything in for free,” he said, according to The Associated Press. “But the freebies may end at some point and apparently it’s coming to an end little by little.”
While opponents of aid to Ukraine often denigrate aid packages as being a “blank check” handed over to the Ukrainian government, most of the aid is in the form of military hardware. The dollar figures in the aid packages mostly represent money spent in the U.S. to pay arms manufacturers for the equipment the U.S. ships to Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday he was confident the U.S. would not “betray” his country by withholding crucial wartime funding as it fights off a Russian invasion.
“We are working very hard on this, and I am certain the United States of America will not betray us, and that on which we agreed in the United States will be fulfilled completely,” Zelenskyy said during a televised news briefing in Kyiv.
https://www.voanews.com/a/negotiations-over-us-aid-to-ukraine-expected-to-stretch-past-christmas-/7405783.html Save to Pocket
This cheap Acer laptop with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c chip can run mainline Linux software (mostly)
date: 2023-12-20, from: Liliputing
The Acer Aspire 1 (A114-61) is a cheap laptop with a 14 inch full HD display, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage. Powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Gen 1 processor, it launched in 2021 as a budget notebook running Windows 10 in S Mode software. But developers have been working to add mainline […]
The post This cheap Acer laptop with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c chip can run mainline Linux software (mostly) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/this-cheap-acer-laptop-with-a-qualcomm-snapdragon-7c-chip-can-run-mainline-linux-software-mostly/ Save to Pocket
Defend Earth from the Chronites in TIMERUN from AMCOG Games
date: 2023-12-20, from: RiscOS Story
Adding to an ever growing list, the latest title from AMCOG Games is TIMERUN, and it had its first public release at the recent MUG RISC OS Xmas Market, and is now available to buy from !Store, priced at £9.99. The game couldn’t be simpler to describe than “it’s a shoot ’em up” – but it should be described in a more complicated way because, well, there’s a little more to it than that. Like one of the most famous shoot ’em ups there is, the all-time classic Space Invaders,…
https://www.riscository.com/2023/timerun-from-amcog-games/ Save to Pocket
A challenging travel quiz for globetrotters and armchair travelers alike
date: 2023-12-20, from: San Jose Mercury News
Whether you’re a full blown globetrotter or someone who just dreams of faraway places, the 20 questions in this travel quiz are sure to challenge and entertain.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/20/a-challenging-travel-quiz-for-globetrotters-and-armchair-travelers-alike/ Save to Pocket
An Alameda brewery day trip takes in sea haggis, plum beer
date: 2023-12-20, from: San Jose Mercury News
This month, my brewery-based travels around the Bay Area took me on a second trip to the island of Alameda.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/20/an-alameda-brewery-day-trip-takes-in-sea-haggis-plum-beer/ Save to Pocket
Electric cars are California’s future
date: 2023-12-20, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
An executive order to eliminate the sales of all gas-powered vehicles in California by 2035 was enacted by Governor Gavin Newsom on Sept. 23, 2020. It was intended to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and clear up the pollution in California with the ultimate goal of fighting climate change, but it will not be as…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177579/print-editions/print-stories/electric-cars-are-californias-future/ Save to Pocket
NASA’s 3D-printed Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine Test a Success
date: 2023-12-20, from: NASA breaking news
NASA has achieved a new benchmark in developing an innovative propulsion system called the Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE). Engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, successfully tested a novel, 3D-printed RDRE for 251 seconds (or longer than four minutes), producing more than 5,800 pounds of thrust. That kind of sustained burn […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/marshall/nasas-3d-printed-rotating-detonation-rocket-engine-test-a-success/ Save to Pocket
US Charges Alleged Hezbollah Member Over 1994 Argentina Bombing
date: 2023-12-20, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — A U.S. court on Wednesday unsealed an indictment charging an alleged senior Hezbollah operative with terrorism charges, in part for coordinating a 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said Samuel Salman El Reda, 58, had coordinated Hezbollah’s activities in South America, Asia and Lebanon since 1993. The Iran-backed, heavily armed Shiite group is part of Lebanon’s coalition government.
Prosecutors said El Reda is based in Lebanon and remains at large. The U.S. State Department in 2019 sanctioned El Reda and offered a $7 million reward for information on his whereabouts.
Argentina also blames Hezbollah for a 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that killed 29 people.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-charges-alleged-hezbollah-member-over-1994-argentina-bombing-/7405781.html Save to Pocket
From the Depths of Wikipedia: none of the phrasing from the 2003…
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043657-from-the-depths-of-wikipe Save to Pocket
Woman found dead inside stolen vehicle in Oakland had been shot
date: 2023-12-20, from: San Jose Mercury News
An autopsy determined that a woman found dead Saturday morning in a stolen vehicle in West Oakland had been shot.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/20/woman-found-dead-inside-stolen-vehicle-in-oakland-had-been-shot/ Save to Pocket
Bay Area rainfall chart: Three-day total exceeds 6 inches at wettest sites
date: 2023-12-20, from: San Jose Mercury News
Another band of rain moved into the Bay Area before dawn Wednesday.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/20/bay-area-rainfall-chart-three-day-totals-exceed-6-inches-at-some-spots/ Save to Pocket
Chinese telecom giant Huawei pushes forward with ambitious plan to dethrone Android
date: 2023-12-20, from: OS News
Hundreds of technical experts from many of China’s biggest state-owned and private companies, including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China Telecom, Meituan, and Baidu, all gathered in Beijing last month. The purpose behind the meeting was for their staff to receive training so they could be certified as developers on Huawei’s Harmony Operation System (OS). While most observers were looking the other way, Huawei has been quietly building an independent Chinese operating system that isn’t subject to U.S. sanctions. In the four years after the telecom giant was banned from using Google apps, the Shenzhen-based company has been making significant strides toward achieving its long-term goal: To dethrone Android and make its HarmonyOS the default operating system in China. ↫ Nina Xiang for Forbes Asia HarmonyOS is poised to succeed in beating iOS and Android where others have failed, if only because the Chinese state is pushing homegrown solutions hard. It’s already hit 10% market share in China, closing in on iOS’ 17%, but still kilometres away from Android’s 72%. However, with both local governments and the government in Beijing enacting all kinds of laws and guidelines to force companies, institutions, and people to switch to homegrown solutions, it wouldn’t surprise me to see this market share climb fast. And that’s actually okay! Setting aside the fact the Chinese government is a genocidal totalitarian surveillance nightmare apparatus, I think it’s entirely understandable, reasonable, and a good investment to have homegrown technology solutions and platforms. I wish the European Union did something similar, but that ship has probably sailed after we let Microsoft gut whatever was left of Nokia after Apple was done with it.
https://www.osnews.com/story/138088/chinese-telecom-giant-huawei-pushes-forward-with-ambitious-plan-to-dethrone-android/ Save to Pocket
New Episode of Stuck@Om: The Reality of Self-Driving Dreams
date: 2023-12-20, from: Om Malik blog
When we look back at 2023, we quickly realize that this was the year when the hype and reality of self-driving cars collided head-on. This pivotal year marked the convergence of hopes, fears, and excitement surrounding the autonomous revolution, setting the stage for an intriguing decade ahead. From Cruise’s challenges to the marvels of Waymo, …
https://om.co/2023/12/20/new-episode-of-stuckom-the-reality-of-self-driving-dreams/ Save to Pocket
NASA makes purrrr-fect deep space transmission of cat vid
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Tabby footage crosses millions of miles and was still faster than most folks’ home broadband
From the department of “what must the aliens think of us?” comes news that NASA has demonstrated its Deep Space Optical Communications experiment through the medium of a cat video.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/nasa_psyche_cat_video/ Save to Pocket
ASRock NUC Ultra 100 motherboards are 4×4 boards with Meteor Lake-H chips
date: 2023-12-20, from: Liliputing
Just a few days after introducing some of the first 4×4 mini PCs powered by Intel’s 14th-gen Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” processors, ASRock Industrial has unveiled an option for folks that want a little more flexibility (and possibly less convenience). The new ASRock NUC Ultra 100 Motherboard Series are a line of 104 x 102 […]
The post ASRock NUC Ultra 100 motherboards are 4×4 boards with Meteor Lake-H chips appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/asrock-nuc-ultra-100-motherboards-are-4x4-boards-with-meteor-lake-h-chips/ Save to Pocket
The Paris Metró is set to expand in a big way with…
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043626-the-paris-metro-is-set Save to Pocket
Man fatally shot in East Oakland
date: 2023-12-20, from: San Jose Mercury News
The killing is the 122nd homicide investigated by Oakland police this year. Last year at this time, police had investigated 116 homicides in the city.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/20/man-fatally-shot-in-east-oakland-58/ Save to Pocket
Japan Court Orders Okinawa to Approve Modified Plan to Build Runways for US Marine Corps
date: 2023-12-20, from: VOA News USA
TOKYO — A Japanese court on Wednesday ordered the governor of Okinawa to approve the central government’s modified plan for landfill work at the planned relocation site of a key U.S. military base on the southern island despite persistent opposition and protests by residents.
The decision will move forward the suspended construction at a time Okinawa’s strategic importance is becoming key for the Japan-U.S. military alliance in the face of growing tensions with China. Japan also rapidly seeks to build up its military in the southwestern region.
The ruling by the Fukuoka High Court Naha branch allows the Land and Transport Ministry to order the modification work designed to reinforce extremely soft ground at the designated relocation site for U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, overriding Gov. Denny Tamaki’s disapproval. The ruling ordered Tamaki to issue the approval within three working days.
Tamaki said it was unjust that the will of the residents is crushed by the central government.
Tamaki, noting the spirit of local government autonomy and democracy, said in a statement that the ruling that allows the government’s forcible execution of its planned construction of a new military base is “absolutely unacceptable.”
If completed, the new site will serve a key Marine Corps facility for the region and also will be home to MV-22 Ospreys that are currently deployed at Futenma.
Tamaki can still appeal to the Supreme Court, but the local government at this point has no power to stop the work unless the top court overturns the decision.
Okinawa and the central government have long tussled over the relocation of the Futenma base.
The Japanese and U.S. governments initially agreed in 1996 to close the Futenma air station a year after the rape of a schoolgirl by three U.S. military personnel led to a massive anti-base movement. But persistent protests and lawsuits between Okinawa and Tokyo have held up the plan for nearly 30 years.
Japan’s central government began the reclamation work off Henoko Bay on the eastern coast of Okinawa in 2018 to pave the way for the relocation of the Futenma base from its crowded neighborhood on the island.
The central government later found out that large areas of the designated reclamation site are on soft ground, which some experts described “as soft as mayonnaise,” and submitted a revision to the original plan with additional land improvement. But Okinawa’s prefectural government rejected the revision plan and suspended the reclamation work.
The ground improvement plan requires tens of thousands of pillars and massive amounts of soil, which opponents say would damage the environment. It is expected to cost 930 billion yen ($6.5 billion), 2.5 times the initial estimate, and take 12 years to finish, according to the Defense Ministry.
The Supreme Court in September turned down Okinawa’s appeal in another lawsuit that ordered the prefecture to withdraw its rejection of the modified landfill plan.
Tamaki has called for a significant reduction of the U.S. military on the island, which is home to more than half of 50,000 American troops based in Japan under the bilateral security pact. Tamaki also has demanded the immediate closure of Futenma base and the scrapping of the base construction at Henoko. Okinawa accounts for just 0.6% of Japanese land.
Tokyo and Washington say the relocation within Okinawa, instead of moving it elsewhere as demanded by many Okinawans, is the only solution.
“We believe that action should be taken promptly in line with this ruling,” Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said. He pledged that the government will continue to make effort for the return of the Futenma air station as soon as possible to reduce the burden from the base.
https://www.voanews.com/a/japan-court-orders-okinawa-to-approve-modified-plan-to-build-runways-for-us-marine-corps-/7405688.html Save to Pocket
NASA’s Fermi Mission Creates 14-Year Time-Lapse of the Gamma-Ray Sky
date: 2023-12-20, from: NASA breaking news
The cosmos comes alive in an all-sky time-lapse movie made from 14 years of data acquired by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Our Sun, occasionally flaring into prominence, serenely traces a path through the sky against the backdrop of high-energy sources within our galaxy and beyond. “The bright, steady gamma-ray glow of the Milky Way […]
https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-fermi-mission-creates-14-year-time-lapse-of-the-gamma-ray-sky/ Save to Pocket
The US has released an ally of Venezuela’s president in a swap for jailed Americans, including Bay Area businessman, the AP learns
date: 2023-12-20, from: San Jose Mercury News
Alex Saab, who was arrested on a U.S. warrant for money laundering in 2020, was released from custody Wednesday. In exchange, Maduro will free some, if not all, of the roughly dozen U.S. citizens who remain imprisoned in Venezuela.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/20/the-us-has-released-an-ally-of-venezuelas-president-in-a-swap-for-jailed-americans-the-ap-learns/ Save to Pocket
Around $1 billion in IRS penalties waived
date: 2023-12-20, from: Marketplace Morning Report
With the new year, the IRS will resume sending reminder letters to taxpayers with old debts to the federal government, which were paused during the pandemic. But to avoid causing sticker shock when people receive reminders, the IRS is waiving the penalties it usually charges for back taxes. We dig in. And later, a boost in U.S. oil production spoils OPEC’s effort to prop up prices.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/around-1-billion-in-irs-penalties-waived Save to Pocket
Big landlords just 28% of California’s rental market
date: 2023-12-20, from: San Jose Mercury News
Large complexes held just 28% of the Golden State’s 6 million renting households.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/20/big-landlords-just-38-of-californias-rental-market/ Save to Pocket
FTC bans Rite Aid from using AI facial recognition in stores for 5 years
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Among the mistakes, an 11-year-old girl was misidentified as a shoplifter and searched
American drugstore chain Rite Aid was banned by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from using AI facial recognition technology for surveillance purposes for five years.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/rite_aid_facial_recognition/ Save to Pocket
As seen on TV: LA’s iconic ‘General Hospital’ to become hotel, housing
date: 2023-12-20, from: San Jose Mercury News
The shuttered, 19-story, Art Deco structure, completed in December of 1933, hasn’t seen a patient in about two decades. It was featured in the opening credits of the long-running TV soap opera “General Hospital.”
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/20/la-county-choses-developer-to-turn-iconic-general-hospital-into-housing-retail/ Save to Pocket
They’re letting us have RSS
date: 2023-12-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Assume that FB doesn’t really want to interop, so that’s why there’s a year timeline on developing AP functionality. No rush. Let’s keep growing and later on we can have an app store that only lets certain sites into our world, subject to our turning them off at any time.
Assuming this is true, RSS is their worst nightmare. It’s implemented in a week, if you’re really careful and there are good toolkits for every platform, and lots of developers know what to do with it, and even worse, there already is a huge installed base of such apps and they all have vociferous users who would be thrilled to be heard, because they largely feel like they’re pissing in the wind.
Remember they said RSS is Dead. I always felt that was aimed at me, but it was aimed at them too, even more so.
The thing to do, build – intelligently, slowly, showing interop at every step. Watch out for people who take stuff out with out putting back.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/20/152127.html?title=theyreLettingUsHaveRss Save to Pocket
Prompt-Brush is a non-AI generative model. If you suggest an image prompt,…
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043652-prompt-brush-is-a-non-gen Save to Pocket
Rite Aid’s ‘reckless’ use of facial recognition got it banned from using the technology in stores for 5 years
date: 2023-12-20, from: San Jose Mercury News
The FTC said that some customers were “erroneously accused by employees of wrongdoing” because Rite Aid’s technology “falsely flagged the consumers as matching someone who had previously been identified as a shoplifter or other troublemaker.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/20/rite-aids-reckless-use-of-facial-recognition-got-it-banned-from-using-the-technology-in-stores-for-5-years/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I asked ChatGPT for a list of Motown songs with a strong fast beat good for dancing. Now I want to play the list in Amazon music. Is there a way to do this?
http://scripting.com/2023/12/20.html#a150701 Save to Pocket
3D Bioprinting
date: 2023-12-20, from: NASA breaking news
Science in Space: December 2023 Imagine someone needs a heart transplant and scientists take cells from that person to create an entire new heart for them. Research on the International Space Station is helping to bring that dream closer to reality. The process of 3D printing (also known as additive manufacturing) enables the design and […]
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/iss-research/3d-bioprinting/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
If we had met in the late 80s and early 90s and we were talking about where technology should go next, I would have talked endlessly about creating apps out of apps. It means being able to write scripts that use an application as a scriptable toolbox, going behind the user interface. I was developing a product around that idea called Frontier. It all happened, and played a big role in making the Mac the ideal development platform for the web when it came along, in the early-late 90s. Unfortunately Apple’s top people didn’t get this, and wiped out the whole developer community in one press conference. The ideas were still useful and we’re using them every day, but not really aware of it. End of speech.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/20.html#a150230 Save to Pocket
NASA Sets Coverage for White House National Space Council Meeting
date: 2023-12-20, from: NASA breaking news
NASA is participating in a meeting of the National Space Council on Wednesday, Dec. 20, in Washington. The meeting, chaired by Vice President Kamala Harris, will focus on international partnerships and is the third council meeting held by the Biden-Harris Administration. NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy and Artemis II and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-sets-coverage-for-white-house-national-space-council-meeting/ Save to Pocket
Road to Cheburnet - Are you ready to destroy the free internet?
date: 2023-12-20, from: Tilde.news
New game available for both Android and iOS, where you have to censor and destroy the free internet.
iOS version: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/road-to-cheburnet/id6473683285
<p><a href="https://tilde.news/s/skpeoe/road_cheburnet_are_you_ready_destroy_free">Comments</a></p>https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=games.noesis.chebureng Save to Pocket
NASA’s Hubble Presents a Holiday Globe of Stars
date: 2023-12-20, from: NASA breaking news
The billion stars in galaxy UGC 8091 resemble a sparkling snow globe in this festive Hubble Space Telescope image from NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). The dwarf galaxy is approximately 7 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. It is considered an “irregular galaxy” because it does not have an orderly spiral or […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-presents-a-holiday-globe-of-stars/ Save to Pocket
Federal Judge Allows Removal of Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery
date: 2023-12-20, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The Defense Department had mandated that the monument be dismantled by January 1, 2024
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/federal-judge-allows-removal-confederate-memorial-arlington-national-cemetery-180983480/ Save to Pocket
Danish techies claim they can predict your next move (and your last)
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Life’s a vector, then you die
Just as language models can predict what phrase might come next in a sentence, Danish researchers claim to have shown human life events can be predicted using similar statistical techniques.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/life2vec/ Save to Pocket
Steady, Heavy Rain Prompts Flood Warnings
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The LAist
The National Weather Service has issued flood watches for portions of Southern California.
https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/la-weather-report-december-20-showers-thunderstorms-flood-watch Save to Pocket
Modi Says India Will Examine Any Information on Assassination Plot in US
date: 2023-12-20, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/modi-says-india-will-examine-any-information-on-assassination-plot-in-us/7405526.html Save to Pocket
This Pico-powered snowman lights up when you enter the room
date: 2023-12-20, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
element14’s Katie made a Raspberry Pi Pico-powered snowman that festively lights up its twinkly NeoPixels when you enter the room.
The post This Pico-powered snowman lights up when you enter the room appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/this-pico-powered-snowman-lights-up-when-you-enter-the-room/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Technical note: I’ve observed that GMail is refusing to show the images on my nightly emails, when viewed on my iPad, both in the Safari browser and in the iOS GMail app. I’d like to know if this is happening for other people, and then run an experiment to see if we can figure out what it is they don’t like about the images. Here’s a place to comment.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/20.html#a141008 Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
If journalism wants to help inform the populace of the stakes, I’d like them to stop using the term neo-Nazi. There’s nothing new about being a Nazi. It adds a tiny bit of confusion at exactly the point where you want zero confusion. It took journalism a long time to use the term insurrection about the January 6 events, that hurt us too. Understand where the path we’re on leads, and don’t give people a reason to hope that it’s not as serious as it is.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/20.html#a140529 Save to Pocket
Gary Horton | No War on Christmas? Who Won?
date: 2023-12-20, from: The Signal
I missed the War on Christmas. Where did this annual wringing of conservative hands go? Did COVID wipe out the War on Christmas, too? Until just these past few years you could count on talking head War on Christmas teeth gnashing every bit as much as count on Christmas itself. I moseyed over […]
The post Gary Horton | No War on Christmas? Who Won? appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/gary-horton-no-war-on-christmas-who-won/ Save to Pocket
Suspect admits to stealing copper wire from federal property in 2019
date: 2023-12-20, from: Guam Daily Post
A man faces a maximum of five years in federal prison for conspiring to steal copper wire from federal property in 2019.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/suspect-admits-to-stealing-copper-wire-from-federal-property-in-2019/article_07a96c12-9edd-11ee-8ac4-7bee67d40966.html Save to Pocket
Suspect accused of kidnapping woman, assaulting her with machete, golf club
date: 2023-12-20, from: Guam Daily Post
A 34-year-old man on pretrial release was accused of assaulting a woman several times after he allegedly kidnapped her.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/suspect-accused-of-kidnapping-woman-assaulting-her-with-machete-golf-club/article_b635c3d4-9ec9-11ee-9230-5bca2ed9edc7.html Save to Pocket
AG referred to ethics counsel
date: 2023-12-20, from: Guam Daily Post
The Supreme Court of Guam has referred Attorney General Douglas Moylan to the Judiciary’s Office of Regulation Counsel, which is responsible for investigating ethics complaints.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/ag-referred-to-ethics-counsel/article_dce60c0e-9ecf-11ee-8cf9-cfbb7789b552.html Save to Pocket
Arriola lambastes Moylan, says AG violated professional conduct
date: 2023-12-20, from: Guam Daily Post
Attorneys Joaquin “Jay” Arriola Jr. and Anita Arriola have responded to Attorney General Douglas Moylan’s letter regarding their firm’s representation of Department of Public Works Director Vince Arriola, stating that the AG’s letter was “replete” with “clear violations” of rules…
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/arriola-lambastes-moylan-says-ag-violated-professional-conduct/article_575fb412-9ee4-11ee-a18a-57e7efd59c01.html Save to Pocket
Clock ticking to avoid potential trash rate hike
date: 2023-12-20, from: Guam Daily Post
March 2024 is the cutoff date for any movement or decision on initiatives that could positively impact the Guam Solid Waste Authority’s financial situation, or the agency may have to decide to push forward with a $5 residential rate increase…
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/clock-ticking-to-avoid-potential-trash-rate-hike/article_a0069ece-9ed0-11ee-8c86-8759fd7a55e0.html Save to Pocket
Woman denies attempted murder charge
date: 2023-12-20, from: Guam Daily Post
A woman denied attempted murder charges related to allegedly stabbing a man in the neck while he was sleeping.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/woman-denies-attempted-murder-charge/article_60e30560-9ee0-11ee-ae3b-e36b3777c965.html Save to Pocket
Gingerbread workshops hosted by Dusit Thani
date: 2023-12-20, from: Guam Daily Post
There’s nothing like smelling fresh gingerbread during the holiday season. This Christmastime, kids on island are invited to decorate their own gingerbread cookies by the Dusit Thani Guam Resort.
