News gathered 2024-08-16
(date: 2024-08-16 11:30:04)
Appeals court rejects challenge to California’s vote-by-mail system
date: 2024-08-16, from: The Signal
By Zachary Stieber Contributing Writer A U.S. appeals court on Thursday turned away a challenge to California’s vote-by-mail laws. Even though some invalid ballots may be counted in California under the […]
The post Appeals court rejects challenge to California’s vote-by-mail system appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/appeals-court-rejects-challenge-to-californias-vote-by-mail-system/
Aug. 28: Youth Grove Evening of Remembrance
date: 2024-08-16, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The annual Evening of Remembrance will take place on Wednesday, Aug,23 at 7:15 p.m., in the Santa Clarita Youth Grove at Central Park in Saugus.
https://scvnews.com/aug-28-youth-grove-evening-of-remembrance/
Harris campaign agrees to 2 debates after Trump proposes 3
date: 2024-08-16, from: The Signal
By Tom Ozimek Contributing Writer Vice President Kamala Harris is prepared to hold no more than two debates against former President Donald Trump — one is the previously agreed to Sept. […]
The post Harris campaign agrees to 2 debates after Trump proposes 3 appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/harris-campaign-agrees-to-2-debates-after-trump-proposes-3/
Ancient Prisoners Carved Graffiti Into the Floors of a Roman-Era Prison
date: 2024-08-16, from: Smithsonian Magazine
An archaeologist has identified vengeful inscriptions etched into a 1,600-year-old prison in Greece
Artificial General Intelligence Might Be Humanity’s Last Invention
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/artificial-general-intelligence-might-be-humanitys-last-invention
Construction to Begin on Vista Canyon Bridge in Canyon Country
date: 2024-08-16, from: City of Santa Clarita
The City of Santa Clarita is announcing the start of construction on the Vista Canyon Bridge and Road Improvements Project in Canyon Country. This project is an integral component of the Santa Clarita 2025 Strategic Plan, focused on building and creating community. The Vista Canyon Bridge and Road Improvements Project includes the construction of a two-lane bridge approximately 780 […]
The post Construction to Begin on Vista Canyon Bridge in Canyon Country appeared first on City of Santa Clarita.
2024-08-16 JSON feed for indexing
date: 2024-08-16, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
2024-08-16 JSON feed for indexing
Recently, @dredmorbius wrote about Google and search and posed the question:
What if websites indexed their own content, and published a permuted index in a standard format, in a cache-and-forward model similar to how DNS works?
A while ago I wondered about self-published indexes. We have software to generate feeds. Why not software to generate indexes? Back then I proposed a JSON format. Today I finally took a look at JSON Feed. I think it has everything we need.
Take a look at the example for this site: .well-known/search-feed.json.gz. This file has about 251KiB. The source material is 6740 Markdown pages, a total of about 21MiB.
Using the next_url attribute, it would be possible to split
this file up into chunks of 100 pages each, or a chunk per year, if the
platform promises that older pages never change. This wouldn’t work for
my wiki, but perhaps it would for certain platforms. Somebody will have
write up a best-practice on how to use HTTP headers to avoid downloading
the whole file when nothing has changed. Sadly,
section
13 of RFC 2616 is pretty convoluted. Basically something about the
use of If-Modified-Since and ETags headers.
I also find RFC 5005 to be very instructive in how to think about feeds for archiving.
@jonny commented, saying that it was important to think about how search indexes were going to be used:
so given that no single machine would or should store a whole index of the internet or even all your local internet, you can go a few ways with that, take the global quorum sensing path and you get a bigass global dht-like thing like ipfs. if instead you think there should be some structure, then you need proximity. is that social proximity where we swap indexes between people we know? or webring like proximity dependent on pages linking to each other and mutually indexing their neighborhood?
It’s an interesting question but I think I want incremental improvements to the current situation. So if a person has a website right now, on server, what’s the simplest thing they can do so that they aren’t drowned in crawlers and can still be found via search? That would be publishing an index, analogous to publishing a feed. Having more search engines (even if using legacy centralized architecture) would be better than what we have now. Not depending on crawlers would be better what we have now.