https://www.postguam.com/entertainment/food/gingerbread-workshops-hosted-by-dusit-thani/article_4f48cee0-9d44-11ee-8849-3f875090f8ca.html Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
After all the disappointments in our country’s response to Homegrown Hitler from Queens, a personality I recognize from the neighborhood I grew up in which is just four miles from where Trump grew up, what a nice unexpected surprise that one holiday season Tuesday night, I’d turn on the news on MSNBC at the exact moment the host says “Hold on, breaking news” (I sighed, no it’s not) only to learn yes, it was. The state of Colorado had decided to use one of the guardrail buttons to extinguish the candidacy of HH, just like that. This morning I woke with a smile on my face and thought, hey it could happen, it should happen. If the Supreme Court doesn’t want to become the Nazi-style ratifier of a holocaust, this is their moment to act. It’s possible they’ll decide that the Constitution applies to every officer of the United States government except the president and vice-president, I’d love to hear the reason, and if they do, we’ll know that we’ve already lost.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/20.html#a135341 Save to Pocket
Microsoft offers rollback for those affected by Windows wireless futility
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
See, it wasn’t just you
Microsoft has finally acknowldged that Windows does have a Wi-Fi problem and offered a resolution for those affected: Known Issue Rollback.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/microsoft_confirms_wifi_issue/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The US has the tools to defend itself from enemies like Trump, and finally we're starting to use them.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/19/011124.html Save to Pocket
New NASA Glenn Exhibit Spotlights Microgravity Research
date: 2023-12-20, from: NASA breaking news
The Fluids and Combustion Facility, or FCF, on the International Space Station was designed and built at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and has been supporting microgravity research for over a decade. A new exhibit at the NASA Glenn Visitor Center, located in the Great Lakes Science Center, brings that research down to Earth […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/glenn/new-nasa-glenn-exhibit-spotlights-microgravity-research/ Save to Pocket
The fence will be tested
date: 2023-12-20, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
“That’s right, but they never attack the same place twice. They were testing the fences for weaknesses, systematically. They remember.” — Robert Muldoon, game warden, Jurassic Park (1993) If we learned anything from the blockbuster film Jurassic Park, other than we all had a crush on Jeff Goldblum, it’s that threats thrive if given the…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/the-fence-will-be-tested/ Save to Pocket
A different sort of reckoning
date: 2023-12-20, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
When I look toward 2024 through the prism of diversity, I see two futures in journalism. Neither is rosy, but one is decidedly bleaker than the other. I’m hoping for better days and bracing for bleak. Journalism took another economic and spiritual beating in the year behind us. More than 2,600 news jobs were cut,…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/a-different-sort-of-reckoning/ Save to Pocket
The obsession with “trust” will end
date: 2023-12-20, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
My prediction for 2024 is that journalists will realize that “trust” is a useless metric of their work. Okay, I’m kidding. I have no expectation that the news media will cease its pointless obsession with trust surveys. It’s not only a distraction but actually harmful. As Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa has pointed out, authoritarian…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/the-obsession-with-trust-will-end/ Save to Pocket
At A University, The Question ‘Who’s In Charge Here?’ Comes With A Lot Of Answers
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The LAist
Conflicts this year at CSU Fullerton and Cal Poly Pomona show divisions between administration and faculty members.
https://laist.com/news/education/who-runs-university-college-what-is-shared-governance Save to Pocket
Tired Of The Waiting Lists For California’s Public Universities, Nursing Students Increasingly Turn To Expensive Private Programs
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The LAist
The number of nursing students enrolling in high-priced private programs has nearly doubled over the past 10 years as the state’s public universities have stagnated in growth.
https://laist.com/news/education/waiting-lists-for-californias-public-universities-nursing-students Save to Pocket
Mental health efforts become a globally connected movement
date: 2023-12-20, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
The mental health of journalists has been steadily deteriorating since the pandemic. Many people feel overwhelmed due to a broken business model and rapid digitalization, which adds to the emotional difficulty of the content we cover. Most newsrooms have become unhealthy places to work, with record levels of burnout, anxiety, depression, and post traumatic stress…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/mental-health-efforts-become-a-globally-connected-movement/ Save to Pocket
How the candy cane gets made
date: 2023-12-20, from: Marketplace Morning Report
What can a beloved, sugary holiday treat teach us about trade protectionism, overseas farm subsidies, inflation and inelastic demand? Turns out, quite a bit. Today, we trace how sugarcane from Louisiana becomes a hand-spun, red-and-white-striped delight at a New Jersey candy shop — and learn a thing or two about economics along the way. But first: The Senate leaves for a holiday recess without any approved aid for Ukraine or Israel.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/candy-cane-global-economics Save to Pocket
‘Ready To Work’: Hollywood Artists Hopeful New Year Will Bring Employment After Dual Strikes
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The LAist
Some experts caution that the recovery will not bounce back to the ‘peak TV’ production frenzy of recent years.
https://laist.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/ready-to-work-hollywood-artists-hopeful-new-year-will-bring-employment-after-dual-strikes Save to Pocket
California Looks To The Health System To Sustain Mental Health Funds In Schools
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The LAist
To create an education system that has stable funds for mental health, California educators and leaders are turning to the health system and launching a statewide behavioral health initiative to fill funding gaps in fluctuating, sometimes unpredictable school budgets.
https://laist.com/news/education/california-looks-to-health-system-to-sustain-mental-health-funds-in-schools Save to Pocket
Journalism investment comes to Los Angeles
date: 2023-12-20, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
There are almost 10 million people in Los Angeles County — the most populous county in the United States. But unlike in other major metro areas of the U.S., a serious investment in local news from funders and policymakers has yet to materialize in L.A. The next decade in Los Angeles needs not only more…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/journalism-investment-comes-to-los-angeles/ Save to Pocket
Journalism’s identity crisis intensifies, and decentralization ensues
date: 2023-12-20, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Journalism outlets have always had to carve their own niche on many continuums — between business and service, content generators and technology platforms, entertainment providers and information mongers, bite-sized content and long-form experiences, ephemeral productions and evergreen products, and so on. In the rapidly evolving landscape, the only constant for media companies is an identity…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/journalisms-identity-crisis-intensifies-and-decentralization-ensues/ Save to Pocket
Capturing press releases for local media revenue
date: 2023-12-20, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
It’s no surprise then that the future of our industry is uncertain. Over the past 20 years, productivity tools have made thousands of teams in industries like tech and finance more efficient and able to focus on higher value work. Why isn’t the media industry, especially local news, embracing the same change? A recent report…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/capturing-press-releases-for-local-media-revenue/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
NASA Streams Cat Video From Deep, Deep Space.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/19/science/nasa-cat-video.html Save to Pocket
AM Briefing: Bird Files for Bankruptcy
date: 2023-12-20, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Southern California is bracing for heavy rain • China’s bitter cold is complicating earthquake rescue efforts • Iceland’s capital of Reykjavik could be hit by pollution from a volcanic eruption.
THE TOP FIVE
- E-scooter company Bird files for bankruptcy
E-scooter company Bird, which “put electric scooters onto the sidewalks of major cities,” is filing for bankruptcy in the U.S. Just five years ago the company reached “unicorn” status with a $1 billion valuation faster than any startup ever before. But “Bird grew too quickly — it launched in too many cities before it had a viable model,” one former employee told the Financial Times. “It was losing money on every ride, so the more cities and more rides it was doing the more money it lost.” The company went public in 2021 but its stock plummeted quickly and never really recovered. Other micromobility startups are facing similar financial challenges, and some cities are cracking down on e-scooters.
Bird
- Biden moves to protect ‘old growth’ forests
President Biden issued a proposal yesterday to protect some of the oldest trees in America’s national forests from commercial logging. The move has climate ramifications because older trees are natural carbon sinks, so keeping them alive prevents that carbon from being released into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. “Older forests provide the most above-ground carbon storage potential on Earth, with mature forests and larger trees driving most accumulation of forest carbon in the critical next few decades,” a group of scientists wrote in a letter to Biden last year. “Left vulnerable to logging, though, they cannot fulfill these vital functions.” The proposal doesn’t protect “mature” trees, which aren’t quite as ancient as “old growth” trees. This concession is “a middle ground between environmentalists and the timber industry,” says Lauren Aratani at The Guardian. The ban is set to come into place in 2025 and comes as part of an executive order, so whether it goes ahead could depend on the outcome of the 2024 election.
- California will start turning wastewater into drinking water
California officials yesterday approved regulations allowing wastewater from toilets and showers to be recycled into drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people. “As we look to make our communities more resilient to drought, to climate change, this is really going to be an important part of that solution,” Heather Cooley, director of research at water think tank Pacific Institute, tells the Los Angeles Times. Colorado has similar rules in place already, and Arizona and Florida could soon follow suit. The wastewater recycling process has undergone extensive review by scientists and engineers who insist it is clean and safe. The water is filtered, decontaminated, disinfected, and monitored, making it “purer than many drinking water sources we now rely on,” says E. Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the state’s water resources board.
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- British Museum gets £50 million in funding from BP
The British Museum, one of the most popular museums in the world, came under fire this week for accepting £50 million (about $63 million) in new funding from oil giant BP. The deal will last for 10 years and the money is expected to help pay for museum upgrades and refurbishments. The sponsorship isn’t new: BP has partnered with the museum since 1996. But it comes at a time when cultural institutions in Britain and elsewhere are under pressure from climate activists to cut ties with fossil fuel companies. One activist group has threatened legal action in response to the move, and Greenpeace called it “brazen greenwashing.” But, as the Times of London points out, most of Britain’s museums charge nothing for entrance and rely heavily on philanthropy and sponsorship. “Money needs to come from somewhere,” the paper says.
- VW will use Tesla’s EV charging plug
Tesla’s EV plug, the North American Charging Standard (NACS), is one step closer to dominating the industry entirely with the announcement that Volkswagen Group has committed to using the connector starting in 2025. VW says customers will now have access to 15,000 Supercharger locations across North America. The last remaining NACS holdout is Stellantis, but it’s probably only a matter of time before the automaker “bends the knee.”
THE KICKER
Five gray wolves were released in Colorado this week as part of a wild wolf restoration project.
https://heatmap.news/climate/am-briefing-bird-files-for-bankruptcy Save to Pocket
Airbnb fined for its dollar dilemma down under
date: 2023-12-20, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Airbnb has been ordered to pay up to $20 million in fines and compensation after misleading customers in Australia. Some bookings there were listed in U.S. dollars rather than Australian dollars, making them look cheaper than they actually were. Plus, we look at the delisting of Toshiba in Japan. And later: Inflation can even affect candy canes.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/airbnb-fined-for-its-dollar-dilemma-down-under Save to Pocket
LEFT WONDERING: How Can You Invest In An Ethical Fashion?
date: 2023-12-20, from: The Lever News
Plus, the best books for an introduction to politics.
https://www.levernews.com/left-wondering-how-can-you-invest-in-an-ethical-fashion/ Save to Pocket
Penguins get their Wayland with Firefox 121
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Latest version of Mozilla’s web browser brings something different depending on your machine
Version 121 of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, released yesterday, has changes that affect Linux, Windows, and Mac users differently.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/firefox_121_released/ Save to Pocket
Nice, Minnesota
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2023/12/20/nice-minnesota/ Save to Pocket
GCHQ Christmas Codebreaking Challenge
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-18, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Looks like fun.
Details here.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/gchq-christmas-codebreaking-challenge.html Save to Pocket
Largest Dataset Powering AI Images Removed After Discovery of Child Sexual Abuse Material
date: 2023-12-20, from: 404 Media Group
The model is a massive part of the AI-ecosystem, used by Google and Stable Diffusion. The removal follows discoveries made by Stanford researchers, who found thousands instances of suspected child sexual abuse material in the dataset.
https://www.404media.co/laion-datasets-removed-stanford-csam-child-abuse/ Save to Pocket
55 Years Ago: Seven Months Before the Moon Landing
date: 2023-12-20, from: NASA breaking news
December 1968 ended a year more turbulent than most. For the American space program, however, it brought the Moon landing one giant step closer. The successful first lunar orbital flight by Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, and William A. Anders proved the space worthiness of the Apollo Command and Service Modules (CSM) […]
https://www.nasa.gov/history/55-years-ago-seven-months-before-the-moon-landing/ Save to Pocket
@Ayjay blog (date: 2023-12-20, from: Ayjay blog)
The Morgan Beatus Manuscript
https://blog.ayjay.org/45811-2/ Save to Pocket
UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Parking meters and trash collection face disruption as networks switch off
A worrying number of UK authorities are still unaware of the impending switch-off of 2G and 3G mobile networks, according to Local Government Association (LGA) figures.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/uk_2g_3g_switchoff/ Save to Pocket
Office Hours: Will Republicans pay a price for giving Putin a victory in Ukraine?
date: 2023-12-20, from: Robert Reich on Substack
Their demands for draconian nativist policies at America’s southern border are playing into Trump’s and Putin’s hands
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-will-republicans-pay Save to Pocket
Alice Brotherton | My Christmas Miracle
date: 2023-12-20, from: The Signal
It was Friday afternoon and the Christmas rush had begun. I was delivering gifts and stopped by Ralphs (in Granary Square on McBean Parkway) to pick up a few things. I ran into the store thinking of many things I had on my “to do” list. When I left the store, I felt a panic […]
The post Alice Brotherton | My Christmas Miracle appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/alice-brotherton-my-christmas-miracle/ Save to Pocket
Gary Curtis | Two States for Two Peoples?
date: 2023-12-20, from: The Signal
Upon the recent release of some of the Oct. 7 Hamas hostages from Gaza, President Joe Biden spoke about ending “this cycle of violence in the Middle East.” He added, “We renew our resolve to pursue this two-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians can one day live side by side in a two-state solution with […]
The post Gary Curtis | Two States for Two Peoples? appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/gary-curtis-two-states-for-two-peoples/ Save to Pocket
Manchester’s finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Enforcement notice issued months after data regulator schooled police force
Updated Greater Manchester Police (GMP) must clear the backlog of hundreds of Freedom of Information (FOI) Act requests – some years old – or find itself in contempt of court.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/greater_manchester_police_foi/ Save to Pocket
KSH, Hilo soccer teams face off
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Kamehameha Schools - Hawai‘i and Hilo High’s boys and girls soccer teams faced off Monday at Pai‘ea Stadium.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/sports/ksh-hilo-soccer-teams-face-off/ Save to Pocket
Stephen Tsai: Chang keeps it real with UH football recruits
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>On every University of Hawaii-sponsored recruiting trip, a must stop for football prospects is the Ching Complex on the school’s lower campus.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/sports/stephen-tsai-chang-keeps-it-real-with-uh-football-recruits/ Save to Pocket
Hilo boys basketball defeats St. Joseph 67-9
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Hilo High’s boys varsity basketball team handled business with ease, crushing St. Joseph School 67-9 on Monday night at UH-Hilo’s Vulcan Gymnasium.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/sports/hilo-boys-basketball-defeats-st-joseph-67-9/ Save to Pocket
NEWS: County announces 2024 keiki track and field meets
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Hawai‘i County Department of Parks and Recreation announced the following 2024 keiki track and field meets for Hilo and Kona on Tuesday:</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/sports/news-county-announces-2024-keiki-track-and-field-meets/ Save to Pocket
Maryland QB Taulia Tagovailoa is opting out of the Music City Bowl against Auburn
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Taulia Tagovailoa is skipping Maryland’s bowl game, closing the book on a record-setting career in which he helped the Terrapins return to respectability under coach Michael Locksley. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/sports/maryland-qb-taulia-tagovailoa-is-opting-out-of-the-music-city-bowl-against-auburn/ Save to Pocket
Colorado Supreme Court, in landmark ruling, bans Trump from state’s ballot under insurrection clause
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>DENVER — A divided Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday declared former President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/colorado-supreme-court-in-landmark-ruling-bans-trump-from-states-ballot-under-insurrection-clause/ Save to Pocket
As climate warms, that perfect Christmas tree may depend on growers’ ability to adapt
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>CHICAGO — Christmas tree breeder Jim Rockis knows what it looks like when one dies long before it can reach a buyer.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/as-climate-warms-that-perfect-christmas-tree-may-depend-on-growers-ability-to-adapt/ Save to Pocket
Probation, community service in shooting of horse
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>A 25-year-old Pahoa man was sentenced to a year of probation and 100 hours of community service Tuesday for fatally shooting a Honomu couple’s pet horse.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/hawaii-news/probation-community-service-in-shooting-of-horse/ Save to Pocket
Suspect sought in assault investigation
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Police are seeking the public’s assistance in locating 68-year-old David Manuel Clark of Waimea, who’s a suspect in an assault investigation.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/hawaii-news/suspect-sought-in-assault-investigation/ Save to Pocket
Google to pay $700 million to US states, consumers in app store settlement
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Google has agreed to pay $700 million and make several other concessions to settle allegations that it had been stifling competition against its Android app store — the same issue that went to trial in another case that could result in even bigger changes.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/hawaii-news/google-to-pay-700-million-to-us-states-consumers-in-app-store-settlement/ Save to Pocket
Repairs to former Hilo Memorial could start next year
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Renovations to the former Hilo Memorial Hospital should begin next year thanks to a $13 million federal grant.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/hawaii-news/repairs-to-former-hilo-memorial-could-start-next-year/ Save to Pocket
Sandra Day O’Connor called a pioneer and ‘iconic jurist’ as she is memorialized by Biden, Roberts
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>WASHINGTON — Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the Arizona rancher’s daughter who became a voice of moderate conservatism as the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, was memorialized by President Joe Biden on Tuesday as a pioneer in the legal world who inspired generations of women.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/sandra-day-oconnor-called-a-pioneer-and-iconic-jurist-as-she-is-memorialized-by-biden-roberts/ Save to Pocket
These kids want to go to school. The main obstacle? Paperwork
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>It’s unclear to Tameka how — or even when — her children became unenrolled from Atlanta Public Schools. But it was traumatic when, in fall 2021, they figured out it had happened.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/these-kids-want-to-go-to-school-the-main-obstacle-paperwork/ Save to Pocket
Illegal crossings surge in remote areas as Congress, White House weigh major asylum limits
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>LUKEVILLE, Ariz. — Hundreds of dates are written on concrete-filled steel columns erected along the U.S. border with Mexico to memorialize when the Border Patrol has repaired illicit openings in the would-be barriers. Yet no sooner are fixes made than another column is sawed, torched and chiseled for large groups of migrants to enter, usually with no agents in sight.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/illegal-crossings-surge-in-remote-areas-as-congress-white-house-weigh-major-asylum-limits/ Save to Pocket
Biden administration moves to protect old-growth forests as climate change brings fires, pests
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>BILLINGS, Mont. — The Biden administration moved on Tuesday to conserve groves of old-growth trees on national forests across the U.S. and limit logging as climate change amplifies the threats they face from wildfires, insects and disease.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/biden-administration-moves-to-protect-old-growth-forests-as-climate-change-brings-fires-pests/ Save to Pocket
US baby boomers over 70 hold more than 30% of country’s wealth
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Most don’t work anymore, but Americans age 70 and older have seen their share of collective wealth surge during the pandemic. As a group, these older baby boomers have accumulated more than $14 trillion in additional net worth since the end 2019, based on Federal Reserve data. Their share of the country’s wealth has jumped to a record 30% last quarter, even though they account for 11% of the population. The aging population helps explain some the gains: There are about 2.3 million more people over 70 in the country than in 2019. But one major driver was the surge in home values and stocks during the pandemic, which benefited older generations most likely to own a house — or two — and hold equities or mutual funds.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/us-baby-boomers-over-70-hold-more-than-30-of-countrys-wealth/ Save to Pocket
Will the eruption of the volcano in Iceland affect flights and how serious is it?
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>LONDON — Scientists anticipated the eruption of a volcano in southwestern Iceland for weeks, so when it happened on Monday night, it was no surprise. The region had been active for more than two years and thousands of small earthquakes rattled the area in recent weeks.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/will-the-eruption-of-the-volcano-in-iceland-affect-flights-and-how-serious-is-it/ Save to Pocket
Retailers are improving their delivery speeds, meaning good news for late holiday shoppers
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>NEW YORK — Haven’t ordered any of your holiday gifts yet?</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/retailers-are-improving-their-delivery-speeds-meaning-good-news-for-late-holiday-shoppers/ Save to Pocket
Herzog says Israel ready to pause fight in exchange for hostages
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Israeli President Isaac Herzog told ambassadors from around the world the country is prepared to agree to a second humanitarian pause in fighting in exchange for the return of more hostages held by Hamas. Hamas, the Islamic militant group considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union, still holds about 129 of the initial 240 or more people it abducted from Israel during its deadly attack on Oct. 7.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/herzog-says-israel-ready-to-pause-fight-in-exchange-for-hostages/ Save to Pocket
Drought-prone California OKs new rules for turning wastewater directly into drinking water
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>SACRAMENTO, Calif. — When a toilet is flushed in California, the water can end up in a lot of places: An ice skating rink near Disneyland, ski slopes around Lake Tahoe, farmland in the Central Valley.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/drought-prone-california-oks-new-rules-for-turning-wastewater-directly-into-drinking-water/ Save to Pocket
Obituaries for December 20
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Mary Elizabeth Nahale, 87, of Holualoa died Nov. 23 at Hilo Medical Center. Born in Kohala, she was a housekeeper and member of Kona-Kohala Chamber of Commerce. Services at a later date. Survived by sons, Charles Nahale of Lahaina, Maui, Dudley Nahale and William Nahale of Holualoa; eight grandchildren and a great-grandchild. Arrangements by Dodo Mortuary.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/obituaries/obituaries-for-december-20-11/ Save to Pocket
Zelenskyy says Ukraine not at risk of losing war with Russia
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his military isn’t at risk of losing the war with Russia and expressed confidence the U.S. will deliver on its $61 billion in aid held up by a political standoff. “I’m certain the U.S. won’t betray us — and what has been agreed upon will be fulfilled,” Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv at a wide-ranging press conference organized to close out the year. Ukraine’s campaign against the Russian invasion has ground to a standstill as the war-battered nation approaches its third year of conflict, with more than $110 billion in financial aid from Kyiv’s main allies entangled in political infighting in Washington and Brussels.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/zelenskyy-says-ukraine-not-at-risk-of-losing-war-with-russia/ Save to Pocket
Elf Bar and other e-cigarette makers dodged US customs and taxes after China’s ban on vaping flavors
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>WASHINGTON — In only two years, a small, colorful vaping device called Elf Bar has become the most popular disposable e-cigarette in the world, generating billions in sales and quickly emerging as the overwhelming favorite of underage U.S. teens who vape.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/nation-world-news/elf-bar-and-other-e-cigarette-makers-dodged-us-customs-and-taxes-after-chinas-ban-on-vaping-flavors/ Save to Pocket
Don’t surrender on immigration: Aid Ukraine without undermining welcoming newcomers
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>In trying to win support from recalcitrant Republicans to reform a badly broken immigration system, the Biden administration has reportedly indicated it’d be open to indefinite authorities to expel asylum seekers and a huge expansion of our already largely unaccountable detention system.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/opinion/dont-surrender-on-immigration-aid-ukraine-without-undermining-welcoming-newcomers/ Save to Pocket
Rodgers’ return will come next season with Jets out of playoff hunt and QB not 100% healthy
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Aaron Rodgers’ quest to make an improbable return this season for the New York Jets appears over. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/sports/rodgers-return-will-come-next-season-with-jets-out-of-playoff-hunt-and-qb-not-100-healthy/ Save to Pocket
Analysis: Eagles have bigger problems than a 3-game losing streak
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The Philadelphia Eagles have bigger problems than a three-game losing streak. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/sports/analysis-eagles-have-bigger-problems-than-a-3-game-losing-streak/ Save to Pocket
Your Views for December 20
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Council urged to support Bill 102</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/opinion/your-views-for-december-20-6/ Save to Pocket
Christmas gift-giving turbocharges our trash problem. This is how I cope
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Every time I rip open a lovingly wrapped gift (and plenty of us will be doing a lot of that soon), one thing pops into my mind: trash.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/opinion/christmas-gift-giving-turbocharges-our-trash-problem-this-is-how-i-cope/ Save to Pocket
Messiah Sing-Along to honor longtime chorus leader, conductor
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The 14th annual Handel’s Messiah Sing-Along is returning with a special honor for the longtime conductor and founder of Hilo’s holiday tradition.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/entertainment/messiah-sing-along-to-honor-longtime-chorus-leader-conductor/ Save to Pocket
More than 50 to take the stage for The Nutcracker
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The Christmas spirit will be in full force as more than 55 local dancers from West Hawaii Dance Theatre and Academy perform The Nutcracker ballet in Waimea on Saturday.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/entertainment/more-than-50-to-take-the-stage-for-the-nutcracker/ Save to Pocket
Washington’s Kalen DeBoer is the AP coach of the year after leading undefeated Huskies to the CFP
date: 2023-12-20, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>SEATTLE — Kalen DeBoer landing the job at Washington two years ago seemed to be an unheralded transaction at the time.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/20/sports/washingtons-kalen-deboer-is-the-ap-coach-of-the-year-after-leading-undefeated-huskies-to-the-cfp/ Save to Pocket
Women in IT are on a 283-year march to parity, BCS warns
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Chartered institute highlights lack of progress in tech role equality
It will take 283 years for female representation in IT to make up an equal share of the tech workforce in the UK, according to a report from the British Computer Society, the chartered institute for IT (BCS).…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/gender_gap_it_employment/ Save to Pocket
SSH shaken, not stirred by Terrapin vulnerability
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
No need to panic, but grab those updates or mitigations anyway just to be safe
A vulnerability in the SSH protocol can be exploited by a well-placed adversary to weaken the security of people’s connections, if conditions are right.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/terrapin_attack_ssh/ Save to Pocket
Today in SCV History (Dec. 20)
date: 2023-12-20, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1892– Benjamin Harrison establishes 555,520-acre San Gabriel Timberland Reserve (Angeles National Forest). First forest reserve in California, second in U.S. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-dec-20/ Save to Pocket
The Savvy Senior | What Is the Retirement Saver’s Credit and How Does It Work?
date: 2023-12-20, from: The Signal
Dear Savvy Senior, Can you explain to me how the retirement saver’s tax credit works? My wife and I are in our fifties and are looking for creative ways to boost our retirement savings beyond our 401(k). Is this something we may be eligible for? — Struggling to Save Dear Struggling, If your income is […]
The post The Savvy Senior | What Is the Retirement Saver’s Credit and How Does It Work? appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/the-savvy-senior-what-is-the-retirement-savers-credit-and-how-does-it-work/ Save to Pocket
December 19, 2023
date: 2023-12-20, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
This evening, by a vote of 4–3, the Colorado Supreme Court decided that former president Donald Trump is disqualified from holding office and should be removed from the 2024 ballot in the state, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-19-2023 Save to Pocket
Man who self-surrendered arrested on suspicion of attempted murder
date: 2023-12-20, from: Guam Daily Post
The man who turned himself in to police on Wednesday morning was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.
https://www.postguam.com/news/man-who-self-surrendered-arrested-on-suspicion-of-attempted-murder/article_73fa9840-9f06-11ee-9424-7f65cc48934a.html Save to Pocket
Long-delayed Ariane 6 rocket is ‘ready to go’ – hopefully – says European Space Agency
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Latest launch sim went off without a hitch. An upper stage test, not so much
The European Space Agency (ESA) has declared its Ariane 6 rocket is “ready to go” – at least in terms of its ability to launch the long - delayed rocket. But some concerns remain about the performance of its upper stage.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/esa_ariane_6_ready/ Save to Pocket
China’s GPU contender Moore Threads reveals card that can cope with Nvidia’s CUDA
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
MTT S4000 GPU isn’t super-fast, but the ‘kilocard cluster’ design supporting it looks interesting
Moore Threads, a Chinese purveyor of GPUs, has unveiled its mightiest model to date – and it may even give market leader Nvidia a little to worry about.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/moore_threads_mtt_s4000_gpu/ Save to Pocket
Hex time
date: 2023-12-20, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
Hex time
My wife left to spend the day in a spa with a friend of hers and I am listening to Louis Armstrong recordings from the 1930s.
I read a discussion between @munroe and @Da_Gut about hex sizes for a hexcrawl. My personal take is to think of hexes as distances one can travel in a certain time.
Think about the diversity of the landscape one can see in a day of travel. Arable lands and a forest. Two regions? Arable lands, a forest, hills, a plateau. Four? That is the number of hexes per day. And nobody cares about the miles.
In my case, I think that “one hex is one day of walking” makes the most sense. In the morning, you’re leaving one hex and in the afternoon you’re arriving in the next hex. This assumes an uncharted wilderness. When I try to leave the forest trails in the hills around Zürich or in the Swiss mountains, I feel that progress is really slow. Super slow. Extremely slow. Sure, I can walk as far as the horizon in some cases, but that’s on gravel roads prepared by industrial machines and maintained by a state that is fed by all the tax evading billionaires and conglomerates of the whole planet. So out there in Fantasy land, it’s more like me trying to find a shortcut in the Swiss mountains and forests.
And sure, if people have horses and mules to carry their stuff, they can travel faster. Twice as fast makes it easy to move the little token around on the map. And roads also speed things up. Like, twice as fast? With horses and mules to carry stuff, on a flat road: 4 hexes per day. If you want to read up on ancient rows, see historic roads and trails on Wikipedia.
Regular exploration of the wilderness where the players are strangers, intruders, colonizers, potential murderers, belonging to the wannabe-conquerors, then surely it’s going to be 1 hex per day. This is the equivalent of slow and careful dungeon exploration speed. Avoid getting lost in the bogs, crossing the rivers and creeks without losing your stuff, without getting ambushed in gullies and canyons, without getting lost in forests, without slipping into ravines, spraining angles or scraping your knees, keeping dry, finding good camping sites, digging a latrine, digging a fire pit, washing clothes, maintaining equipment, baking bread, and on and on. This is the speed you can maintain for long expeditions.
Now, you can get into all the nitty-gritty of it all. Luckily, @settembrini already did all that and wrote Inch by inch it’s all a cinch, by the yard it’s hard. It’s a long article and not an easy read. But here’s one of the things I can put into my gamer notes:
1 hour’s walk = 1 league = 3 miles = 3000 double paces = 15 000 feet= 5000 yards.
So let’s go back to my example. Using the above equivalences, 8 hours of walking takes you 24 miles out in the open, on a road or well kept and straight trail. At the same time, I said that 1 day of walking is 2 hexes in my world, without mules or horses. So now we know: one day of walking is 24 miles and 2 hexes. Therefore my hexes should be 12 miles across, if you really need to know.
But of course you don’t because nothing happens “per mile” in the game. All the things happen “per unit of time”. The most important one of these is “how many random encounters per day?” Or “per 4 hour watch?”
I’m serious about one thing, however: It’s better if you don’t think about the miles per hex. If you do, you’ll keep thinking about all the other things, too. How far was your hike last summer? Did you have to set up camp? How heavy was your backpack? Did you wear armour? Is travelling by horse really faster than walking by foot if you can’t switch horses? How fast are you if you have two horses per person? How fast is a wagon. The questions are endless and somehow I find them all very boring questions. These are not good questions.
It’s better if you think about what’s important in the game for you and the table and go from there. Is the world dangerous because of random encounters? Start with the question of how often you want to roll for random encounters as the party travels from landmark to landmark. Think about the distances between settlements. Traditionally, that would be about a day’s march by foot in arable land: half a day out and do a bit of work and half a day back is the limit.
So let’s say you answered the above with “I’m going to roll once for random encounters per day of travel”. And every landmark has something: either it’s arable land so there are people living there, a camp, a hamlet, a village, or it’s dangerous because of a monster lair, or because of a natural hazard like mountains, swamps, deep forest, or something else that’s similarly inhospitable.
If you follow this train of thought then you’ll arrive at my setup: the slowest speed is one hex per day, and then there are ways to speed things up with transporation methods and infrastructure. Take a boat downriver or along the coast: 8 hexes per day? More? What about taking a boat upriver? Just as slow as walking but you can unlimited supplies? How far can the flying carpet go? All these questions need settling, eventually. All I am concerned about right now, however, is that they can be answered in principle: a certain multiple of the slowest speed is good enough.
The only good argument for switching things up that I can think of is wanting to present more variety to your players. No problem. If the land is full of stuff, a river ford, a tower ruin, then up onto the plateau and into the moors until you reach the cairns of Arguable, you can scale it up. Multiply it all by two or three or four and you’re good to go. I find that this leads to a lot more mapping and so I don’t do it, but if you feel like it, you have my blessings.
If you are like me and prefer more diversity in theory but cannot be bothered to map in practice, I have a suggestion: start with the sparse map and keep adding. Using the example above, there’s a hex with a settlement, and the next hex is hills, and there’s a river between the two. You can improvise a story about the fields giving way to brushland, the river winding its way between the willows and the ford with the poles of King Borgobob who raised them in the times of your grandfather, and then there’s that plateau. If the players don’t look for the tower, it does not show up. But if the players know about the old tower you add a tower symbol to the hill hex and presto, one more landmark in the same hex. They know about the cairn, too? Then it’s a tower and a cairn. You can even number the sides of a hex: 1 is north, 2 is south-east, 3 is south-west, and so on. Then your notes can say “1: cairn, 4: old tower” and depending on how the party crosses the hexes, you’ll know whether they pass by the thing or wether they can spot it from a distance or whether they’ll have to search for it.
I also like to label geographic features. Label settlements, forests, mountains, swamps, rivers, trails. I feel that adds so much.
Down below is a snapshot of the player map in my German Greyhawk campaign where I run the Elredd region on the Wild Coast. How long does it take to travel from Elredd to Moorwies along the Miesbohlenweg? 1 hex/day in the wilderness, 2 hexes/day on the road: From Elredd to Brackmühl is a day, from Brackmühl to Kreuzdorf is a day, and from Kreuzdorf to Moorwies is half a day, or perhaps the swamp slows things down and the road is shit so it’s a full day. So three days total. If you had horses, then it’s one day from Elredd to Kreuzdorf, and then the shit trackway into the swamp… a second day? Or maybe you can travel right through Moorwies and out of the swamp on the other side. But my players don’t know what lies to the west…
OK, but now I have a different problem. @settembrini says that each hex is 10 km across. Now what? Let’s take those equivalences again and add a rough conversion to kilometers. 3 miles × 1½ km/mi = 4½ km or 5000 years × 9/10 m/yard = 4500 m = 4½ km. Let’s round that to 5 km – or in keeping with this blog post: a 10 km hex takes 2 h to walk through and in 8 h you can walk through 4 hexes, if you’re on a road, 2 hexes cross-country, 8 hexes if you ride on a good road. Speed is sort-of doubled because 12 mi × 1½ km/mi = 18 km which is nearly twice as much as 10 km.
So bow how long does it take to travel from Elredd to Moorwies along the Miesbohlen way? 1 day from Elredd to Kreuzdorf. Plus 2 h on the next day.
1 hour’s walk = 1 league = 3 miles = 3000 double paces = 15 000 feet= 5000 yards = 5 km
My point with all of this: keep in mind how the map relates to events in your hexcrawl procedure. With the “new” ruling handed down to me regarding my map, I keep the idea that there is a single encounter check to be made during the day (and one to be made during the night if the party is camping out in the open).
(Map generated using Text Mapper with the Bright library)
@Yora writes:
the best way to avoid introducing fractions again would be to simply switch from a 6-mile hex grid to a 3-mile hex grid. The old hexes per day become hexes per shift and the players can either move two or three shifts in a day. – My Overland Travel Rules adapted for Dragonbane
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2023-12-15-hex-time Save to Pocket
Trinity hoops breaks eight-year drought against SCCS
date: 2023-12-20, from: The Signal
For the first time in eight seasons, the tides have turned in Santa Clarita’s Heritage League boys’ basketball rivalry. The Trinity Knights defeated the Santa Clarita Christian Cardinals, 69-49, snapping a 10-game losing streak against its league rival on Monday at the Newhall Church of the Nazarene. “It’s a big deal,” said Knights coach Daniel […]
The post <strong>Trinity hoops breaks eight-year drought against SCCS </strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/trinity-hoops-breaks-eight-year-drought-against-sccs/ Save to Pocket
Singapore wants datacenters, clouds, regulated like critical infrastructure
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Even systems located outside city-state could be considered ‘foundational’ and face performance demands
Singapore’s government has proposed amendments to its 2018-era Cybersecurity Bill that would extend the oversight of its cyber security agency to cloud service providers and datacenter operators.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/singapore_proposes_treating_data_centers/ Save to Pocket
Trump Defends Comments About Immigrants ‘Poisoning the Blood’ of America
date: 2023-12-20, from: VOA News USA
WATERLOO, Iowa — Former U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended his comments about migrants crossing the southern border “poisoning the blood” of America, and he reinforced the message while denying any similarities to fascist writings others had noted.
“I never read ‘Mein Kampf,’” Trump said at a campaign rally in Waterloo, Iowa, referencing Adolf Hitler’s fascist manifesto.
Immigrants in the U.S. illegally, Trump said Tuesday, are “destroying the blood of our country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country.”
In the speech to more than 1,000 supporters from a podium flanked by Christmas trees in red MAGA hats, Trump responded to mounting criticism about his anti-immigrant “blood” purity rhetoric over the weekend.
Several politicians and extremism experts have noted his language echoed writings from Hitler about the “purity” of Aryan blood, which underpinned Nazi Germany’s systematic murder of millions of Jews and other “undesirables” before and during World War II.
As illegal border crossings surge, topping 10,000 some days in December, Trump continued to blast Biden for allowing migrants to “pour into our country.” He alleged, without offering evidence, that they bring crime and potential disease with them.
“They come from Africa, they come from Asia, they come from South America,” he said, lamenting what he said was a “border catastrophe.”
Trump made no mention of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday to disqualify him from the state’s ballot under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause, though his campaign blasted out a fundraising email about it during his speech.
The former president has long used inflammatory language about immigrants coming to the United States, dating back to his campaign launch in 2015, when he said immigrants from Mexico are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.”
But Trump has espoused increasingly authoritarian messages in his third campaign, vowing to renew and add to his effort to bar citizens from certain Muslim-majority countries, and to expand " ideological screening " for people immigrating to the U.S. He said he would be a dictator on “day one” only, in order to close the border and increase drilling.
In Waterloo on Tuesday, Trump’s supporters in the crowd said his border policies were effective and necessary, even if he doesn’t always say the right thing.
“I don’t know if he says the right words all of the time,” said 63-year-old Marylee Geist, adding that just because “you’re not fortunate enough to be born in this country,” doesn’t mean “you don’t get to come here.”
“But it should all be done legally,” she added.
It’s about the volume of border crossings and national security, said her husband, John Geist, 68.
“America is the land of opportunity, however, the influx — it needs to be kept to a certain level,” he said. “The amount of undocumented immigrants that come through and you don’t know what you’re getting, things aren’t regulated properly.”
Alex Litterer and her dad, Tom, of Charles City said they were concerned about migrants crossing the southern border, especially because the U.S. doesn’t have the resources to support that influx. But the 22-year-old said she didn’t agree with Trump’s comments, adding that immigrants who come to the country legally contribute to the country’s character and bring different perspectives.
Polling shows most Americans agree, with two-thirds saying the country’s diverse population makes the U.S. stronger.
But Trump’s “blood” purity message might resonate with some voters.
About a third of Americans overall worry that more immigration is causing U.S.-born Americans to lose their economic, political and cultural influence, according to a late 2021 poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Jackie Malecek, 50, of Waterloo said she likes Trump for the reasons that many people don’t — how outspoken he is and “that he’s a little bit of a loose cannon.” But she thought Trump saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood” took it a little too far.
“I’m very much for cutting off what’s happening at the border now. There’s too many people pouring in here right now, I watch it every single day,” Malecek said. “But that wording is not what I would have chosen to say.”
Malecek said she supports allowing legal immigration and accepting refugees, but she is concerned about the waves of migrants crossing the border who are not being vetted.
Sen. JD Vance, a Republican from Ohio, lashed out at a reporter asking about Trump’s “poisoning the blood” comments, defending them as a reference to overdoses from fentanyl smuggled over the border.
“You just framed your question implicitly assuming that Donald Trump is talking about Adolf Hitler. It’s absurd,” Vance said. “It is obvious that he was talking about the very clear fact that the blood of Americans is being poisoned by a drug epidemic.”
At a congressional hearing July 12, James Mandryck, a Customs and Border Protection deputy assistant commissioner, said 73% of fentanyl seizures at the border since the previous October were smuggling attempts carried out by U.S. citizens, with the rest being done by Mexican citizens.
Extremism experts say Trump’s rhetoric resembles the language that white supremacist shooters have used to justify mass killings.
Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, pointed to the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooter and this year’s Texas mall shooter, who he said used similar language in writings before their attacks.
“Call it what it is,” said Lewis. “This is fascism. This is white supremacy. This is dehumanizing language that would not be out of place in a white supremacist Signal or Telegram chat.”
Asked about Trump’s “poisoning the blood” comments, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell replied with a quip about his own wife, an immigrant, who was an appointee in Trump’s administration.
“Well, it strikes me that didn’t bother him when he appointed Elaine Chao secretary of transportation,” McConnell said.
Trump currently leads other candidates, by far, in polls of likely Republican voters in Iowa and nationwide. Trump’s campaign is hoping for a knockout performance in the caucuses that will deny his rivals momentum and allow him to quickly lock up the nomination. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has staked his campaign on Iowa, raising expectations for him there.