In terms of decentralisation, I think I like community search engines like lieu. The idea is great: a community lists a bunch of sites. Lieu generates a web ring and crawls them to build an index of all the member sites. Instead of crawling, it could fetch the indexes. This would be much better than what it does right now, because right now, lieu uses colly for crawling and colly ignores robots.txt. This means that lieu instantly bans itself when it visits my site because it’s not rate limited. It’s just an implementation detail, but sadly I am biased. I’ve been on a Butlerian Jihad since 2009 when I discover that over 30% of all requests I serve from my sites are for machines, not humans.
It makes me want to raise my keyboard and scream “CO₂ for the CO₂ god!!”
Somebody should draw a Hacker Elric doing that, standing on a mountain of electro-trash with the burnt and dead landscape of the post-apocalypse in the background.
But back to the problem of indexing. Right now, search engine operators and their parasites, the search engine optimisation enterprises, crawls every single page including page histories, page diffs, and more, on my wikis. If every wanna-be search engine downloaded my index once a day, I would be saving resources. Whether that’s a step in the right direction, I don’t know.
@jonny also said:
i just think that the ability to fundamentally depart from the commercial structure of the web and all its brokenness doesn’t happen gradually and esp. not with the server/client stack we have now
Indeed, there must be another way. I just don’t see it, right now. It’s always hard to imagine a new world while you’re still living in the old one. I’m sure the solution will seem obvious to the next generation, looking back.
#Search #Feeds #Butlerian Jihad
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-08-16-json-feed-for-indexes
NASA-Funded Research Institute Selects New Class of Space Health Fellows
date: 2024-08-16, from: NASA breaking news
The NASA-funded Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) announced its selections for the institute’s 2024 postdoctoral fellowship, a space health program intended to launch the careers of a new generation of researchers tackling various challenges involved with human space exploration. The program supports early-career scientists pursuing research with the potential to reduce the health […]
Santa Clarita receives investment policy certificate
date: 2024-08-16, from: The Signal
News release For the 30th year in a row, the city of Santa Clarita has received an Investment Policy Certificate of Excellence Award from the Association of Public Treasurers of […]
The post Santa Clarita receives investment policy certificate appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/santa-clarita-receives-investment-policy-certificate/
Sheriff’s Log: Aug. 8 to Aug. 14, 2024
date: 2024-08-16, from: Catalina Islander
The following is the Avalon’s Sheriff’s Stations significant incidents report for the period of Aug. 8 to Aug. 14, 2024. All suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Many people who are arrested do not get prosecuted in the first place and many who are prosecuted do not get convicted. […]
https://thecatalinaislander.com/sheriffs-log-aug-8-to-aug-14-2024/
CHP arrests driver after crash investigation
date: 2024-08-16, from: The Signal
California Highway Patrol officers arrested a man Wednesday night following a close call on San Francisquito Canyon Road in Saugus. The CHP Newhall Area Office began receiving calls around 8:35 […]
The post CHP arrests driver after crash investigation appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/chp-arrests-driver-after-crash-investigation/
Pentagon leaker Teixeira arraigned on military charges ahead of March trial
date: 2024-08-16, from: VOA News USA
HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Massachusetts — Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard accused of leaking classified U.S. national security documents online, was arraigned Friday on charges brought by the U.S. Air Force that he violated military laws.
During a brief appearance before a military judge at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, 22-year-old Teixeira deferred entering a plea to charges that he obstructed justice and failed to obey a lawful order until closer to when his court-martial trial is scheduled to begin on March 10.
The Air Force announced in May it was pursuing charges that he violated military laws after Teixeira had already pleaded guilty in March to separate charges in federal court brought by the U.S. Justice Department.
Air Force prosecutors say Teixeira ignored an order to cease accessing classified information unrelated to his duties and obstructed justice by disposing of an iPad, computer hard drive and iPhone after the leaks were uncovered and instructing someone to delete online messages Teixeira had sent.
Military Judge Colonel Vicki Marcus at Friday’s hearing said she would hold hearings in November and January where she would address any pre-trial motions from defense lawyers. They have argued the charges were brought in violation of Teixeira’s constitutional right to not be prosecuted twice for the same offense.
Teixeira was arrested in April 2013 after authorities said he carried out one of the most serious U.S. national security breaches in years while working as a cyber defense operations journeyman, or information technology support specialist.
Despite being a low-level airman, Teixeira held a top-secret security clearance, and starting in January 2022 began accessing hundreds of classified documents related to topics including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to prosecutors.
Teixeira shared classified information on the messaging app Discord in private servers — a kind of chat room — while bragging that he had access to “stuff for Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iran and China,” according to prosecutors.