“I will not guarantee it,” Trump said of winning Iowa next month, “but I pretty much guarantee it.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-defends-comments-about-immigrants-poisoning-the-blood-of-america/7405198.html Save to Pocket
lynx –nocolor
date: 2023-12-20, from: Jirka’s blog
I really dislike how the Lynx WWW browser looks on some modern systems. On my SGI it was OK - it simply respected IRIS terminal colors. On modern systems in seems to be full of colors with gray background. Text colors are quite nice but I have disliked the gray background. I have wished to have or black one or transparent one (it a terminal emulator supports transparency).
http://jirka.1-2-8.net/20231220-0443_lynx_nocolor Save to Pocket
Working from home
date: 2023-12-20, from: Jirka’s blog
And this is my main tool:
http://jirka.1-2-8.net/20231220-0443_Working_from_home Save to Pocket
Workflow: Changes and additions
date: 2023-12-20, from: Jirka’s blog
Things are continuously developing or at least changing. For example, my gVim on my GPD Pocket (Ubuntu MATE 18.04) has issues with text encoding. If I create a new file then I everything is OK. But when I save it and re-open it then it en-codes local language characters incorrectly. It is strange because I have been using the same .vimrc/.gvimrc for ages on several Linux machines and I never encountered such behaviour.
http://jirka.1-2-8.net/20231220-0443_Workflow_Changes_and_additions Save to Pocket
Tungsten W + PalmPix
date: 2023-12-20, from: Jirka’s blog
As you may know I do have a Palm Tungsten W. And I als othave the KODAK PalmPix for m5xx devices. So I have almost modern smarphone (jsut 17 years old!) with the (detachable camera).
http://jirka.1-2-8.net/20231220-0443_Tungsten_W_PalmPix Save to Pocket
TRGpro tuning (2)
date: 2023-12-20, from: Jirka’s blog
Just a tiny update this time. I only replaced the broken battery door by unused one (which I have borrowed them from my Palm IIIe).
http://jirka.1-2-8.net/20231220-0443_TRGpro_tuning_2 Save to Pocket
TRGpro tuning
date: 2023-12-20, from: Jirka’s blog
The PILOT Pentopia Chameleon stylus for Palm III and VI {sup}1{/sup} arrived today. It is a stylus with integrated reset pin and - last but not least - an actual pen. The pen refill is thin and it is labelled “Pilot” but I assume that a thin (non-pressurized) Fischer refill will fit here. This stylus has a bit different shape than the original Palm III pen and its tip is a bit harder but it is usable (I am writing this post with it). It is also little thicker than the original which is actually a plus - it sits more reliable in stylus housing of my heavily used Palms - I lost several styli from my old IIIxe and almost lost one of my TRGpro recently. The {sup}1{/sup} says that it is better for writing than the original stylus but I don’t think so. I see no improvement.
http://jirka.1-2-8.net/20231220-0443_TRGpro_tuning Save to Pocket
TRG Pro: first impressions
date: 2023-12-20, from: Jirka’s blog
The title is all wrong because I extensively used the TRG Pro in the past. But the last time when I synced the TRG was in 2/2016 and then I have been using the original Palm III devices (IIIx + IIIxe) instead of the TRG. I have not wanted to damage or lost my only TRG Pro (which is pretty rare as you may know). Now I have two TRGs so I can use one of them on daily basis, I think.
http://jirka.1-2-8.net/20231220-0443_TRG_Pro_first_impressions Save to Pocket
Standing desk attempt
date: 2023-12-20, from: Jirka’s blog
I’m trying to set up a standing desk in my office. I found a (less or more) space, two older LCDs (the ViewSonic vp171s), then prepared the keyboard and mouse.
http://jirka.1-2-8.net/20231220-0443_Standing_desk_attempt Save to Pocket
Lanes closed on Lyons Avenue due to SoCal Edison project
date: 2023-12-20, from: The Signal
Multiple lanes were closed in both directions on Lyons Avenue near Wiley Canyon Road on Tuesday as construction workers were digging up parts of the street. According to Conrad Reynado, a senior district manager with Southern California Edison, construction workers were ensuring that sealant that was put in place as part of a previously announced […]
The post Lanes closed on Lyons Avenue due to SoCal Edison project appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/lanes-closed-on-lyons-avenue-due-to-socal-edison-project/ Save to Pocket
US Plan to Empower Palestinian Authority in Gaza Faces Israeli Opposition
date: 2023-12-20, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-plan-to-empower-palestinian-authority-in-gaza-faces-israeli-opposition/7405175.html Save to Pocket
Storli Elected Hart School Board’s 2024 President
date: 2023-12-20, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Linda Storli was elected president of the William S. Hart Union School Governing Board during its annual organizational meeting on Dec.
https://scvnews.com/storli-elected-hart-school-boards-2024-president/ Save to Pocket
CHP holding maximum enforcement period during holiday weekend
date: 2023-12-20, from: The Signal
The California Highway Patrol’s Newhall-area office will be holding a maximum enforcement period from Friday at 6 p.m. until Monday at midnight, according to officials. According to Officer Josh Greengard, spokesman for the CHP’s Newhall office, a maximum enforcement period entails having all available officers deployed on roadways to ensure that motorists continue to move. […]
The post CHP holding maximum enforcement period during holiday weekend appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/chp-holding-maximum-enforcement-period-during-holiday-weekend/ Save to Pocket
County OKs battery storage in Acton
date: 2023-12-20, from: The Signal
The LA County Board of Supervisors signed off Tuesday on a 400-megawatt battery energy storage system, or BESS, facility for Acton over the objections of a group of mostly longtime area residents there who sported black “Don’t BESS with Acton” shirts at the meeting. Proponents mentioned how the project will help the state move toward […]
The post County OKs battery storage in Acton appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/county-oks-battery-storage-in-acton/ Save to Pocket
Supervisors seek new complaint process for school resource deputies
date: 2023-12-20, from: The Signal
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a motion at Tuesday’s meeting that will see an ordinance be drafted that provides the Probation Oversight Commission with the authority to receive complaints related to school law enforcement services within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The proposed ordinance is set to be brought back to […]
The post <strong>Supervisors seek new complaint process for school resource deputies</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/supervisors-seek-new-complaint-process-for-school-resource-deputies/ Save to Pocket
@Ayjay blog (date: 2023-12-20, from: Ayjay blog)
Brian Eno, from a 1995 diary entry: Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound […]
https://blog.ayjay.org/45817-2/ Save to Pocket
India builds massive tech infrastructure to support finance sector
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
ERP for 63,000 small rural lenders, software for 1,800 banks, and better-than-hyperscale cloud for the rest
India is building massive technology infrastructure to support its financial services sector.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/india_financial_services_infrastructure_build/ Save to Pocket
Thank you Santa Barbara COMMUNITY, REALTORS®, and AFFILIATES
date: 2023-12-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
By Todd Shea2023 PresidentSanta Barbara Association of Realtors If you are like me, once you are coming close to finishing
The post Thank you Santa Barbara COMMUNITY, REALTORS®, and AFFILIATES appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/19/thank-you-santa-barbara-community-realtors-and-affiliates/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Elon Musk: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=0hhkuJXd1-D6TZhf&v=Eo3zORUGCbM&feature=youtu.be Save to Pocket
Blue Origin Returns to Space After Year-long Hiatus
date: 2023-12-20, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Blue Origin launched its first rocket in more than a year on Tuesday, reviving the U.S. company’s fortunes with a successful return to space following an uncrewed crash in 2022.
Though mission NS-24 carried a payload of science experiments, not people, it paves the way for Jeff Bezos’ aerospace enterprise to resume taking wealthy thrill-seekers to the final frontier.
The New Shepard suborbital rocket blasted off from the pad at Launch Site One, near Van Horn, Texas, at 10:42 a.m.
After separating from the booster, the gumdrop-shaped capsule attained a peak altitude of 107 kilometers above sea level, well above the internationally recognized boundary of space known as the Karman line, which is 100 kilometers high.
The booster then successfully landed vertically on the launchpad, against the majestic backdrop of the Sierra Diablo mountains, followed a few minutes later by the capsule floating to the desert floor on three giant parachutes.
All in all, the mission lasted 10 minutes and 13 seconds.
“Demand for New Shepard flights continues to grow, and we’re looking forward to increasing our flight cadence in 2024,” said Phil Joyce, the company’s senior vice president.
The science experiments onboard included one to demonstrate the operation of hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity, and another showing how water and gas move in a weightless environment.
Future applications could include monitoring water quality for astronauts in space.
On Sept. 12, 2022, a Blue Origin rocket became engulfed in flames shortly after launch. The capsule, fixed to the top of the rocket, successfully initiated an emergency separation sequence and floated safely to the ground on parachutes.
The accident prompted a year-long probe by the Federal Aviation Administration, which found it was caused by the failure of an engine nozzle that experienced higher-than-expected operating temperatures.
The regulator issued a set of corrective actions for Blue Origin to undertake before it could resume flying, including the redesign of certain engine parts. It confirmed Sunday that it had approved Blue Origin’s application to fly again.
In all, Blue Origin has carried out six crewed flights — some passengers were paying customers and others were guests — since July 2021, when Bezos himself took part in the first.
While Blue Origin has been grounded, rival Virgin Galactic — the company founded by British billionaire Richard Branson — has pressed on, with five commercial flights this year.
The two companies compete in the emerging space tourism sector, operating in suborbital space.
While Blue Origin launches a small rocket vertically, Virgin Galactic uses a large carrier plane to gain altitude and then drop off a smaller, rocket-powered spaceplane that completes the journey to space.
In both cases, passengers enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness and can view the curvature of the Earth through large windows.
Virgin Galactic tickets were sold for between $200,000 to $450,000; Blue Origin does not publicly disclose its ticket prices.
Blue Origin can boast the fact that nearly all of its rocket platform is reused, including the booster, capsule, engine, landing gear and parachutes.
Its engine, meanwhile, is fueled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen, meaning the only byproduct during flight is water vapor, with no carbon emissions.
Blue Origin is also developing a heavy rocket for commercial purposes called New Glenn, with the maiden flight planned for next year.
This rocket, which measures 98 meters high, is designed to carry payloads of as much as 45 metric tons into low Earth orbit.
https://www.voanews.com/a/blue-origin-returns-to-space-after-year-long-hiatus/7405145.html Save to Pocket
Man wanted in two investigations turns himself in to police
date: 2023-12-20, from: Guam Daily Post
A man sought by police self-surrendered on Wednesday morning.
https://www.postguam.com/news/man-wanted-in-two-investigations-turns-himself-in-to-police/article_82537832-9ecd-11ee-846f-73da6542cfcb.html Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
What New Upgrades Mean for East Coast Skiing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/travel/ski-resorts-east-us-snow-making.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HE0.PUZr.HCQt0ht-0niY&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Save to Pocket
There’s actual news tonight
date: 2023-12-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I’ve been watching the news tonight, when there’s some actual news, and it’s good news.
What they’re not saying is that the US has the tools to defend itself from enemies like Trump, and finally we’re starting to use them. Not impotent tools, like congressional hearings or impeachment, but the actual guardrail meant to serve as a last resort to keep a nightmare out of the government. An insurrectionist should be dealt with a lot more swiftly than Trump has and the penalty should be harsh to warn off other would-be coup plotters. But – better late than never.
And if they want to have a civil war, okay – better to do it when the military is under constitutional control, at least theoretically. Tell the Republicans to try again, now before any primary votes have been cast. This candidate is prohibited from being president, as if he were born outside the United States. Not qualified.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/19/011124.html?title=theresActualNewsTonight Save to Pocket
CalArtians to Screen Films at Sundance
date: 2023-12-20, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Sundance Institute has announced the 53 short films and the 40th Edition Celebration Screenings that will screen at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, from Jan. 18-28.
https://scvnews.com/calartians-to-screen-films-at-sundance/ Save to Pocket
Why Hezbollah And Israel Haven’t Plunged Into All-Out War
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The LAist
The Iran-backed Lebanese militia and Israeli forces have been fighting across their border since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, but analysts say they want to avoid a war.
https://laist.com/news/why-hezbollah-and-israel-havent-plunged-into-all-out-war Save to Pocket
Drought-Prone California OKs New Rules for Turning Wastewater Directly Into Drinking Water
date: 2023-12-20, from: VOA News USA
SACRAMENTO, California — When a toilet is flushed in California, the water can end up in a lot of places: an ice skating rink in Ontario, ski slopes around Lake Tahoe, farmland in the Central Valley.
And — coming soon — kitchen faucets.
California regulators on Tuesday approved new rules to let water agencies recycle wastewater and put it right back into the pipes that carry drinking water to homes, schools and businesses.
It’s a big step for a state that has struggled for decades to secure reliable sources of drinking water for its more than 39 million residents. And it signals a shift in public opinion on a subject that as recently as two decades ago prompted backlash that scuttled similar projects.
Since then, California has been through multiple extreme droughts, including the most recent one that scientists say was the driest three-year period on record and left the state’s reservoirs at dangerously low levels.
“Water is so precious in California. It is important that we use it more than once,” said Jennifer West, managing director of WateReuse California, a group advocating for recycled water.
California has been using recycled wastewater for decades. The Ontario Reign minor league hockey team has used it to make ice for its rink in Southern California. Soda Springs Ski Resort near Lake Tahoe has used it to make snow. And farmers in the Central Valley, where much of the nation’s vegetables, fruits and nuts are grown, use it to water their crops.
But it hasn’t been used directly for drinking water. Orange County operates a large water purification system that recycles wastewater and then uses it to refill underground aquifers. The water mingles with the groundwater for months before being pumped up and used for drinking water again.
California’s new rules would let — but not require — water agencies take wastewater, treat it and then put it right back into the drinking water system. California would be just the second state to allow this, following Colorado.
It’s taken regulators more than 10 years to develop these rules, a process that included multiple reviews by independent panels of scientists. A state law required the California Water Resources Control Board to approve these regulations by December 31 — a deadline met with just days to spare.
The vote was heralded by some of the state’s biggest water agencies, which all have plans to build huge water recycling plants in the coming years. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million people, aims to produce up to 570 million liters (150 million gallons) per day of both direct and indirect recycled water. A project in San Diego is aiming to account for nearly half of the city’s water by 2035.
Water agencies will need public support to complete these projects — which means convincing customers that not only is recycled water safe to drink, but it’s not icky.
California’s new rules require the wastewater to be treated for all pathogens and viruses, even if the pathogens and viruses aren’t in the wastewater. That’s different from regular water treatment rules, which require treatment only for known pathogens, said Darrin Polhemus, deputy director of the division of drinking water for the California Water Resources Control Board.
In fact, the treatment is so stringent it removes all of the minerals that make fresh drinking water taste good — meaning they have to be added back at the end of the process.
“It’s at the same drinking water quality, and probably better in many instances,” Polhemus said.
It’s expensive and time-consuming to build these treatment facilities, so Polhemus said it will only be an option for bigger, well-funded cities — at least initially.
In San Jose, local officials have opened the Silicon Valley Advanced Water Purification Center for public tours “so that people can see that this is a very high-tech process that ensures the water is super clean,” said Kirsten Struve, assistant officer for the water supply division at the Santa Clara Valley Water District.
Right now, the agency uses the water for things like irrigating parks and playing fields. But they plan to use it for drinking water in the future.
“We live in California where the drought happens all the time. And with climate change, it will only get worse,” Struve said. “And this is a drought-resistant supply that we will need in the future to meet the demands of our communities.”
Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the Water Resources Control Board that approved the new rules on Tuesday, noted that most people are already drinking recycled water anyway. Most wastewater treatment plants put their treated water back into rivers and streams, which then flow down to the next town so they can drink it.
“Anyone out there taking drinking water downstream from a wastewater treatment plant discharge — which, I promise you, you’re all doing — is already drinking toilet to tap,” Esquivel said. “All water is recycled. What we have here are standards, science and — importantly — monitoring that allow us to have the faith that it is pure water.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/drought-prone-california-oks-new-rules-for-turning-wastewater-directly-into-drinking-water-/7404746.html Save to Pocket
There’s No Christmas In Bethlehem This Year. With War In Gaza, Festivities Are Off
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The LAist
In a city synonymous with the birth of Jesus, Christmas is typically a time when Bethlehem is full of visitors. But with war raging, the city’s Christian leaders have canceled public celebrations.
https://laist.com/news/theres-no-christmas-in-bethlehem-this-year-with-war-in-gaza-festivities-are-off Save to Pocket
Saugus district’s Relay for Life team a regional winner
date: 2023-12-20, from: The Signal
News release Saugus Union School District announced that its district team, “SUSD: Let’s Teach Cancer a Lesson,” was selected as the regional winner for the Pat Flynn Spirit of Relay Team Award for the 2023 American Cancer Society Relay for Life. The region includes teams in California, Guam and Hawaii. The SUSD team will […]
The post Saugus district’s Relay for Life team a regional winner appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/saugus-districts-relay-for-life-team-a-regional-winner/ Save to Pocket
Santa Barbara Unified Students Walk Out to Raise Teacher Wages
date: 2023-12-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Bitter salary dispute leads to a soft strike and student protests.
The post Santa Barbara Unified Students Walk Out to Raise Teacher Wages appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/19/santa-barbara-unified-students-walk-out-to-raise-teacher-wages/ Save to Pocket
At OC Supervisors Meeting, Renewed Calls For Investigation Into Millions Routed By Andrew Do To His Daughter’s Nonprofit
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The LAist
“The public’s trust is being eroded by people who abuse the process,” Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento told LAist.
https://laist.com/news/politics/orange-county-supervisors-vote-ethics-reforms-taxpayer-money-andrew-do-viet-america-society-warner-wellness Save to Pocket
Los Angeles County is Ready for Storm Season, Offers Tips for the Public
date: 2023-12-20, from: SCV New (TV Station)
As the first significant storm of the winter season approaches, Los Angeles County is collaborating with agencies across the region to protect the public from flood danger and to capture as much stormwater as possible to become future drinking water
https://scvnews.com/los-angeles-county-is-ready-for-storm-season-offers-tips-for-the-public/ Save to Pocket
Philippines, South Korea, Interpol cuff 3,500 suspected cyber scammers, seize $300M
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Alleged crims used AI to pose as friends, family, romantic partners – and sold dodgy NFTs
A transnational police operation has resulted in the arrest of 3,500 alleged cybercriminals and the seizure of $300 million in cash and digital assets.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/interpol_haechi_iv/ Save to Pocket
Wednesday 20 December, 2023
date: 2023-12-20, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Bagel-Land I’ve never liked bagels. On the other hand, I’ve never seen ones like these. Still, I gave them a miss. Seen in central London, last week. Quote of the Day From Politico: ”British Foreign Secretary David Cameron and German … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/wednesday-20-december-2023/38925/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump Is Disqualified From the 2024 Ballot, Colorado Supreme Court Rules.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/19/us/politics/trump-colorado-ballot-14th-amendment.html?smtyp=cur&smid=bsky-nytimes Save to Pocket
Keith Richards at 80
date: 2023-12-20, updated: 2023-12-20, from: Daring Fireball
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/keith-richards-at-80 Save to Pocket
Trump disqualified in Colorado
date: 2023-12-20, from: Robert Reich on Substack
Now on to the Supreme Court. Will Thomas recuse himself?
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/trump-disqualified-in-colorado Save to Pocket
WARC’in the crawler
date: 2023-12-20, from: Marginallia log
The Marginalia Crawler has seen improvements! A long term problem with the crawler design is that if for whatever reason the crawler shuts down, then it needs to re-start fetching whatever domains it was currently traversing during the termination from zero. This isn’t fantastic, since not only does crawling a website take a fair bit of time, it’s a nuisance for the server admins to re-crawl stuff that was already fetched, and a real liability for ending up in robots.
https://www.marginalia.nu/log/94_warc_warc/ Save to Pocket
Inferring Implicit 3D Representations from Human Figures on Pictorial Maps
date: 2023-12-20, from: ETH Zurich, recently added
Schnürer, Raimund
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/648445 Save to Pocket
California approves lavatory-to-faucet water recycling
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
‘Water? Like out of the toilet?’ It will get cleaned first and it’ll be better than Brawndo
Taking a cue from water-starved environments like Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune books and the International Space Station, arid California is shortening the distance between wastewater and drinking water.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/california_approves_water_recycling/ Save to Pocket
How Soon Will Southern Californians Be Using Water That’s Gone From Toilet To Tap?
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The LAist
Projects are already in the works.
https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/toilet-to-tap-water-southern-california-timeline Save to Pocket
Colorado Court Bars Trump from Presidential Primary Ballot
date: 2023-12-19, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/colorado-supreme-court-bans-trump-from-state-s-ballot-under-constitution-s-insurrection-clause/7404758.html Save to Pocket
NASA, Partners Continue to Advance Space Tech on Suborbital Flights
date: 2023-12-19, from: NASA breaking news
Living and working in space requires getting ready a bit closer to Earth. Through a suborbital flight test on Dec. 19, 2023 with industry provider Blue Origin, NASA’s Flight Opportunities program is helping 14 research payloads move one step toward future space missions and commercial applications. The flown technologies aim to address some of the […]
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/flight-opportunities-program/nasa-partners-continue-to-advance-space-tech-on-suborbital-flights/ Save to Pocket
A New Day Dawns
date: 2023-12-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, we learned an important lesson: Many, many people have animals in their lives, and
The post A New Day Dawns appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/19/a-new-day-dawns/ Save to Pocket
LASD: Celebrate Responsibly with ‘Go Safely’ Game Plan
date: 2023-12-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department wants to remind the public of the dangers of driving impaired and celebrate the holiday season responsibly by not driving under the influence.
https://scvnews.com/lasd-celebrate-responsibly-with-go-safely-game-plan/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-19, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Colorado Supreme Court bans Trump from the state’s ballot under Constitution’s insurrection clause.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-insurrection-14th-amendment-2024-colorado-d16dd8f354eeaf450558378c65fd79a2?taid=6582258c75681a00010e04c6 Save to Pocket
The Fruit Shaped Bus Stops in Nagasaki, Japan
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/the-fruit-shaped-bus-stops-in-nagasaki-japan Save to Pocket
Karen Jones, Santa Ynez Public Official and January 6 Rioter, Is Arrested
date: 2023-12-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Jones and her husband face federal charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct.
The post Karen Jones, Santa Ynez Public Official and January 6 Rioter, Is Arrested appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/19/karen-jones-santa-ynez-public-official-and-january-6-rioter-is-arrested/ Save to Pocket
MSI Prestige 13 AI Evo is a 2.2 pound Meteor Lake laptop with a 2.8K OLED display
date: 2023-12-19, from: Liliputing
Intel’s new Meteor Lake chips are designed for laptops, mini PCs, and other small computers. But the new MSI Prestige 13 AI Evo may be one of the thinnest, lightest Meteor Lake laptops announced to date. It measures just 16.9mm (0.67 inches) thick and weighs just 990 grams (2.2 pounds), but supports up to an Intel […]
The post MSI Prestige 13 AI Evo is a 2.2 pound Meteor Lake laptop with a 2.8K OLED display appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/msi-prestige-13-ai-evo-is-a-2-2-pound-meteor-lake-laptop-with-a-2-8k-oled-display/ Save to Pocket
Autonomy And Feelings Of Safety Elude Residents At An Inside Safe Motel
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The LAist
One woman’s story of her experiences with interim housing.
https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/autonomy-and-feelings-of-safety-elude-residents-at-an-inside-safe-motel Save to Pocket
Lady Cougars Close Tourney with Back-to-Back Wins
date: 2023-12-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
College of the Canyons participated in the 44th Colleen Riley Holiday Crossover Tournament hosted by Fullerton College Dec. 14-16 with the Lady Cougars basketball team coming home with a 2-1 record
https://scvnews.com/lady-cougars-close-tourney-with-back-to-back-wins/ Save to Pocket
Matadors drop seventh straight amid offensive woes in the second half
date: 2023-12-19, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
Forty days removed from their last victory, CSUN women’s basketball (2-7) has dropped its seventh straight after being outscored by 21 in an abysmal second half. CSUN took on San Jose State (5-6), a team that recently defeated Bethesda, a National Christian Collegiate Athletic Association (NCCAA) school, by 94. The Matadors have a 6-9 all-time…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177692/sports/matadors-drop-seventh-straight-amid-offensive-woes-in-the-second-half/ Save to Pocket
Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me to Be a Better Journalist. “[It]…
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043649-reporting-on-long-covid-t Save to Pocket
How Can We Remain Steady?
date: 2023-12-19, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Fury. Confusion. Despair. A year may be ending, but those who cherish American democracy look over the horizon at 2024 with a strong sense of foreboding. A former president strides, seemingly unstoppable and with authoritarian glee, toward the Republican nomination for president.
https://steady.substack.com/p/how-can-we-remain-steady Save to Pocket
Supes Tackle Local Oversight of Battery Energy Storage Facilities
date: 2023-12-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a motion authored by Supervisor Kathryn Barger that directs Los Angeles County’s Department of Regional Planning to develop an ordinance that will regulate and prevent the overconcentration of battery energy storage sites in North County
https://scvnews.com/supes-tackle-local-oversight-of-battery-energy-storage-facilities/ Save to Pocket
State Approves New Rules for Turning Sewage into Drinking Water, but ‘Toilet to Tap’ Still a Ways off for Santa Barbara
date: 2023-12-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
City water czar says City Hall is not likely to pursue the expensive water treatment infrastructure for at least another decade.
The post State Approves New Rules for Turning Sewage into Drinking Water, but ‘Toilet to Tap’ Still a Ways off for Santa Barbara appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/19/state-approves-new-rules-for-turning-sewage-into-drinking-water-but-toilet-to-tap-still-a-ways-off-for-santa-barbara/ Save to Pocket
The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2023. From Gary Shteyngart’s review of…
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043648-the-most-scathing-book-re Save to Pocket
CHP Prioritizing Safety on the Roads this Holiday Season
date: 2023-12-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The California Highway Patrol is gearing up to launch its annual Christmas Day Maximum Enforcement Period. This additional enforcement initiative aims to enhance the safety of the public on California’s roads during the busy holiday travel period
https://scvnews.com/chp-prioritizing-safety-on-the-roads-this-holiday-season/ Save to Pocket
Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Oh yes, please, get in the sea
Never mind that it is years late, hampered by production problems, and still not on the actual horizon: Elon Musk wants to turn the Cybertruck into a boat.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/musk_says_boat_mod_package/ Save to Pocket
Sorry, but FunSearch probably isn’t a milestone in scientific discovery
date: 2023-12-19, from: Gary Marcus blog
As ever, don’t believe the hype
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/sorry-but-funsearch-probably-isnt Save to Pocket
NASA’s Artemis II Crew Meet with President, VP at White House
date: 2023-12-19, from: NASA breaking news
The first astronauts to fly around the Moon under NASA’s Artemis program visited the White House in Washington Thursday, and met with President Joe Biden in the Oval Office to thank him for his leadership and discuss their upcoming flight test. Artemis II crew members are NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/nasas-artemis-ii-crew-meet-with-president-vp-at-white-house/ Save to Pocket
Car Life
date: 2023-12-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
We are currently disabled, elderly, and houseless, dealing with bathroom issues at night, the cold, spiders in the van that we stay in and sleep in, and a lack of affordable housing options.
The post Car Life appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/19/505078/ Save to Pocket
The Met Will Repatriate 16 Artifacts to Cambodia and Thailand
date: 2023-12-19, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The looted objects are tied to the notorious art dealer Douglas Latchford
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-met-will-repatriate-16-artifacts-to-cambodia-and-thailand-180983477/ Save to Pocket
Hartmann Advocates for Lompoc Valley
date: 2023-12-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Residents of the county’s 3rd District are so fortunate to have Joan Hartmann as its supervisor.
The post Hartmann Advocates for Lompoc Valley appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/19/hartmann-advocates-for-lompoc-valley/ Save to Pocket
Chimpanzees and Bonobos May Remember Faces for More Than 20 Years
date: 2023-12-19, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The great apes, which are humans’ closest living relatives, appeared to recognize photos of their former acquaintances in a study, even decades later
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chimpanzees-and-bonobos-may-remember-faces-for-more-than-20-years-180983473/ Save to Pocket
Flood Watch Issued for Santa Barbara County as Storms Approach
date: 2023-12-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The National Weather Service warns of potential floods through the week due to heavy rainfall.
The post Flood Watch Issued for Santa Barbara County as Storms Approach appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/19/flood-watch-issued-for-santa-barbara-county-as-storms-approach/ Save to Pocket
One more thing about wifi garage doors
date: 2023-12-19, from: Matt Haughey blog
For the last ten years, I’ve been a big fan of wifi garage doors because you don’t have to carry an extra key or controller and you can automate things once the garage opens (like turn on lights in your house). I’ve had Chamberlain/LiftMaster doors for years now in two different houses and though I’ve …Continue reading “One more thing about wifi garage doors”
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2023/12/19/one-more-thing-about-wifi-garage-doors/ Save to Pocket
The Pudding announces its picks for the best visual and data-driven stories…
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043650-the-pudding-announces-its Save to Pocket
Gladbach Scholarship for 2024/25 is Now Available
date: 2023-12-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Established in honor of the late Edward G. “Jerry” Gladbach, a past Association of California Water Agencies president, Santa Clarta Valley Water Agency vice president and longtime local, state and national water leader, the 2024/25 Edward G. “Jerry” Gladbach Scholarship opportunity is now open for applications.
https://scvnews.com/gladbach-scholarship-for-2024-25-is-now-available/ Save to Pocket
Millions of Xfinity customers’ info, hashed passwords feared stolen in cyberattack
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
35M-plus Comcast user IDs accessed by intruder via Citrix Bleed
Millions of Comcast Xfinity subscribers’ personal data – including potentially their usernames, hashed passwords, contact details, and secret security question-answers – was likely stolen by one or more miscreants exploiting Citrix Bleed in October.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/comcast_xfinity_hacked/ Save to Pocket
A typology of eggnog cartons. “The peculiarities of the packaging range from…
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043651-a-typology-of-eggnog-cart Save to Pocket
Saugus High Marching Centurions Wrap Up the Holidays
date: 2023-12-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
It’s almost time to wrap up your holiday shopping, literally. On Saturday, Dec. 23, the Saugus High School Centurion Band and Guard will be hosting their final gift wrapping booth of the season.
https://scvnews.com/saugus-high-marching-centurions-wrap-up-the-holidays/ Save to Pocket
Volcano Erupts in Iceland After Weeks of Earthquake Activity
date: 2023-12-19, from: Smithsonian Magazine
On Monday night, plumes of lava and ash blasted more than 330 feet into the air
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/volcano-erupts-in-iceland-after-weeks-of-earthquake-activity-180983478/ Save to Pocket
macOS 14.2.1
date: 2023-12-19, from: Michael Tsai
Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer, full installer, IPSW): According to Apple’s release notes, macOS Sonoma 14.2.1 includes bug fixes and a security update. macOS 14.2.1 fixes a screen sharing vulnerability that could cause a user to unintentionally share the incorrect content. See also: Mr. Macintosh and Howard Oakley. Previously: macOS 14.2
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/19/macos-14-2-1/ Save to Pocket
iOS 17.2.1
date: 2023-12-19, from: Michael Tsai
Juli Clover (release notes TBA, security TBA, developer): The iOS 17.2.1 update includes unspecified bug fixes, according to Apple’s release notes for the update. Previously: iOS 17.2 and iPadOS 17.2
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/19/ios-17-2-1-and-ipados-17-2-1/ Save to Pocket
tvOS 17.2 Removes Wishlists
date: 2023-12-19, from: Michael Tsai
Juli Clover: Unfortunately, Apple’s move to consolidate purchasing and viewing in the Apple TV app has done away with wishlists, and customers who used the feature got no warning about their elimination.On Reddit, Twitter, the MacRumors forums, and the Apple Support Community, customers are complaining about the change.[…]The wishlists did not transfer over to the […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/19/tvos-17-2-removes-wishlists/ Save to Pocket
Adobe Abandons Figma Acquisition
date: 2023-12-19, from: Michael Tsai
Paul Kunert (Hacker News): Adobe’s $20 billion buy of web-first design collaboration start-up Figma will harm software developers if it goes ahead as proposed, according to a provisional ruling on the merger by Britain’s competition regulator.[…]The CMA adds in its report: “The inquiry group also provisionally concluded that Adobe abandoned development of new product design […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/19/adobe-abandons-figma-acquisition/ Save to Pocket
Archaeomagnetism is the study of the changes in the Earth’s magnetic field…
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043653-archaeomagnetism-is-the-s Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-19, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
George Harrison: Pirate Song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3CosIid63U Save to Pocket
Tangara is an open source, iPod-inspired portable music player (crowdfunding soon)
date: 2023-12-19, from: Liliputing
If you have a smartphone then you have a portable music player in your pocket, which is probably one of the reasons why the Apple iPod and similar devices have fallen by the wayside in recent years. But sometimes you don’t want the distractions of a modern, internet-connected device with a touchscreen color display, so there […]
The post Tangara is an open source, iPod-inspired portable music player (crowdfunding soon) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/tangara-is-an-open-source-ipod-inspired-portable-music-player-crowdfunding-soon/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-19, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Oil and Gas Wastewater Spills Pollute the Lone Star State.
https://www.texasobserver.org/oil-gas-wastewater-spills-across-texas/ Save to Pocket
Before you go away for Xmas: You’ve patched that critical Perforce Server hole, right?
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Microsoft bug hunters highlight weaknesses in source-wrangling suite
Four vulnerabilities in Perforce Helix Core Server, including one critical remote code execution bug, should be patched “immediately,” according to Microsoft, which spotted the flaws and disclosed them to the software vendor.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/microsoft_warns_patch_critical_perforce/ Save to Pocket
Lawsuit Challenges Texas Efforts to Restrict Illegal Border Crossings
date: 2023-12-19, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/lawsuit-challenges-texas-efforts-to-restrict-illegal-border-crossings-/7404545.html Save to Pocket
Biden Hails Justice O’Connor’s Imprint on US, American Lives
date: 2023-12-19, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden hailed Sandra Day O’Connor as an “American pioneer” who embodied principle over politics in his eulogy at the Washington funeral of the U.S. Supreme Court’s first female justice.
Biden praised O’Connor for breaking down barriers in the legal and political worlds, transcending political divisions and weighing ordinary people in her decision-making in pointed remarks that contrasted sharply with his words about the current Supreme Court.
“She was especially conscious of the law’s real impact on people’s lives,” he said. “One need not agree with all her decisions in order to recognize that her principles were deeply held, and of the highest order, and that her desire for civility was genuine.”
O’Connor knew that “no person is an island” and that Americans — “rugged individualists, adventurers and entrepreneurs” — were inextricably linked, he said at the service in Washington National Cathedral.
“And for America to thrive, Americans must see themselves not as enemies, but as partners in the great work of deciding our collective destiny,” Biden said.
Tributes to O’Connor, who died on December 1 at age 93, were also delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts and O’Connor’s son Jay O’Connor.
Sandra Day O’Connor died in Phoenix, Arizona, of complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness.
A centrist on the court who was appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1981, O’Connor served until her retirement in 2006.
She created a critical alliance in 1992 to affirm the central holding in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion legal nationwide. She also was a crucial vote in 2003 to uphold campus affirmative action policies that were used to increase the number of underrepresented minority students at American colleges.
The Supreme Court, which now has a 6-3 conservative majority, overturned the Roe ruling in 2022, and in June struck down race-conscious admissions programs in higher education, effectively prohibiting affirmative action.
Biden has said the current Supreme Court has done more to “unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history,” but has rejected calls to expand it.
O’Connor’s body lay in repose on Monday in the great hall of the Supreme Court in Washington, where all nine current justices attended a private ceremony before the public was invited to pay their respects.
All the justices also were present for the funeral service.
Chief Justice Roberts called her a “strong, influential and iconic jurist.”
It was hard for young people to imagine a time when women were not on the bench, he added, because O’Connor was so good. “She was so successful that the barriers she broke down are almost unthinkable today,” he said.
Jay O’Connor spoke of his mother as an indefatigable woman with “unearthly energy” who kept working long after she hung up her judicial robes.
“What do we say to the special person? This little cowgirl? This remarkable woman from a remote cattle ranch in Arizona? This mother, this justice, who did so much for so many people? We say to her: We thank you, we love you, we will never, ever forget you.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-hails-justice-o-connor-s-imprint-on-us-american-lives-/7404514.html Save to Pocket
Last week, Halley’s comet reached its farthest point away from the Sun…
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043655-last-week-halleys-comet-r Save to Pocket
Fedora Asahi Remix is now available, bringing Fedora Linux to Apple Silicon Macs
date: 2023-12-19, from: Liliputing
The developers behind Asahi Linux have been working to bring GNU/Linux Macs with Apple Silicon for about as long as Apple has been selling them. While early builds of their Linux for Mac software were based on Arch Linux ARM, this summer the Asahi team announced a new flagship operating system that would instead be […]
The post Fedora Asahi Remix is now available, bringing Fedora Linux to Apple Silicon Macs appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/fedora-asahi-remix-is-now-available-bringing-fedora-linux-to-apple-silicon-macs/ Save to Pocket
Activist Who Exposed Racist Video in Santa Barbara Arrested in San Bernardino
date: 2023-12-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Edin Alex Enamorado and seven others are charged with conspiracy and are being held without bail.
The post Activist Who Exposed Racist Video in Santa Barbara Arrested in San Bernardino appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/19/activist-who-exposed-racist-video-in-santa-barbara-arrested-in-san-bernardino/ Save to Pocket
Apple Releases macOS 14.2.1, iOS 17.2.1, iOS 16.74, and iPadOS 16.7.4
date: 2023-12-19, from: TidBITS blog
A handful of iOS and iPadOS updates address unspecified bugs, and the update to macOS 14.2.1 Sonoma fixes a bug that could share random windows via Screen Sharing.
https://tidbits.com/2023/12/19/apple-releases-macos-14-2-1-ios-17-2-1-ios-16-74-and-ipados-16-7-4/ Save to Pocket
Navigating the Complex Landscape of Research Data Management and Sharing (DMS): DMS Activities from the RADS Initiative
date: 2023-12-19, from: Association of Research Libraries News
Last Updated on December 19, 2023, 2:09 pm ET The Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative has entered the second phase of the project, generously funded by the Institute…
The post Navigating the Complex Landscape of Research Data Management and Sharing (DMS): DMS Activities from the RADS Initiative appeared first on Association of Research Libraries.
https://www.arl.org/blog/navigating-the-complex-landscape-of-research-data-management-and-sharing-dms-dms-activities-from-the-rads-initiative/ Save to Pocket
103-Year-Old Artificial Christmas Tree Sells for Over $4,000
date: 2023-12-19, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The tree was originally purchased for 8-year-old Dorothy Grant in 1920
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/103-year-old-artificial-christmas-tree-sells-for-over-4000-180983470/ Save to Pocket
In-N-Out Burger Is Out of Buellton Before It Ever Got In
date: 2023-12-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
City Council votes against the proposed franchise over traffic concerns.
The post In-N-Out Burger Is Out of Buellton Before It Ever Got In appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/19/in-n-out-burger-is-out-of-buellton-before-it-ever-got-in/ Save to Pocket
Christmas Gifts for the Computer History Nerd (2023)
date: 2023-12-19, from: Computer ads from the Past
Recently, Substack send out an email suggesting that writers create a gift suggest list for their readers. I thought, “Hey, that sounds like a good idea. I’ll try that.” So here is a list of the books that I’ve read on computer history and found interesting. Buy them for the computer nerd in your life (or for yourself). Enjoy.
https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/christmas-gifts-for-the-computer Save to Pocket
Biden urged to do something about Europe ‘unfairly’ targeting American tech
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
5 out of 6 ‘gatekeepers’ are US-based so regulators across pond are just being mean to us, say lawmakers
Bipartisan congressional representatives have sent a letter to President Joe Biden, demanding action over what they claim is the unfair targeting of US tech companies by the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/congress_eu_dma_complaint/ Save to Pocket
Apple Adds The Athletic to Apple News+
date: 2023-12-19, from: TidBITS blog
Fans of professional and college teams across major sports leagues may appreciate the addition of The Athletic to Apple News+. Apple said content from Wirecutter would also be available to all Apple News users starting in 2024.
https://tidbits.com/2023/12/19/apple-adds-the-athletic-to-apple-news/ Save to Pocket
Artemis II Crew Trains for Emergency Scenarios Ahead of Moon Mission
date: 2023-12-19, from: NASA breaking news
The four Artemis II astronauts practiced procedures to exit the Orion spacecraft in an emergency during training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Dec. 15. NASA astronaut Christina Koch (foreground) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen were assisted by Bill Owens, Artemis II spacesuit technician. The training included exiting both the […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/artemis-ii-crew-trains-for-emergency-scenarios-ahead-of-moon-mission/ Save to Pocket
A funny ChatGPT story
date: 2023-12-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I wanted a simple chicken soup recipe, so I entered.
- Simple chicken soup
And hit Return.
It started drawing a picture.
I was fascinated, wondering what will it draw?
The caption was written by the AI.
Very different from previous cartoonish pictures.
I asked for the ingredients and got the recipe I sought.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/19/180733.html?title=aFunnyChatgptStory Save to Pocket
This time, journalists will stand up to Trump (no, really)
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
“How do we deal with Trump’s lying?” It was October 2023, and the news editors sat around the public-radio newsroom conference table debating how best to cover Donald Trump in the 2024 election. The top editor raised the question, posing it to the room and waited as silence prevailed. The question was surprising, in a…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/this-time-journalists-will-stand-up-to-trump-no-really/ Save to Pocket
Channels change the publishing game on WhatsApp
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
When I started thinking about WhatsApp strategy for publishers years ago, communication on the platform was largely limited to groups of 256 participants. A handful of services allowed users to send messages to larger groups, but they operated in gray areas of the platform’s T&Cs — until they didn’t. WhatsApp Channels, which can be used…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/channels-change-the-publishing-game-on-whatsapp/ Save to Pocket
We’ll move beyond “en Español” to reach Hispanic and Latino audiences
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
In 2024, Hispanic and Latino audiences will play a crucial role in shaping a new business strategy in U.S. media. The opportunity is here because of the continued growth in population and economic power in the sector, their potential impact on the upcoming presidential election, and the promise that digital tools like generative AI present…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/well-move-beyond-en-espanol-to-reach-hispanic-and-latino-audiences/ Save to Pocket
Journalists confront disinformation head-on
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Yes, it’s gotten easier to create persuasive disinformation. And yes, it’s easier than ever before to spread lies that divide and hurt our societies. But as I look ahead to 2024, I see a hopeful trend: More and more journalists are exposing and explaining disinformation narratives. And that means more people are in a position…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/journalists-confront-disinformation-head-on/ Save to Pocket
Refocus on what really drives growth
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
The past 10 years has been a crazy ride for news orgs, with the social traffic rush that kicked off in 2013, multiple pivots to video, covid, and the rise and fall of Donald Trump, all while direct publisher traffic started listing downwards and news reader apps stole attention away from on-domain reading. As a…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/refocus-on-what-really-drives-growth/ Save to Pocket
Journalists cover power grabs from an openly pro-democracy bent
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
On December 6, 2023, a group of 10 Republicans in Wisconsin who had submitted an “alternative” slate of electors falsely claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election agreed to withdraw their phony electoral slate, identified Joe Biden as the legitimate winner, and admitted that their behavior served a scheme to illegally overturn the…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/journalists-cover-power-grabs-from-an-openly-pro-democracy-bent/ Save to Pocket
News coverage will give readers something to hope for
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Publishers had a year that showed them engaging audiences is becoming more and more difficult. Data from the Reuters Institutes’s 2023 Digital News Report showed a decline in news interest and high levels of news avoidance. We can have long discussions on why people are choosing to avoid the news and the effect of this…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/news-coverage-will-give-readers-something-to-hope-for/ Save to Pocket
Newspocalypse now
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
We finally did it. After roughly five decades of per-capita reader declines, three decades of prophets shouting out from the digital wilderness, two decades of profits declining (whether due to digital platforms’ disintermediation, our poor strategy, or both); and a decade of private equity strip mining, we’re arrived at the end of days for the…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/newspocalypse-now/ Save to Pocket
Daily Deals (12-19-2023)
date: 2023-12-19, from: Liliputing
Best Buy is running a 24-hour flash sale and a “last-minute” sale that goes through Sunday, ostensibly for folks who are still looking to pick up a present before Christmas. But it’s also a pretty good time to pick up a cheap but decent Chromebook, Windows laptop, or any number of other products. Meanwhile, Amazon and Lenovo […]
The post Daily Deals (12-19-2023) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/daily-deals-12-19-2023/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-19, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Scripting News: Facebook offers AI participation a private group.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/19/170801.html Save to Pocket
How the Heat Dome Stole Christmas
date: 2023-12-19, from: Heatmap News
I’m not normally concerned about having the perfect home — though I’m also not normally interviewing Mr. Christmas Tree himself from my living room, with a scraggly, disco-lit Nordmann fir in the background of my Zoom shot.
A high-quality tree should have “up-turning branches, so they’re not drooping,” he was telling me. “They have really nice dark green needles” and “what I would consider to be a uniform density, all the way to the top of the tree.” As he talked, my eyes slid to the corner of my computer screen, where I noticed that the topper on my rather limp and gappy specimen was also crooked.
But in the true spirit of the holiday season, Gary Chastagner — a plant pathologist at Washington State University whose extensive research on ornamental holiday conifers has earned him his jolly nickname — was generous. He added that there’s also a robust market for imperfect “Charlie Brown” Christmas trees, to the point that growers will actually avoid culling arboreal oddballs that might attract people like, well, me.
Soon, they may not have much choice. The normally cold and rainy Pacific Northwest is the Christmas tree-growing capital of the U.S., producing more than 5.4 million trees every holiday season, many of which get exported to places like New York, where I procured mine from a sidewalk lot. But back in 2021, a heat dome pushed temperatures in the Northwest to nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The event killed the year’s seedlings and browned new growth on older trees — the consequences of which we’re already seeing in the form of patchy trees and shortages, and will continue to feel for years to come.
Unlike most farmed products, Christmas trees grow slowly; it can take seven to 12 years for a seedling to reach 8 feet tall, depending on the species. To ensure a consistent stock of Christmas trees for the years ahead, most growers plant the same number of seedlings each season with the expectation that there will be some amount of loss along the way.
But the heat dome was exceptional; it “killed off virtually every seedling that was planted on farms in 2021, plus some from the year before,” Sheila McKinnon, a former grower and representative of the Puget Sound Christmas Tree Association, in Washington state, told me over email. One dismayed grower told CNN at the time, “There are literally fields with hundreds of acres of dead seedlings. Just 100% mortality across the entire field.”
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Because the heat dome occurred in early summer, young trees as well as the new shoots and buds on older trees had not yet “hardened,” and were therefore especially vulnerable to the high temperatures. Additionally, prevailing drought conditions in the Pacific Northwest in 2021 limited the available groundwater to rehydrate the superheated plants. “They just shut down because they couldn’t get enough water; they literally just cooked,” Judith Kowalski, a researcher in the Christmas tree program at Oregon State University, explained to me.
Not all trees — or tree farms — were affected equally. Nordmann, Turkish, and some Noble firs mature later in the season than Douglas firs, so their tissues were softer and “just fried,” Kowalski said. Regional differences mattered, too. For example, it didn’t get quite as hot in the southern Willamette Valley in Oregon, and trees there faired a little better. But even microclimates could mean the difference between life and death. “On a hill, where there was a breeze, it made a lot of difference,” Kowalski said. By that same token, so did “a little valley, where trees didn’t get any air circulation.”
Some unlucky growers lost as much as 90% of the year’s seedlings; by one estimate, 70% of the Noble fir seedlings planted in Oregon in 2021 died. McKinnon sounded fatalistic when she described the damage. “There is no way to recover from this loss,” she said. “Some folks tried to buy more seedlings the following year,” but “instantly doubling the supply wasn’t possible.”