The U.S. Justice Department plans to seek a sentence of more than 16 years when Teixeira is sentenced on November 12.
Margaret G. Hall Scholarship Golf Tournament returns
date: 2024-08-16, from: Catalina Islander
For the past 17 years the Hall family has organized a golf tournament at the Catalina Island Golf Course to raise money for a scholarship given to a senior basketball player who plans on continuing their education in either college or a trade school. Tournament organizers announced that this year’s recipient is Darren Hall. Darren […]
https://thecatalinaislander.com/margaret-g-hall-scholarship-golf-tournament-returns/
A website for taking selfies using NYC traffic cameras. “People can then…
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045131-a-website-for-taking-self
Windows 11 Insider preview brings new Sandbox features and fatter FAT32
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Arrives in the Canary Channel and updated via the Microsoft Store
Build 27686 of Windows 11 is out for Canary Channel Windows Insiders including the Sandbox Client preview, a fix for a potentially alarming registry issue and a warning for owners of Copilot+ PCs.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/16/microsoft_windows_sandbox_preview/
Burglary suspect arrested at gunpoint in Newhall
date: 2024-08-16, from: The Signal
Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies took a burglary suspect into custody at gunpoint Friday morning in Newhall, sheriff’s officials said. According to Lt. Luis Molina of the Santa Clarita Valley […]
The post Burglary suspect arrested at gunpoint in Newhall appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/burglary-suspect-arrested-at-gunpoint-in-newhall/
Friday Links: August 16, 2024
date: 2024-08-16, from: California Native Plants Society
Can native plants make LA ready for the Olympics? Also find out about the soul of soil, giant saguaros, fern nectaries, and more!
The post Friday Links: August 16, 2024 appeared first on California Native Plant Society.
https://www.cnps.org/friday-links/friday-links-august-16-2024-39931
Featured Friday: Back to School
date: 2024-08-16, from: John August blog
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, it’s back to school! We look at stories that articulate the excitement and ease the pain of starting another academic year. Our collection includes: 10 Things I Hate About You by Karen McCullah Lutz […] The post Featured Friday: Back to School first appeared on John August.
https://johnaugust.com/2024/featured-friday-back-to-school
Jamelle Bouie: “If Democrats win control of Washington in November, they should…
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045130-jamelle-bouie-if-democrat
Rare Ocelot Caught on Camera in Arizona, the First Sighting in Its Area for 50 Years
date: 2024-08-16, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Ocelots were federally listed as endangered in 1972, and their current U.S. population is thought to be fewer than 100 individuals
Radxa ROCK E20C is a tiny 2.6 inch PC with a RK3528A chip and two Gigabit Ethernet ports for $25 and up
date: 2024-08-16, from: Liliputing
The Radxa ROCK E20C is a palm-sized computer designed for use as a router, firewall, or other simple applications. It features two Gigabit Ethernet ports, support for up to 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 32GB of eMMC flash storage, a microSD card reader for removable storage, and a few USB ports for power, data, and debugging. It’s […]
The post Radxa ROCK E20C is a tiny 2.6 inch PC with a RK3528A chip and two Gigabit Ethernet ports for $25 and up appeared first on Liliputing.
Behind the Blog: Lost in Translation
date: 2024-08-16, from: 404 Media Group
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss LLMs and languages, and a big data breach.
https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-lost-in-translation/
Hopefulness Is the Warrior Emotion
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/hopefulness-is-the-warrior-emotion
Art Dealer Arrested for Trying to Sell a Fake Leonardo da Vinci for $1.4 Million
date: 2024-08-16, from: Smithsonian Magazine
French customs officers seized the imitation when they discovered the man’s export license had expired
Shots fired as AT&T and Verizon ask FCC to block Starlink’s direct-to-cell plans
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Rivals claim signal waiver would interfere with terrestrial networks
Starlink’s rivals in the satellite phone service race are asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reject its request for a waiver relating to out-of-band emission limits on signals, claiming this would cause interference with terrestrial cell networks.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/16/att_verizon_starlink/
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-16, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Feature requests for Threads.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/16.html#a151423
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-16, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
‘Fridgescaping’ Is the Trend That Has People Decorating the Inside of Their Fridges.
https://www.foodandwine.com/fridgescaping-trend-8685640
Not a joke: The Onion is bringing back its monthly print newspaper….