Call them the Ghosts of Christmas Yet to Come — because conifers take so long to mature, the effects of the 2021 heat dome will cascade into the future, causing shortages of certain trees at certain heights for a decade or more. If the typical Noble fir takes roughly 10 years to grow 8 feet, for example, then the 2021 heat dome could cause shortages of 9-foot-tall Nobles that won’t be felt until 2032.
The good news is, customers don’t usually shop for a specific species and height of Christmas tree; they just want something that looks good (or, in my case, passable) in their living room. While there might be a 9-foot-tall Noble tree shortage in 2032, customers in the market for a large tree that year will probably switch to buying a Douglas fir or some other variety, instead. Unless a grower depends heavily on one specific type of tree that was widely killed off by the heat dome, the impacts of 2021 can “kind of get absorbed” by the other stock, Kowalski said.
Of course, all that assumes that there is only one bad year.
“The heat dome is part of a pattern that we’re seeing of increased frequency of very high temperatures, much more than normal,” Chastagner told me. “2022 was one of the driest summers on record. We only had half of an inch of precipitation during the summer. And unlike other areas, the growers in the Pacific Northwest generally do not irrigate trees.”
Chastagner’s research indicates that trees in the Pacific Northwest have been so stressed by the region’s dry summers that it’s making them vulnerable to diseases like armillaria, a root rot caused by a fungus, “which we normally didn’t see.” And high temperatures don’t just affect a tree’s growth; warmer autumns also lead to worse needle retention once the tree is cut, meaning more needles on your floor in mid-December. And while one summer of extreme temperatures might lead to shortages that other stock can absorb, that stops being true when there are back-to-back heat domes. As Tom Norby, the president of Oregon Christmas Tree Growers Association, told The Oregonian after the 2021 heat dome, “One year is not a catastrophe. Two years becomes a big problem. Three years, it’s a catastrophe.”
With that in mind, Chastagner and his team at WSU — as well as Kowalski and the researchers at OSU — are exploring everything from introducing irrigation to farms (which is complicated and expensive, but also effective) to determining what conifer varieties will be better suited to a hotter future in the region. Already, the makeup of tree farms in the West is changing: In 2017, native Noble firs made up about 54% of the trees grown in the Pacific Northwest, with Nordmann and Turkish firs (which are native to Turkey and Georgia) only making up about 4%. Now, more and more growers are planting exotic Nordmann and Turkish firs due to their drought tolerance.
But don’t worry: Charlie Brown Christmas trees aren’t going anywhere. Heat or no, there will always be evergreens that require aggressive pruning or otherwise turn out a little bit, well, special. “When I get asked to give talks on what the perfect Christmas tree is,” Chastagner said with — did I only imagine it? — a kindly glance over my shoulder, “I say it’s all in the eye of the beholder.”
https://heatmap.news/climate/heat-dome-christmas-trees-grinch Save to Pocket
Facebook offers AI participation a private group
date: 2023-12-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I have a private group on Facebook, and just got this notice.
- “Join the waitlist for Meta AI in your group! Meta AI can save you time and spark conversations by answering questions posted in your group, linking people to the posts they find most helpful, and more. Sign up your group to be the first to get access when it becomes available in your region.”
When I clicked on the Learn More button, this is what came back.
- A new way to get questions answered
- Meta AI will comment on questions that haven’t gotten an answer after one hour
- Keep members engaged
- Meta AI’s answers will summarize earlier group discussions and share past posts from the group, helping to build community and spark discussion
- Stay in control
- You’ll be able to delete any of Meta AI’s comments, turn it off anytime, and customize it for your group
A thought – this kind of feature could not have been offered a year ago. The online world and journalism would never have accepted it from Facebook. But now they’re called Meta and that seems to matter. ChatGPT has created a new opening. Not sure I’m going to like it, esp since this is mostly a one-way group. It’s not for discussions. But it’s the only group they offered to, and I love this stuff and want to know more.
I haven’t told the members of the group that I’ve requested this. Am I obligated to do that?
Also in private groups where people reveal personal info (not the purpose of this group) I could see where this would be very controversial.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/19/170801.html?title=facebookOffersAiParticipationAPrivateGroup Save to Pocket
CSUN’s road to sustainability
date: 2023-12-19, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
California State University, Northridge has recently been making strides toward becoming a more sustainable campus thanks to the leadership and combined efforts of administrators, staff and students of all backgrounds who are passionate about realizing sustainability. With a student body of around 35,000 and more than 4,000 employees, CSUN uses more energy annually than the…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177548/print-editions/print-stories/csuns-road-to-sustainability/ Save to Pocket
Contact! Rotate! Gear Up! Records Relating to Airports in the National Register of Historic Places
date: 2023-12-19, from: National Archives, Text Message blog
The Wright Brothers and Airports in the National Register of Historic Places
https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2023/12/19/contact-rotate-gear-up-records-relating-to-airports-in-the-national-register-of-historic-places/ Save to Pocket
China, Ukraine, Gaza Challenge Biden’s Foreign Policy Focus in 2024
date: 2023-12-19, from: VOA News USA
As U.S. President Joe Biden tries to keep his 2023 focus on the U.S. strategic rivalry with China and the war in Ukraine, the bloodshed in Gaza threatens to engulf the broader Middle East region and places his foreign policy agenda under the scrutiny of American voters heading into the November 2024 election. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports.
https://www.voanews.com/a/china-ukraine-gaza-challenge-biden-s-foreign-policy-focus-in-2024/7390877.html Save to Pocket
Google loosens restrictions on alternate payment methods for Play Store apps (for customers in the US)
date: 2023-12-19, from: Liliputing
One of the things that sets Google’s Android operating system apart from Apple’s iOS is that Android has always allowed users to sideload applications, as well as allowing device makers to pre-load third-party app stores… as long as they were in addition to the Google Play Store rather than a replacement for it. But the […]
The post Google loosens restrictions on alternate payment methods for Play Store apps (for customers in the US) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/google-loosens-restrictions-on-alternate-payment-methods-for-play-store-apps-for-customers-in-the-us/ Save to Pocket
Volunteers Join Annual Christmas Bird Count
date: 2023-12-19, from: VOA News USA
North America’s oldest citizen science project is underway with thousands of volunteers measuring bird populations in the annual Christmas Bird Count. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya joined a birdwatching team in Seattle.
https://www.voanews.com/a/volunteers-join-annual-christmas-bird-count/7404207.html Save to Pocket
Debian preps ground to drop 32-bit x86 as separate edition
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Bad news for several downstream distros, but good news for NetBSD
After a recent meetup in Cambridge, Debian developers are discussing how to start gradually dropping 32-bit x86 support.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/debian_to_drop_x86_32/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
A suggestion to ActivityPub enthusiasts – a very simple, highly factored toolkit for posting via ActivityPub might unleash a flood of compatible software, depending on how many obstacles can be removed. I’ve tried to evangelize the idea, but it didn’t happen. In the end I punted, and used Mastodon’s API, and thus my software only works with services that implement their API.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/19.html#a161653 Save to Pocket
Pluralistic: What kind of bubble is AI? (19 Dec 2023)
date: 2023-12-19, from: Cory Doctorow’s blog
Today’s links What kind of bubble is AI?: My latest column for Locus Magazine. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading What kind of bubble is AI? (permalink) My latest column for Locus Magazine is “What Kind of Bubble is AI?” All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes: https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/ Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who’d been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices. Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics. Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron’s fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom’s fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar. AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an “AI” startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That’s amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is. So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there’s a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook’s AI environments: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There’s a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved. Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are “value” (how much customers will pay for them) and “risk tolerance” (how perfect the product needs to be). Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren’t overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn’t care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant (“that’s your blue shirt” when it’s green is not a big deal, while “the street is safe to cross” when it’s not is a much bigger one). Morganstanley doesn’t talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous. These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is “fire most drivers and replace them with ‘humans in the loop’ who intervene at critical junctures.” That’s the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it’s a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html The self-driving pitch isn’t that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn’t about using automation to augment human skill – it’s about replacing humans. There’s no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there’s a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages. What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there’s a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose “automation blindness” will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating “reverse centaurs”: humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker: https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/ But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it’s only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history. Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications. The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they’re almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers. If they aren’t, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn’t matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn’t matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn’t even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites: https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509 These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them. Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies that created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers’ beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful. These standalone, “toy” models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it’s possible that federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap). So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who’ve invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques. But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems. This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about “AI safety,” AKA “Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?” https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space But no one is asking, “What will we do if” – when – “the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?” (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; tom_bullock, CC BY 2.0; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) The unnecessary complexity of trying to get medication approved on time https://twitter.com/marklewismd/status/1735665219299664353 (h/t Naked Capitalism) Adobe Officially Cancels $20 Billion Figma Acquisition https://gizmodo.com/adobe-cancels-20-billion-figma-acquisition-eu-antitrust-1851107240 Bipartisan Lawmakers Want to Know Why the Hell Apple Is Blocking Beeper Mini https://gizmodo.com/lawmakers-apple-imessage-beeper-mini-block-1851107246 This day in history (permalink) #10yrsago Charlie Stross: Bitcoin should die in a fire http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html #10yrsago Chihuahua skeleton made from typewriter parts https://web.archive.org/web/20140112055610/http://jemayer.tumblr.com/post/70427309469 #10yrsago New York: stop putting 16-year-olds in adult prison and trying 13-year-olds as adults! https://vimeo.com/80939323 #10yrsago Italy passes Internet censorship laws: regulator can censor sites on 12 days’ notice without judicial review https://www.zdnet.com/article/italys-site-blocking-law-comes-into-effect-a-threat-to-pirate-bay-or-a-curse-on-online-freedom/ #5yrsago Before Tumblr switched off access to NSFW blogs, it blocked archivists who were trying to preserve them https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3bekm/archivists-say-tumblr-ip-banned-them-for-trying-to-preserve-adult-content #5yrsago Molly Crabapple’s illustrated report from the immigration detention Gulags of Texas https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/immigration-border-crisis-molly-crabapple-713991/ #5yrsago Even after you turn off Facebook location tracking, Facebook tracks your location https://gizmodo.com/turning-off-facebook-location-tracking-doesnt-stop-it-f-1831149148 #1yrago Better failure for social media: The right of exit, freedom of reach, and technological self-determination https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: The Internet’s Original Sin https://craphound.com/news/2023/12/17/the-internets-original-sin/) Upcoming appearances: Internet Con (Peculiar Book Club), Jan 11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5UvzuJ1R4I Recent appearances: Enshittification: A Monopoly Story (Macro n Cheese) https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-255-enshittification-a-monopoly-story-with-cory-doctorow Science Fiction and the Future of Science https://council.science/podcast/science-fiction/ AI needs to work with humans — not replace us (CBC IDEAS) https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/artificial-intelligence-provocation-ideas-festival-1.7046841 Latest books: “The Lost Cause:” a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) “The Internet Con”: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). “Red Team Blues”: “A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. “Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com “Attack Surface”: The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it “a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance.” Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism”: an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) “Little Brother/Homeland”: A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html “Poesy the Monster Slayer” a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic “When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/ Save to Pocket
The chroniclers of the crypto collapse
date: 2023-12-19, from: Dave Karpf’s blog
A review of Easy Money, Number Go Up and Going Infinite
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/the-chroniclers-of-the-crypto-collapse Save to Pocket
Bilateral Tensions Cause the Number of American Students in China to Plummet
date: 2023-12-19, from: VOA News USA
Taipei, Taiwan — Students from China and the U.S. have been traveling between the two countries for decades, playing an important role in cultivating people-to-people ties between the world’s top two economies. However, rising tension between Beijing and Washington in recent years is posing serious threats to this tradition.
During a talk at the Brookings Institute in Washington last week, U.S. ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said there were 15,000 American students in China “six or seven years ago,” but that number dropped to 350 in 2022. While the number of American students rebounded to 700 in 2023, Burns said the number doesn’t represent interest by Washington.
For some American students studying in China, the decision extends from their desire to enrich their understanding of the country and further strengthen their Chinese language skills.
“I’ve studied Chinese for a while, and I think if I don’t go to China, I’ll probably lose my language skills,” Brock Mullen, a student at Johns Hopkins University’s Hopkins-Nanjing Center, told VOA in a call.
As domestic political attitude towards China becomes more negative in the U.S., some students hope their experience in China could help reverse the current trend.
“There is a trend in the U.S. on both sides of the [political] aisle where people want to read about China, but very few want to come here to study China,” Sam Trizza, a student at Hopkins Nanjing Center, told VOA in a video interview, adding that he hopes to discover nuances that should be raised in the China policy landscape in the U.S through his time in China.
Over the last few years, exchanges between American and Chinese students have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the rising security concerns that Americans have about being physically in China.
Signaling his desire to improve people-to-people ties between China and the U.S., Chinese leader Xi Jinping said during his meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in San Francisco last month that Beijing is ready to welcome 50,000 American students to China on exchange or study programs in the next five years.
American students remain hesitant about studying in China
While some American officials have also expressed a desire to restart exchanges between students, some students say their programs are facing difficulties recruiting American students to study in China.
“[The goal of our program] is to have about 100 to 150 American students each year, but we only have about 30 American students here [in Nanjing,]” said Mullen from the Hopkins Nanjing Center.
According to him, a factor that causes American students to hesitate about studying in China is the impact of China’s surveillance regime or potentially being arbitrarily detained by Chinese authorities.
“A big reason why [some American students] might feel nervous about coming to China is due to concerns about surveillance or hearing stories about people being arbitrarily thrown into prison or facing exit bans,” he said.
Some current American students say one important value of studying in China is to build up a more thorough understanding of Chinese people’s views on things and the dynamics in China.
“Being in China allows me to better understand what’s happening in the country from sources other than the Chinese government’s statements,” said one American student in China who asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns.
“You can have more frank conversations with Chinese people and compared to reading about China from the outside, which gives you a passive understanding of China, being in the country allows one to develop a more subtle understanding of Chinese people’s politics and their understanding of what’s going on in China and outside of China,” the student added.
Dispel stereotypes about China in the US
As it remains unclear whether the number of American students studying in China could return to the pre-pandemic level, some academics worry that important elements that help strengthen expertise on China in the U.S. may disappear over time.
“Today, we have a lot of information that we can get from a distance but what I miss the most about regularly going to China is things like the tea breaks at conferences, because that’s the time you can create an intimate space to have a conversation that wasn’t on a set agenda,” said Maggie Lewis, professor of law at Seton Hall University, adding that people can learn nuances through those personal interactions.
In her view, if interactions like this become less frequent, it could have negative impact on Washington’s efforts to manage the relationship with Beijing.
“We need the multifaceted input if we are going to navigate successfully what’s going to be a very challenging relationship between China and the U.S. for the foreseeable future,” Lewis said.
With expertise on China being in high demand in the U.S., Trizza in Nanjing said he believes his in-country experience will make him “a better candidate with more to contribute” to either the public or private sector in the U.S.
“At a time when U.S.-China relations are at an all-time low, person-to-person relationships are like grains of sand in the ocean of international relations, but I know one day we students will be the ones making the waves,” he said. “I want to get involved.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/bilateral-tensions-cause-the-number-of-american-students-in-china-to-plummet-/7404085.html Save to Pocket
It may seem like an obvious answer
date: 2023-12-19, from: Marketplace Morning Report
What’s one of the best ways to ease the affordable housing crisis? Build more places to live. Construction of new homes rose 15% in November, which coincides with a dip in mortgage rates. We’ll examine what these new homes could mean for still-strong housing demand. Then, we’ll hear about disruptions to ships and ports in the Red Sea and check the pulse of Germany’s economy.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/it-may-seem-like-an-obvious-answer Save to Pocket
Building Blocks of a Digital Caste Panopticon: Everyday Brahminical Policing in India
date: 2023-12-19, from: Care
<p>Tracing the history of Telangana’s police state and its Brahminical investments.</p>https://logicmag.io/policy/building-blocks-of-a-digital-caste-panopticon-everyday-brahminical-policing Save to Pocket
Shady Characters advent calendar 2023: the Canon Pocketronic
date: 2023-12-19, from: Shady Characters
https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2023/12/advent-calendar-pocketronic/ Save to Pocket
Keeping one Game Gear out of the landfill
date: 2023-12-19, from: Jeff Geerling blog
Keeping one Game Gear out of the landfill
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p><img src="https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/gamegear-screen-scratch-comparison.jpeg" width="700" height="auto" class="insert-image" alt="Game Gear and scratchy blue" /></p>I was sent a Zega Mame Gear kit by John Maddison, of Zarcade, in April this year. I bought a Game Gear shell off eBay for $15, some extra buttons, switches, screws, and a new glass screen cover from Handheld Legend, and I could finally find a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 for sale last month.
So I put all that together into a modern RetroPie handheld emulation build, and now I can play through games I only wish I could’ve played in my childhood. Being the third child, I was typically relegated to ‘trying to cram in some time on the console before the game rental was due back’ status.
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/keeping-one-game-gear-out-landfill Save to Pocket
Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Gets Similar Prison Sentence to Defrauder of Holocaust Victim
date: 2023-12-19, from: Heatmap News
Yesterday, a federal judge in Manhattan sentenced Nikola founder Trevor Milton to four years in prison for lying to his investors about his electric truck startup’s prospects and progress. Last year, a jury found Milton guilty on one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud.
Prosecutors had asked for an 11-year prison term and a $5 million fine. While Milton will be required to pay a $1 million fine, plus an amount of restitution to be determined later, the judge in the case, Edgardo Ramos, said he took to heart the letters he’d received from Milton’s friends and family attesting to his character. “There were people I’ve sentenced whose offenses were substantially less, but who looked their victims in the eye as they took their last dollar,” Ramos said. Nevertheless, he added, “real people were hurt by your actions.”
How much people were hurt by Milton’s alleged fabrications was a matter of contention in the trial. Prosecutors claimed retail investors lost $660 million as a result of Milton’s false statements — comparable to the $600 million lost by venture capital firms and other bigwigs in the Theranos bust but far less than the $16 billion-worth of online currency that collapsed along with the crypto exchange FTX, of which only $7.3 billion has been recovered so far.
Nikola went public as part of 2020’s SPAC boom, but shortly after, unnamed insiders told Bloomberg News that Milton had been exaggerating what his prototypes could do. At the 2016 unveiling of the Nikola One, a purportedly hydrogen-powered big rig, Milton told onlookers, “We’re going to try to keep people from driving off. This thing fully functions and works.” But people familiar with the set-up for the event told Bloomberg reporters that the engine was missing key components — including a hydrogen fuel cell.
“I never deceived anyone,” Milton told Bloomberg. “There wasn’t a fuel cell in the truck. We never claimed there was,” although the model in question had “H2 Zero Emission Hydrogen Electric” emblazoned on its side. At the unveiling, Milton said deliveries of the Nikola One would begin in 2020; by 2020, the company still hadn’t published production plans.
To be fair, scaling an electric vehicle company is extremely difficult. As my colleague Robinson Meyer described it, there comes a put in every EV company’s development cycle when “it faces a hold-your-breath moment where its high costs can overwhelm its meager production.” This, he said, is the “valley of death,” which claimed electric bus-maker Proterra earlier this year.
Perhaps these difficulties contributed to Ramos’s apparent leniency in sentencing, although a quick look at his past cases shows that he wasn’t exaggerating about his past cases. In 2018, he sentenced a 73-year-old found guilty of running a $220 million payday lending scheme to 10 years in prison, and a couple months ago he sentenced the co-founder of a fake cryptocurrency to 20 years in prison and ordered him to forfeit $300 million. The coup de grâce, though, seems to be the case of a Florida woman named Peaches Stergo who pleaded guilty to defrauding a 87-year-old Holocaust survivor of $2.8 million. Ramos also sentenced her to four years in prison, plus restitution.
https://heatmap.news/sparks/nikola-trevor-milton-prison-sentence Save to Pocket
FBI develops decryptor for BlackCat ransomware, seizes gang’s website
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Crims laugh it off and resume their activity
Updated The FBI created a decryption tool for the ransomware used by the gang known as BlackCat and/or AlphV, as part of a wider disruption campaign against the extortionists.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/blackcat_domain_seizure/ Save to Pocket
Print isn’t dead, it’s just being delivered by mail
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Hybrid digital-print combinations, both for-profit and nonprofit, will be a source of earned revenue and create a path to sustainability for start-up local news organizations. Executed strategically, this approach can also serve as a pivot for legacy newspapers struggling to print and deliver a quality product multiple days per week. Legacy players in the local…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/print-isnt-dead-its-just-being-delivered-by-mail/ Save to Pocket
We’ll see partisan media more clearly
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
In the middle of the 20th century, a certain model of professional journalism reached peak levels of influence in the U.S. This model promised objectivity and non-partisanship, unlike most American journalism that had preceded it. For a few decades, then, the partisan press and the many quandaries partisan journalism had long posed for democracy appeared…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/well-see-partisan-media-more-clearly/ Save to Pocket
Julian Assange’s ‘Final’ Appeal Against US Extradition to be Held in February
date: 2023-12-19, from: VOA News USA
LONDON — WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange’s possible final legal challenge to stop his extradition from Britain to the United States, where he is wanted on criminal charges, will be held at London’s High Court in February, his supporters said on Tuesday.
Assange, 52, is wanted by U.S. authorities on 18 counts, including one under a spying act, relating to WikiLeaks’ release of vast troves of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables which Washington said had put lives in danger.
Britain has given the go-ahead for his extradition, but he has been trying to overturn that decision. Campaigners said a public hearing would take place at the High Court on Feb. 20-21, when two judges will review an earlier ruling that had refused Assange permission to appeal.
“The two-day hearing may be the final chance for Julian Assange to prevent his extradition to the United States,” WikiLeaks said in a statement.
WikiLeaks first came to prominence in 2010 when it released hundreds of thousands of secret classified files and diplomatic cables in what was the largest security breach of its kind in U.S. military history, which U.S. prosecutors say imperiled the lives of agents named in the leaked material.
Assange’s supporters say he is an anti-establishment hero who has been victimized because he exposed U.S. wrongdoing, and that his prosecution is an assault on journalism and free speech.
He spent seven years holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London before he was dragged out and jailed in 2019 for breaching bail conditions. He has been held in prison ever since.
His lawyers have also applied to the European Court of Human Rights which could potentially order the extradition to be blocked.
“The last four and a half years have taken the most considerable toll on Julian and his family, including our two young sons,” said his wife Stella, who he married in prison.
“The persecution of this innocent journalist and publisher must end.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/julian-assange-s-final-appeal-against-us-extradition-to-be-held-in-february/7404027.html Save to Pocket
What Two Record-Breaking Floods Taught Vermont
date: 2023-12-19, from: Heatmap News
There’s a brook that runs along the Mountain Home Park in Brattleboro, Vermont, providing the sort of pleasant babbling sound people play at night to help them fall asleep. On a typical morning, the water moves quickly and is shallow enough that you can see the rocks under the surface.
But when a storm comes through, long-time resident Angela Johnson warns, this steady stream can turn treacherous.
“We watch it every day when it’s raining — it doesn’t matter if it’s a heavy storm, the brook rises quite quickly,” Johnson told me. “It has and it will continue to break out of its space and cause flooding.”
That’s what happened four years ago, when an ice jam caused the brook to burst, flooding into the houses in the low-lying surrounding area. Or during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, which destroyed 29 homes in the greater Tri-Park Housing Cooperative, of which Mountain Home is a member. The rushing water lifted some structures right off their foundations, damaged roadways, and left a trail of debris, photos, and furniture among the wreckage in its wake.
Manufactured homes (which the state of Vermont uses interchangeably with mobile homes, though that term that refers only to models made before 1976) were disproportionately impacted during Irene, making up 7% of the state’s housing stock but 15% of housing damaged during the storm. Across the U.S., one of seven manufactured homes is in a neighborhood with high flood risk, according to a Headwaters Economics analysis, a figure that is only expected to rise due to climate change.
Vermont has recognized this risk, making changes at the state, local, and community levels that have earned it national recognition as a model for mitigating flood risk in these particularly vulnerable neighborhoods. To better understand what some of these strategies looked like, I went to Vermont earlier this year and met with residents, officials, and researchers who shared their experiences working or living — or both — in manufactured home parks.
Or rather, I tried to. On my first attempt to visit, I made it about 45 minutes into my four-hour drive before I had to turn around due to flooding, an irony that was certainly not lost on me. When I finally made it up to Tri-Park the next day, there was still water pooled in front of homes and alongside the road, hinting at the areas that might be particularly vulnerable to the next storm.
Mountain Home Brook.Colleen Hagerty
Weeks later, Vermont was in the headlines for flooding once again. An unnamed storm drenched the state in July, causing “catastrophic” impacts and earning quick comparisons to Tropical Storm Irene. More than 2,900 homes were damaged across the state, hundreds of them significantly, including dozens of manufactured homes. “Flooding had outsized impact on 4 Vermont mobile home communities,” announced the headline from one local news organization, which placed the loss at more than 60 manufactured homes.
So, did any of the changes implemented after Irene make a difference? It’s a tricky question, said Kelly Hamshaw, a researcher with the University of Vermont. She’s been visiting and interviewing residents in manufactured housing communities since 2011 and is currently working to identify needs in areas impacted by this summer’s storm.
For starters, the flooding footprints of the two storms were different, meaning those hardest-hit by one were not necessarily as impacted by the other. The flooded areas are still in the early stages of recovery, so it’s difficult to step back and make clear comparisons. Other less visible interventions, though, have certainly paid off, she told me.
Take accessing aid — researchers say the specific needs of manufactured homeowners are often overlooked in laws dealing with flood damage. Typically, owners of manufactured homes buy the structure they live in but not the land beneath it, which they rent from a distinct owner or corporation. Since most government assistance is aimed at either single-family homeowners or renters, Headwaters Economics research found that manufactured homeowners are “more likely to face barriers in accessing federal and state assistance, more likely to experience long-term recovery problems, and more likely to be permanently displaced.”
In the aftermath of Irene, for instance, most damaged manufactured homes had to be condemned to receive a full payout from the Federal Emergency Management Agency; those payouts often amounted to less than the value of the homes and left their owners without anywhere to live. Other types of homes did not require condemnation for their owners to receive that full payout.
This was a discrepancy the state recognized more readily this time, though it still has required additional interventions to address. In response to this summer’s storm, Vermont has rolled out new programs specifically aimed at damaged manufactured home removal and funding for those who received insufficient payouts from FEMA. A state legislative task force is also working to better understand the economics and issues related to manufactured housing in hopes of addressing policy gaps.
Because it’s not just a challenge accessing aid. Other types of homeowners also have more options when they’re ready to start moving on.
Stephanie Smith, hazard mitigation officer for Vermont Emergency Management, said buyouts were a key tool when it came to single-family homes after Irene. In those cases, the typical model was to pay 75% of the value of a property, an amount that was often significantly higher than the maximum FEMA payout, and gave the homeowner funds towards purchasing a new property. But this approach wasn’t feasible for manufactured homeowners, Smith told me. While many single-family homes appreciate in value over time, Smith said the value of a manufactured home often diminishes over time due to age and wear. And unlike single-family homes, in which the entire property goes into the valuation, manufactured home owners typically own just the structure they live in, paying rent on the actual land beneath it to a landlord.
So, based on just the value of that building, the payout these homeowners would receive would not be “anywhere near enough” to cover purchasing a new structure and paying lot rent, according to Smith.
Aging infrastructure is an issue in Tri-Park, from older homes to public offerings like the bridges and sewage systems, all of which can make the community more vulnerable to flooding. To address these compounding challenges, Tri-Park, where Johnson lives, developed a multimillion-dollar master plan with the input of government officials, residents, board members, and developers. It calls for funding infrastructure upgrades, including fixing up sewers and bridges over the brook, and proposes a new approach to buyouts. Instead of paying the 25 residents living in floodplains a percentage for their homes, Tri-Park will offer them new, eco-friendly manufactured homes located at a higher elevation within the same community.
The plan has multiple public and private supporters, including Smith’s department, which is providing the park with $2 million to purchase those new homes through the state’s Flood Resilient Communities Fund. At this point, both the plans and the funds to make this idea a reality are largely in place.
What’s still missing: Fewer than half of the minimum 25 households necessary to move forward have agreed to move. Residents have been hearing about the plan as a hypothetical for years while the board worked with partners and looked for capital. But board members and residents alike acknowledge there is a lot of skepticism around the plan’s promises. One challenge is that the new lots are expected to be smaller, and residents might not be able to have the same sort of layouts or amenities they currently enjoy.
To address these concerns, the Tri-Park board — which is open for residents to join — has hosted resident meetings and is offering a chance to tour models of the new types of homes they will be building. Which brings up another resiliency strategy more than a dozen parks have adopted since Irene: becoming resident-owned. Vermont law requires landowners of manufactured home parks to give notice to all lessees if they intend to sell the property, giving residents first dibs on purchasing the land. To do so, homeowners often opt to work with a nonprofit or establish a resident-owned cooperative, in which the residents become shareholders. Tri-Park is the largest of the 67 nonprofit or resident-owned manufactured home parks in the state, giving its residents an opportunity to have a voice in these larger park decisions.
Help from Cooperative Development Institute and Resident-Owned Communities has been a key part of this movement, local officials said. Julia Curry, who works for CDI in Vermont, says the biggest benefit in switching to a resident-owned model is security, as things like lot rent cannot be changed without resident input.
“Now the residents themselves — the members of the co-op — are setting their annual budgets,” Curry explained.
Aside from ensuring prices remain reasonable, that can also allow for prioritizing and accounting for risks like flooding. Last Christmas, a winter storm sent Sandy Jarvis’s Christmas into chaos. A mixture of high winds, rain, and snow over Northwestern Vermont caused the St. George Community Cooperative, where Jarvis has lived for nearly a decade, to lose power. Like Mountain Home, even an average storm causes large puddles to form in the low-lying neighborhood. But the Christmas flood sprang from another source — frozen pipes that cracked and leaked, draining the community’s well system.
For Jarvis, this was a warning sign. Since then, she’s been working to establish an emergency plan in the community and budget for a generator that could keep the water supply running during power outages. When the heavy rains came through this summer, she said, they were mostly spared, though they did lose power again and dealt with some flooding.
“Most mobile home communities in the state are old, and there’s a lot of aging infrastructure,” Jarvis told me. Reflecting on their luck compared to other communities in the state, she later added, “We came out of it fairly well.”
Bill Dunton, another resident of the St. George development, has lived there nearly 25 years, through the transition to a cooperative; he’s witnessed flooding and the aftermath. Making changes can be difficult, he acknowledges, particularly in a neighborhood that has “118 families — and 118 different attitudes.” Still, Dunton believes the co-op model is ultimately supportive for residents, as it eliminates the fear of losing their homes or getting priced out with no notice, something Hamshaw from the University of Vermont said is not unusual in the state’s “bonkers” housing market, even after disasters.
Concerns over lot rent, which manufactured housing residents can still be charged after being displaced, and accessing aid are among the issues Hamshaw has heard since the summer storm. With the ground now frosting over at night as winter weather settles in, Hamshaw worries about the residents still in the thick of post-disaster bureaucracy. She’s currently interviewing displaced residents, many of whom are couch surfing or living in campers as they await aid. Even once they receive funds, she stressed that the housing market is significantly different now than it was after Irene, with everything from rent to repairs costing more, let alone new housing units.
That’s why Dunton, sitting inside his warm home as a light drizzle fell outside, said he hopes the state can come to see communities like St. George the way he does: as one of the last vestiges of actually affordable housing. And that, he believes, is well worth investing in for the long haul.
Support for this story was provided by The Neal Peirce Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting journalism on ways to make cities and their larger regions work better for all people.
https://heatmap.news/climate/vermont-manufactured-homes-flood-winter Save to Pocket
MOVIES VS. CAPITALISM: The Muppet Christmas Carol (w/ Wren Mack)
date: 2023-12-19, from: The Lever News
The MVC team analyzes a zany adaptation of Charles Dickens’ iconic holiday story.
https://www.levernews.com/movies-vs-capitalism-the-muppet-christmas-carol-w-wren-mack/ Save to Pocket
Mental Health on Minds of International Students Studying in US
date: 2023-12-19, from: VOA News USA
Mental health is a big topic of discussion on U.S. college campuses, with universities themselves continually reaching out to students to make sure they are OK. Many international students studying in the U.S. say the concern is novel but welcome. VOA’s Laurel Bowman has more. Camera and video editing by Saqib Ul Islam.
https://www.voanews.com/a/mental-health-on-minds-of-international-students-studying-in-us/7404011.html Save to Pocket
Verizon Gave Her Data to a Stalker. ‘This Has Completely Changed My Life’
date: 2023-12-19, from: 404 Media Group
A stalker haphazardly posing as a cop demanded sensitive data from Verizon. Verizon complied, and the stalker drove to an address armed with a knife. 404 Media spoke to the victim.
https://www.404media.co/verizon-gave-her-data-to-a-stalker-this-has-completely-changed-my-life/ Save to Pocket
US EPA submits final PFAS rule
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has sent its final rule for regulating certain types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in drinking water to the Office of Management and Budget for review, according to the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators,…
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/us-epa-submits-final-pfas-rule/article_94086da8-9e14-11ee-bf36-535f2d056aa8.html Save to Pocket
Defense act on Biden’s desk without expansion of radiation compensation
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
The fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act now awaits President Joe Biden’s signature, but it does so without key language to expand compensation coverage for those who were subject to radiation exposure.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/defense-act-on-bidens-desk-without-expansion-of-radiation-compensation/article_35e95e9a-9e04-11ee-af11-3f47820f47ae.html Save to Pocket
iLearn students deck their school halls
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
Christmas brings a special feeling to kids when it’s celebrated everywhere, even around the classrooms. When last year’s iLearn Academy holiday decor brought success and excitement, the school decided to make its “Deck the Halls” Christmas event an annual treat…
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/ilearn-students-deck-their-school-halls/article_bdc3d3ac-9aff-11ee-b82c-e7d94cfb99d2.html Save to Pocket
Quaker Oats recalls products for potential salmonella contamination
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
Quaker Oats has recalled dozens of its products because of potential contamination by salmonella.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/quaker-oats-recalls-products-for-potential-salmonella-contamination/article_2d2d1ed2-9d59-11ee-ba03-833da58112f6.html Save to Pocket
BPT exemption sought for meds
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
A new measure, Bill 220-37, is proposing to add prescription medications to a list of exemptions to the business privilege tax.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/bpt-exemption-sought-for-meds/article_eb19a830-9d76-11ee-85a0-ffde23717ccf.html Save to Pocket
Senators propose transfer of old Public Health HQ to GCC
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
Vice Speaker Tina Muña Barnes and Sens. Chris Duenas and Joe San Agustin are proposing to transfer the former headquarters of the Department of Public Health and Social Services to Guam Community College, through a recently introduced measure, Bill 221-37.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/senators-propose-transfer-of-old-public-health-hq-to-gcc/article_1012ad48-9e1d-11ee-ae5e-eb6eab112c9c.html Save to Pocket
Suspect on pretrial release allegedly smashed car window with rock, wood
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
A man on pretrial release in a 2022 home invasion case was charged this week with criminal mischief to a motor vehicle.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/suspect-on-pretrial-release-allegedly-smashed-car-window-with-rock-wood/article_6c9a59f6-9e1a-11ee-a66a-0bfceee44ac4.html Save to Pocket
‘Model inmate’: Meth smuggler seeks reduction to sentence
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
A man who has been in federal prison for 14 years after being convicted in a drug smuggling conspiracy is seeking a reduction of his 20-year sentence.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/model-inmate-meth-smuggler-seeks-reduction-to-sentence/article_10729ffe-9e0a-11ee-871a-5b0dc9c08392.html Save to Pocket
Teen accused of ‘touching’ 2 girls, age 6 and 7
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
A 17-year-old has been charged as an adult with eight counts of criminal sexual conduct in connection to the alleged sexual assault of two female minors who are 6 and 7 years old.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/teen-accused-of-touching-2-girls-age-6-and-7/article_936c61f2-9dfa-11ee-99ac-07c5235d158d.html Save to Pocket
Bill: Fines for missed deadlines
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
Sen. Telo Taitague and seven other lawmakers have introduced bipartisan legislation that would establish fines for department and agency heads should they fail to timely submit financial or program information necessary for the Office of Public Accountability to carry out…
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/bill-fines-for-missed-deadlines/article_77fe787a-9d6d-11ee-8de0-8b9270272ebb.html Save to Pocket
AG wants clarification on DPW
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
Attorney General Douglas Moylan has written to attorney Jay Arriola, asking him to clarify if his firm is representing Department of Public Works Director Vince Arriola as personal legal counsel, if he had instructed the director not to cooperate with…
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/ag-wants-clarification-on-dpw/article_d58666c8-9e09-11ee-ab37-530ef1806313.html Save to Pocket
Woman allegedly strangled, stopped from contacting police
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
A man was accused of strangling a woman known to him and preventing her from making a call for help.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/woman-allegedly-strangled-stopped-from-contacting-police/article_c64b91b0-9e1d-11ee-94fd-c7a0b095576e.html Save to Pocket
Ex-Korean Air manager pleads guilty to bank fraud and money laundering
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
A former Korean Air officer manager pleaded guilty to bank fraud and money laundering.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/ex-korean-air-manager-pleads-guilty-to-bank-fraud-and-money-laundering/article_ab16fb58-9e15-11ee-9efc-371399cc26f7.html Save to Pocket
Living on the Eastside
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2023/12/19/living-on-the-eastside/ Save to Pocket
PeerJ Award at the 9th EuChemS Chemistry Congress
date: 2023-12-19, from: PeerJ blog
PeerJ are excited to announce sponsorship of a PeerJ Award for Best Poster at the 9th EuChemS Chemistry Congress! The 9th EuChemS Chemistry Congress (ECC-9) is taking place in Dublin in July 2024. The ECC-9 Congress will offer an exciting scientific programme with world-leading plenary speakers, invited speakers and short oral presentations, supplemented with a […]
https://peerj.com/blog/post/115284888648/peerj-award-at-the-9th-euchems-chemistry-congress/ Save to Pocket
To infinity and … just over the Atlantic
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Soul searching in the wake of Virgin Orbit failure
The UK Space Agency has published a “Lessons Learned” report after the failure of the first orbital launch attempt from Spaceport Cornwall in Newquay on the south west coast of England.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/lessons_learned_uk_launch/ Save to Pocket
Music at The Colony
date: 2023-12-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I went to my first since-pandemic live show, at The Colony in Woodstock. It’s small venue that goes way back. It’s basically a bar, with a stage and a small seating area which can hold about 50 people, seated at tables. Very comfortable space. Woodstock as you might imagine is a great place for live music, one of the reasons I moved here, the other being that it’s a magnet for creative people, like a lot of the other places I’ve lived (New Orleans, Cambridge, Berkeley, Madison, Seattle, New York). But the pandemic squashed that, now maybe we’re starting to come back.
I decided to risk it because a friend was playing last night, Tony Levin, who I know through his wife, Andi. When I first met Tony, at a birthday dinner last year, I thought he was a banker. He’s tall, an impressive-looking person, like the people who rose to be an executive at companies like IBM in the 80s. Just shows how deceiving appearances can be. He’s an accomplished musician, and a very sweet, quiet person. Probably about as far from an IBM exec or banker as you can get. Until Sunday I had never seen him perform.
The group I was with arrived early, and Tony was at the front door, greeting people as we entered, and immediately he made a very different impression. He seemed soft, hippieish, relaxed, smiling. Later I realized this may have been the first time I’d seen him in his element. And the show, a four-piece jazz band, with his brother Pete Levin on piano, started off playing (to my uneducated ear) pretty plain improvisational jazz. But as the show went on, I could see that this music had been composed, and had all kinds of themes running through it. It seemed to me the music had been cultivated over many years?
The Levins and friends, are roughly my age. I imagined they had been playing together as long as I have been making software. And I felt certain what I was seeing here were two very talented brothers, who have been performing together their whole lives, and there was something I had been trying to understand about myself, how I feel about my art, almost fifty years after I started. There is an important difference in how I do it at 68 vs how I did it when I was 22. Exactly how it is different, I’m probably too close to it to really understand, but seeing what I imagined to being something similar in two people I kind of know, that was thought-provoking.
To me, music is as software probably is to most people who use it. I love it, but I don’t have much of an idea of how it’s made. The last few years I’ve been reintroduced to it in a new way, thanks to the Get Back documentary, which gave us a view into the Beatles’ creative process, something I wish I could have seen when I was much younger. The Beatles were the music my generation grew up with, but I never really even understood that there was a difference between a John song and a Paul song.
The second great influence has been Andrew Hickey’s 500 songs podcast. Now I have so many more stories to go with the music that my life was formed by. And I have a feeling that attending this event on Sunday will turn out to be a similar influence.
Now, what music should I go see next? 💥
PS: The concert was reviewed by a professional.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/19/131648.html?title=musicAtTheColony Save to Pocket
We look South
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
I’ve been thinking about what 2024 holds domestically for news coverage. And I keep returning to this: In 2024, we look South. Between the upcoming presidential election and the continued reverberations of the Dobbs decision, the region deserves and will see an uptick in national media attention next year. That’s where my forecast stops. It’s…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/we-look-south/ Save to Pocket
More states directly fund local news reporting
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
New Jersey, New Mexico, California, and Washington are now among state governments providing financial support to weakened news organizations struggling to cover local news — and they won’t be the last. In the year ahead, more legislators will introduce efforts to support local news, having realized that the economic plight of news companies, particularly dailies and…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/more-states-directly-fund-local-news-reporting/ Save to Pocket
Publishers’ short video strategy is put to the test
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
2024 is a strange year. It will see four-year elections in the U.S. (the world’s richest economy and democracy) and five-year elections in India (the world’s most populous country and largest democracy) coincide. All this will happen against the context of an uncertain economy. Will things continue to cool down for businesses and job growth,…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/publishers-short-video-strategy-is-put-to-the-test/ Save to Pocket
Podcasting goes bionic
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Ask anyone in podcasting, and they’ll tell you that 2023 was not an easy year for the audio industry. Not by a long shot. Major podcast players and platforms — from NPR and Pushkin Industries to Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music — were plagued by massive layoffs. A long list of acclaimed and beloved shows — including Pulitzer…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/podcasting-goes-bionic/ Save to Pocket
Visuals get a boost from AI-powered tools
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/visuals-get-a-boost-from-ai-powered-tools/ Save to Pocket
The voter is the VIP
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
In October, the USA Today Network, anchored by our Seacoast Media newsrooms, held five town halls with Republican presidential candidates in Exeter, New Hampshire. In the historic Exeter Town Hall building sat about 160 chairs in a circle. At each town hall, the candidate — Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, Doug Burgam, Asa Hutchinson…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/the-voter-is-the-vip/ Save to Pocket
More boots on the ground
date: 2023-12-19, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
There’s a thread in 20 Days in Mariupol, a documentary Frontline and the Associated Press released this year, that offers a model for carrying out the sort of fair, vetted, fact-based journalism that’s necessary to combat mis- and disinformation. First, we watch as AP video journalist Mstyslav Chernov and his colleagues — who would become…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/more-boots-on-the-ground/ Save to Pocket
How to get compensated for future Southwest Airlines delays
date: 2023-12-19, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Southwest Airlines is being fined $140 million by the U.S. Department of Transportation after last year’s holiday travel meltdown. But the majority of that money will go toward compensating future Southwest customers who arrive at their destination three or more hours late — if the issues were caused by something under the airline’s control. Plus, one state put a price tag on untreated mental illness. The costs were staggering.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/how-to-get-compensated-for-future-southwest-airlines-delays Save to Pocket
Google coughs up $700M in Play Store antitrust suit
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Gives Apple a sly nod over sideloading
Google is to pay $700 million and overhaul some policies to settle the Play Store antitrust lawsuit launched by US states and consumers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/google_play_store_antitrust_settlement/ Save to Pocket
AM Briefing: 2035 or Bust
date: 2023-12-19, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: A volcano on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula has finally started to erupt • At least 120 people were killed in an earthquake in China • Meteorologists say Americans on the East Coast hoping for snow in January should keep “expectations in check.”
THE TOP FIVE
- Some EU countries pledge to decarbonize power systems by 2035
A handful of countries within the European Union have pledged to decarbonize their power systems by 2035. The group includes France and Germany, the two biggest power producers in Europe. They’re joined in the commitment by the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, which is not in the EU but is aligned with the bloc’s climate policies. Current EU emissions goals aim for decarbonization by 2040, but this group believes they can move more quickly, and by working together they hope to streamline infrastructure installation and grid connectivity. “Cutting carbon from the electricity grid is seen as a crucial first step to removing emissions from the wider energy system,” Bloomberg Green explains.
- Houthi attacks on ships send oil prices higher
The price of oil shot up yesterday on growing concerns about tankers being attacked by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. BP paused shipments through the channel, joining shipping giants including AP Moller-Maersk, MSC, and Hapag-Lloyd. The Red Sea offers a quick route from Asia to Europe, making it one of the world’s busiest shipping channels. It handles about 15% of global shipping, or 20,000 vessels each year, reports The Times of London. Since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas, Iran-backed Houthi rebels based in Yemen have been attacking ships with links to Israel. Lately the attacks have expanded to include ships with no Israeli ties. On Monday a Norwegian-owned vessel was attacked. The price of brent crude jumped by as much as 3% on the BP news, but “ample oil supply limited price gains,” says Reuters.
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- House Democrats sound alarm about major owner of oil and gas wells
Democrats in the House of Representatives have launched an inquiry into the company that owns the most oil and gas wells in the U.S., saying its business model poses a massive climate risk. Diversified Energy Co. owns about 65,000 oil and gas wells, Bloomberg reports. It buys old and unproductive wells and tries to keep them on life support. Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee worry Diversified could suddenly decide to abandon the wells, leaving state governments with a hefty bill for cleanup and raising the risk of massive methane leaks. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, and already Diversified was the fourth-largest methane emitter among oil and gas producers last year, according to the EPA. “Diversified Energy’s strategy of leaving thousands of marginal wells unplugged for decades and potentially underestimating future cleanup costs could undermine important efforts to fight climate change,” committee members wrote in a letter.
- Airlines team up with researchers to reduce planet-warming contrails
Major airlines are looking for ways to reduce the warming effect of the contrails produced by planes. Contrails are the clouds that build up in the sky behind jets as their engines spew hot air and soot into the atmosphere. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) posits that contrails could have a bigger warming effect than burning jet fuel, because contrails reflect heat back toward the ground. “It’s a big contributor and we need to worry about it,” MIT researcher Florian Allroggen tells The Washington Post. Airlines including Delta, KLM, and American are working with researchers to identify and test ways to eliminate contrails, which might mean flying at higher or lower altitudes to avoid routes with the coldest, wettest air. One recent study found that rerouting 1.7% of flights could cut contrail warming by 59%.
- Kentucky is getting a massive solar farm next year
Construction has begun on what will eventually be Kentucky’s largest solar farm. The project, called Unbridled, is scheduled to come online in 2024. It will be able to power 120,000 homes with clean energy every year, and will provide around $42 million in direct economic impact over the first 20 years of operation, Electrek’s Michelle Lewis reports. “This 160 MW solar farm is a milestone for Kentucky, the fifth-largest coal-producing state in the U.S.” Lewis says. “Coal is at a point of no return, and renewables will provide clean electricity and substantial economic benefits. It’s encouraging that Kentucky is starting to embrace renewables.”
THE KICKER
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building a $270 million compound in Hawaii that will have its own food and energy supplies, and a 5,000-square-foot underground bunker.
https://heatmap.news/climate/am-briefing-2035-or-bust Save to Pocket
OpenAI Is Not Training on Your Dropbox Documents—Today
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-18, from: Bruce Schneier blog
There’s a rumor flying around the Internet that OpenAI is training foundation models on your Dropbox documents.
Here’s CNBC. Here’s Boing Boing. Some articles are more nuanced, but there’s still a lot of confusion.
It seems not to be true. Dropbox isn’t sharing all of your documents with OpenAI. But here’s the problem: we don’t trust OpenAI. We don’t trust tech corporations. And—to be fair—corporations in general. We have no reason to.
Simon Willison nails it in a tweet:
“OpenAI are training on every piece of data they see, even when they say they aren’t” is the new “Facebook are showing you ads based on overhearing everything you say through your phone’s microphone.”…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/openai-is-not-training-on-your-dropbox-documents-today.html Save to Pocket
Red Sea strikes ignite oil price fears
date: 2023-12-19, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Analysts are warning that oil prices will rise as companies stop transporting fuel and goods in the Red Sea following attacks on commercial ships. Then, the European Union and the U.S. have agreed to temporarily stop imposing additional taxes on EU-made steel and aluminum, as well as various U.S.-made products. And for the first time, the Netherlands is growing cannabis legally.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/red-sea-strikes-ignite-oil-price-fears Save to Pocket
Denmark, US Reach Defense Agreement
date: 2023-12-19, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/denmark-us-reach-defense-agreement-/7403888.html Save to Pocket
Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven’t come
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The difference between 1983 and 1993 is vast. Since then, not so much
Comment As we approach the end of 2023, it’s interesting to look back at the tech of three decades ago. Not just to compare it to today’s, but also to that a decade earlier. The interesting aspect isn’t how much has changed: it’s how fast it was, and is, changing.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/windows_nt_30_years_on/ Save to Pocket
A santa themed CODE100 puzzle – Hitting the chimney
date: 2023-12-19, from: Chris Heilmann
I just finished another puzzle for the CODE100 competition and thought I make it Santa themed. Imagine Santa cocking things up by dropping his presents everywhere but inside the chimney. Can you find out which ones hit, which ones landed on the chimney and which ones dropped outside of it? You get points in a […]
https://christianheilmann.com/2023/12/19/a-santa-themed-code100-puzzle-hitting-the-chimney/ Save to Pocket
HMRC launches £500M procurement for new ERP, though project’s already a ‘red’ risk
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Rivals will need to dislodge incumbent SAP in competition for 5-year deal across three departments
The UK’s tax collector is seeking software and technical services suppliers to replace its SAP ERP with a subscription-based product, in a project already judged a “red” risk by the government’s projects watchdog.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/uk_tax_collect_launches_500/ Save to Pocket
Hilo HS Color Run
date: 2023-12-19, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The Second Annual Hilo High School Jingle Bells Color Run was held last Sunday at Bayfront.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/19/sports/hilo-hs-color-run/ Save to Pocket
Drew Lock’s late touchdown pass rallies Seahawks to 20-17 victory over sliding Eagles
date: 2023-12-19, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>SEATTLE — Drew Lock threw a 29-yard touchdown pass to Jaxon Smith-Njigba with 28 seconds left to cap a 92-yard drive, and the Seattle Seahawks stunned the Philadelphia Eagles 20-17 on Monday night, ending a four-game skid and getting back into NFC playoff contention.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/19/sports/drew-locks-late-touchdown-pass-rallies-seahawks-to-20-17-victory-over-sliding-eagles/ Save to Pocket
BIIF weekend soccer: Kealakehe sweeps crosstown classic, HPA shut out by Waiakea
date: 2023-12-19, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>KEALAKEHE — Both of Kealakehe soccer’s teams were victorious over Konawaena on Saturday at Waverider Stadium. It was the first time the two local schools have faced each other thus far in the Big Island Interscholastic Federation (BIIF) soccer season.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/19/sports/biif-weekend-soccer-kealakehe-sweeps-crosstown-classic-hpa-shut-out-by-waiakea/ Save to Pocket
Deion Sanders is luring linemen to Colorado to protect QB son. Now, those blockers need to jell.
date: 2023-12-19, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>BOULDER, Colo. — Deion Sanders recently reeled in a large bass as he took a break from the recruiting trail. His trophy catches from the transfer portal have been sizeable, too. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/19/sports/deion-sanders-is-luring-linemen-to-colorado-to-protect-qb-son-now-those-blockers-need-to-jell/ Save to Pocket
Harden, Leonard and George lead Clippers to 151-127 rout of Pacers for eighth straight win
date: 2023-12-19, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>INDIANAPOLIS — Kawhi Leonard and Paul George did most of the Los Angeles Clippers’ heavy lifting.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/19/sports/harden-leonard-and-george-lead-clippers-to-151-127-rout-of-pacers-for-eighth-straight-win/ Save to Pocket
Shohei Ohtani’s video pitch helps lure pitcher Tyler Glasnow to his ‘dream team’ the Dodgers
date: 2023-12-19, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>LOS ANGELES — Shohei Ohtani has already notched a win for the Los Angeles Dodgers. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/19/sports/shohei-ohtanis-video-pitch-helps-lure-pitcher-tyler-glasnow-to-his-dream-team-the-dodgers/ Save to Pocket
Josh Allen and the Bills show how quickly things can turn around in the NFL
date: 2023-12-19, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Turnarounds happen quickly in the NFL.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/19/sports/josh-allen-and-the-bills-show-how-quickly-things-can-turn-around-in-the-nfl/ Save to Pocket
Some Trump fake electors from 2020 haven’t faded away. They have roles in how the 2024 race is run
date: 2023-12-19, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>VIRGINIA CITY, Nev. — Nearly two years after he signed documents attempting to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 loss in Nevada, Jim Hindle thanked everyone gathered in a historic Nevada boomtown’s commission chambers and asked them to bear with him while he learned how to oversee elections in rural Storey County.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/19/nation-world-news/some-trump-fake-electors-from-2020-havent-faded-away-they-have-roles-in-how-the-2024-race-is-run/ Save to Pocket
House Republicans’ empty impeachment inquiry cheapens an important process
date: 2023-12-19, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The move by House Republicans Wednesday to formally open an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden was perhaps predictable back in January 2021 — with then-President Donald Trump’s second impeachment, for his role in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — or even as far back as December 2019, with Trump’s first impeachment, for trying to strong-arm Ukraine’s government into helping him win reelection.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/19/opinion/house-republicans-empty-impeachment-inquiry-cheapens-an-important-process/ Save to Pocket
What is the impact of attending a Code Club or CoderDojo?
date: 2023-12-19, from: Raspberry Pi (.org)
We support two networks of coding clubs where young people around the world discover the countless possibilities of creating with digital technologies. Every year, we send out a survey to volunteers at all the clubs we support. Today we share some highlights from the findings and what we’re planning next. Why do we do an…
The post What is the impact of attending a Code Club or CoderDojo? appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/code-club-coderdojo-survey-2023/ Save to Pocket
Maddy and Väänänen on categoricity arguments
date: 2023-12-19, from: Logic Matters blog
There’s a new short book in the Cambridge Elements series — Penelope Maddy and Jouko Väänänen have written a very interesting contribution on Philosophical Uses of Categoricity Arguments. Here’s their Introduction: Mathematicians and philosophers have appealed to categoricity arguments in a surprisingly varied range of contexts. One familiar example calls on second-order categoricity in an …
Maddy and Väänänen on categoricity arguments Read More »
The post Maddy and Väänänen on categoricity arguments appeared first on Logic Matters.
https://www.logicmatters.net/2023/12/19/maddy-and-vaananen-on-categoricity-arguments/ Save to Pocket
Larry Fink’s Big Climate Lie
date: 2023-12-19, from: The Lever News
Coverage of the BlackRock CEO offers an object lesson in how not to report on greenwashing.
https://www.levernews.com/larry-finks-big-climate-lie/ Save to Pocket
Qakbot’s backbot: FBI-led takedown keeps crims at bay for just 3 months
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Experts say malware strain make take years to die off completely
Multiple sources are confirming the resurgence of Qakbot malware mere months after the FBI and other law enforcement agencies shuttered the Windows botnet.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/qakbot_returns/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-19, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
News from Bluesky via RSS and FeedLand.
https://feedland.com/?river=https://blueskyweb.xyz/rss.xml Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-19, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Amazon’s ‘return-to-hub’ policy sparks employee backlash.
https://medium.com/trendy-digests/amazons-return-to-hub-policy-sparks-employee-backlash-87cfbce12a79 Save to Pocket
The awful, horrible, detestable year of 1968
date: 2023-12-19, from: Robert Reich on Substack
Idealism and failure
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/1968 Save to Pocket
Day in Review (December 18–19)
date: 2023-12-19, from: Association of Research Libraries News
Last Updated on December 20, 2023, 11:24 am ET Sign up to receive the Day in Review by email. Jump to: Tuesday, December 19 | Note: Day in Review will…
The post Day in Review (December 18–19) appeared first on Association of Research Libraries.
https://www.arl.org/day-in-review/day-in-review-december-18-20/ Save to Pocket
Simon Sanchez High School project waiting on construction manager
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
A construction manager is pivotal for the construction of a new Simon Sanchez High School, but the longstanding project doesn’t have one yet, according to Department of Public Works Director Vince Arriola.
https://www.postguam.com/news/simon-sanchez-high-school-project-waiting-on-construction-manager/article_6fa16df4-9e30-11ee-89be-3fe4d3757004.html Save to Pocket
ValueLicensing tries to smack down Microsoft defenses in license reselling spat
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
UK software reseller alleges ‘no real prospect of success’ of Windows giant’s arguments
Microsoft’s tussle with ValueLicensing over perpetual licensing terms has taken another turn after the software reseller asked the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to strike out parts of Redmond’s amended defense.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/valuelicensing_files_a_summary_judgment/ Save to Pocket
Create your own Slack bot with a Raspberry Pi Pico W
date: 2023-12-19, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Learn how to connect a Raspberry Pi Pico W to Slack and create an interactive Slack bot that can send and receive messages.
The post Create your own Slack bot with a Raspberry Pi Pico W appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/create-your-own-slack-bot-with-a-raspberry-pi-pico-w/ Save to Pocket
Japanese brewery using generative AI to dream up new beverages
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Maybe check the label before you next sip a Kirin alcopop?
With less than two weeks remaining in 2023, The Register thinks we’ve almost reached the point at which we can prove Nothing Is Safe From AI – thanks to an announcement that Japan’s Kirin Holdings, purveyor of many fine beers, has enlisted a binary brainbox to brew ideas for new products.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/kirin_ai_drink_development/ Save to Pocket
Closing Christmas / New Year
date: 2023-12-19, from: ETH Zurich Research Archives
The ETH Library is closed from 24 December 2023 until 2 January 2024. During this time, you can still deposit new publications. The Research Collection team will process them from 3 January. We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
https://rc-blog.ethz.ch/en/closing-christmas-new-year/ Save to Pocket
VMware’s end-user compute products are for sale. Who might buy ’em?
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Would you rather a cloud that not-so-gently migrates you, or a retirement home like HCL?
Broadcom recently revaled it intends to divest VMware’s end-user compute products, which span virtual desktops, app publishing, and device management. Let’s ponder where they might land.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/vmware_euc_sale_speculation/ Save to Pocket
Happy Hibernation: Seasonal Rituals and Transformations
date: 2023-12-19, from: CSUN Library Blog, Cited
Winter — and the sweet relief of winter break — is finally here. CSUN students (and staff and faculty) have overcome the harsh challenges of…
https://library.csun.edu/blogs/cited/2023/12/19/happy-hibernation-seasonal-rituals-and-transformations/ Save to Pocket
Pakistani politician deepfakes himself to deliver a speech from behind bars
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Grammar might be off, but use case remains groundbreaking
While pundits fear a future where elections are clouded by AI-created videos of faked politicans spreading misinformation, a Pakistani politician has deliberately delivered a deepfake of a speech while isolated from media behind bars.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/ousted_and_isolated_pakistan_pm/ Save to Pocket
December 18, 2023
date: 2023-12-19, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Reporters at ProPublica have uncovered yet more news about the right-wing network of wealthy donors who have supported Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. According to Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski, and Brett Murphy, in January 2000, on a plane flight home from a conservative conference, Thomas complained to Representative Cliff Stearns (R-FL) about his salary. He warned that if lawmakers didn’t give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, “one or more justices will leave soon.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-18-2023 Save to Pocket
India’s long-awaited telecoms bill drops language that would have regulated social media
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
OTT apps in the clear. Indian citizens, not so much – law proposes registration, surveillance, and shutdown powers
India’s government has introduced its Telecommunications Bill – heavily anticipated legislation that will replace laws that were passed before the internet existed and prior to India turning on over a billion mobile phone subscriptions.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/india_telecommunications_bill_2023/ Save to Pocket
Marvel, Disney Drop Actor Jonathan Majors After Assault Conviction
date: 2023-12-19, from: VOA News USA
New York — Jonathan Majors was convicted Monday of assaulting his former girlfriend after a trial that he hoped would vindicate him and restore his status as an emerging Hollywood star. It did just the opposite: Marvel Studios and the Walt Disney Co. dropped him hours after the verdict.
A Manhattan jury found Majors, 34, guilty of one misdemeanor assault charge and one harassment violation stemming from his March confrontation with then-girlfriend Grace Jabbari. She said he attacked her in a car and left her in “excruciating” pain; his lawyers said Jabbari was the aggressor.
Majors, who was acquitted of a different assault charge and of aggravated harassment, looked slightly downward and showed no immediate reaction as the verdict was read. He declined to comment as he left the courthouse.
His lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, said in a statement that he “still has faith in the process and looks forward to fully clearing his name.” While he was convicted of an assault charge that involves recklessly causing injury, she said his team was grateful for his acquittal on the other assault count, which concerned intentionally causing injury.
“Mr. Majors is grateful to God, his family, his friends and his fans for their love and support during these harrowing eight months,” Chaudhry said.
Marvel and Disney immediately dropped the “Creed III” star from all upcoming projects following the conviction, said a person close to the studio who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Before his arrest, Majors had been on track to become a central figure throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe, playing the antagonist role of Kang. Majors had already appeared in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and the first two seasons of “Loki.” He was to star in “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty,” dated for release in May 2026.
Majors, whose credits include “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” “Devotion” and “Da 5 Bloods,” had been one of the fastest-rising stars in Hollywood. The Yale School of Drama graduate also starred as a troubled amateur bodybuilder in “Magazine Dreams,” which made an acclaimed debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was set to open in theaters this month. Ahead of Majors’ trial, Disney-owned distributor Searchlight Pictures removed “Magazine Dreams” from its release calendar.
Majors’ sentencing was set for Feb. 6. He faces the possibility of up to a year in jail for the assault conviction, though probation or other non-jail sentences also are possible.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement that the trial “illustrated a cycle of psychological and emotional abuse, and escalating patterns of coercion.”
The dispute between Majors and Jabbari began in the backseat of a chauffeured car and spilled into the streets of Manhattan.
Jabbari, a 30-year-old British dancer, accused Majors of hitting her in the head with his open hand, twisting her arm behind her back and squeezing her middle finger until it fractured.
Majors’ lawyers alleged that she flew into a jealous rage after reading a text message — from another woman — on his phone. They said Jabbari had spread a “fantasy” to take down the actor, who was only trying to regain his phone and get away safely.
But as Majors sought vindication from the jury, the trial also brought forth new evidence about his troubled relationship with Jabbari, whom he met on the set of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” two years ago.
Prosecutors shared text messages that showed the actor begging Jabbari not to seek hospital treatment for an earlier head injury. One message warned “it could lead to an investigation even if you do lie and they suspect something.”
They also played audio of Majors declaring himself a “great man,” then questioning whether Jabbari could meet the high standards set by the spouses of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama. Majors’ attorneys countered that Jabbari had surreptitiously recorded her boyfriend as part of a plot to “destroy” his career.
Over four days of tearful testimony, Jabbari said Majors was excessively controlling and prone to fits of explosive rage that left her afraid “physically quite a lot.” She broke down on the witness stand as a jury watched security footage of him pushing her back into the car after the backseat confrontation. Prosecutors described the video as showing Majors “manhandling” her and shoving her into the vehicle “as if she was a doll.”
Majors arrived in the courtroom each morning carrying a gold-leaf Bible, accompanied by family members and his current girlfriend, actress Meagan Good. Expressionless for much of the testimony, he wiped away tears as Chaudhry urged jurors during her closing arguments on Thursday to “end this nightmare for Jonathan Majors.”
Majors did not take the stand. But Chaudhry said her client was the victim of “white lies, big lies, and pretty little lies” invented by Jabbari to exact revenge on an unfaithful partner.
The attorney cited security footage, taken immediately after the shove, that showed Majors sprinting away from his girlfriend as she chased him through the night. Jabbari then followed a group of strangers she’d met on the street to a dance club, where she ordered drinks for the group and did not appear to be favoring her injured hand.
“She was revenge-partying and charging Champagne to the man she was angry with and treating these strangers to fancy Champagne she bought with Jonathan’s credit card,” Chaudhry alleged.
The next morning, after finding Jabbari unconscious in the closet of their Manhattan penthouse, Majors called police. He was arrested at the scene, while Jabbari was transported to a hospital to receive treatment for the injuries to her ear and hand.
“He called 911 out of concern for her, and his fear of what happens when a Black man in America came true,” Chaudhry said, accusing police and prosecutors of failing to take seriously Majors’ allegations that he was bloodied and scratched during the dispute.
In her closing arguments, prosecutor Kelli Galaway said Majors was following a well-worn playbook used by abusers to cast their victims as attackers.
“This is not a revenge plot to ruin the defendant’s life or his career,” Galaway said. “You were asked why you are here? Because domestic violence is serious.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/marvel-disney-drop-actor-jonathan-majors-after-assault-conviction/7403719.html Save to Pocket
[Sponsor] Obsidian
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: Daring Fireball
https://obsidian.md/?df Save to Pocket
Protecting Palestinian Civilians a ‘Strategic Imperative,’ Pentagon Chief Says
date: 2023-12-19, from: VOA News USA
In Israel on Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reaffirmed his country’s “unshakable” support for the Jewish state. He also stressed the importance of protecting Palestinian civilians and reaching a two-state solution after the war ends. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports.
https://www.voanews.com/a/protecting-palestinian-civilians-a-strategic-imperative-pentagon-chief-says-/7403681.html Save to Pocket
Beijing demands government apps must shed their bureaucratic skins
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Its hard to disagree with a mandate to make government digital services fit for people, not box-tickers
Beijing’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has decided government digital services and apps need to become less bureaucratic and formal.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/cac_app_fornalism_crackdown/ Save to Pocket
Internet’s deep-level architects slam US, UK, Europe for pushing device-side scanning
date: 2023-12-19, updated: 2023-12-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Someone needs to think of the children … and the consequences of breaking encryption and trashing privacy
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has warned that policy proposals requiring or enabling the automated scouring of people’s devices for illegal material – as floated by the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States – threaten the open internet.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/iab_ietf_oppose_clientside_scanning/ Save to Pocket
NDAA at president’s desk without RECA expansion, delegate looks to other vehicles
date: 2023-12-19, from: Guam Daily Post
The fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act now awaits President Joe Biden’s signature, but it does so without key language to expand compensation coverage for those who were subject to radiation exposure.
https://www.postguam.com/news/ndaa-at-presidents-desk-without-reca-expansion-delegate-looks-to-other-vehicles/article_dd0d8cfa-9d50-11ee-b8ac-33bf0fed4d65.html Save to Pocket
Taking Russia to Court
date: 2023-12-19, from: ETH Zurich, recently added
Bogush, Gleb; Nalepa, Monika; Remington, Thomas F. Burkhardt, Fabian; Orttung, Robert; Perović, Jeronim; Pleines, Heiko; Schröder, Hans-Henning; Powell, Ellen