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045129-not-a-joke-the-onion
Kansas Students to Hear from NASA Astronauts Aboard Station
date: 2024-08-16, from: NASA breaking news
Students from Topeka, Kansas, will have the opportunity Wednesday, Aug. 21, to have NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick and Tracy C. Dyson answer their prerecorded questions aboard the International Space Station. The 20-minute space-to-Earth call with students from Mose J. Whitson Elementary, Most Pure Heart Catholic School, and Aviation Explorers Post 8, will stream live at […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/kansas-students-to-hear-from-nasa-astronauts-aboard-station/
The embroiled battle over nursing home staffing minimums
date: 2024-08-16, from: Marketplace Morning Report
A landmark federal staffing mandate has prompted fierce disagreement between resident advocates and the nursing home industry. Nursing home owners describe the minimums as extreme, warning they could force some facilities out of business. Though advocates welcomed the new mandate, they say it’s more lenient than ideal. We hear about this fierce — and personal — debate. Plus: a major Social Security number data breach and parsing more retail sales data.
Can you hack our new chip?
date: 2024-08-16, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
We think RP2350 is pretty safe and sturdy. Care to test that theory?
The post Can you hack our new chip? appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/can-you-hack-our-new-chip/
San Sebastián, Spain
date: 2024-08-16, from: mrusme blog
“San Sebastián, officially known by the bilingual name Donostia / San Sebastián is a city and municipality located in the Basque Autonomous Community, Spain. It lies on the coast of the Bay of Biscay, 20 km (12 miles) from the France–Spain border. The capital city of the province of Gipuzkoa, the municipality’s population is 188,102 as of 2021, with its metropolitan area reaching 436,500 in 2010. Locals call themselves donostiarra (singular), both in Spanish and Basque. It is also a part of Basque Eurocity Bayonne-San Sebastián.”
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/travel/spain/san-sebastian/
US colleges revise rules on free speech in hopes of containing anti-war demonstrations
date: 2024-08-16, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — As students return to colleges across the United States, administrators are bracing for a resurgence in activism against the war in Gaza, and some schools are adopting rules to limit the kind of protests that swept campuses last spring.
While the summer break provided a respite in student demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war, it also gave both student protesters and higher education officials a chance to regroup and strategize for the fall semester.
The stakes remain high. At Columbia University, President Minouche Shafik resigned Wednesday after coming under heavy scrutiny for her handling of the demonstrations at the campus in New York City, where the wave of pro-Palestinian tent encampments began last spring.
Some of the new rules imposed by universities include banning encampments, limiting the duration of demonstrations, allowing protests only in designated spaces and restricting campus access to those with university identification. Critics say some of the measures will curtail free speech.
The American Association of University Professors issued a statement Wednesday condemning “overly restrictive policies” that could discourage free expression. Many of the new policies require protesters to register well in advance and strictly limit the locations where gatherings can be held, as well as setting new limits on the use of amplified sound and signage.
“Our colleges and universities should encourage, not suppress, open and vigorous dialogue and debate even on the most deeply held beliefs,” said the statement, adding that many policies were imposed without faculty input.
The University of Pennsylvania has outlined new “temporary guidelines” for student protests that include bans on encampments, overnight demonstrations, and the use of bullhorns and speakers until after 5 p.m. on class days. Penn also requires that posters and banners be removed within two weeks of going up. The university says it remains committed to freedom of speech and lawful assembly.
At Indiana University, protests after 11 p.m. are forbidden under a new “expressive activities policy” that took effect August 1. The policy says “camping” and erecting any type of shelter are prohibited on campus, and signs cannot be displayed on university property without prior approval.
The University of South Florida now requires approval for tents, canopies, banners, signs and amplifiers. The school’s “speech, expression and assembly” rules stipulate that no “activity,” including protests or demonstrations, is allowed after 5 p.m. on weekdays or during weekends and not allowed at all during the last two weeks of a semester.
A draft document obtained over the summer by the student newspaper at Harvard University showed the college was considering prohibitions on overnight camping, chalk messages and unapproved signs.
“I think right now we are seeing a resurgence of repression on campuses that we haven’t seen since the late 1960s,” said Risa Lieberwitz, a Cornell University professor of labor and employment law who serves as general counsel for the AAUP.
Universities say they encourage free speech as long as it doesn’t interfere with learning, and they insist they are simply updating existing rules for demonstrations to protect campus safety.
Tensions have run high on college campuses since the October 7 Hamas terror attack in southern Israel killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 hostages.
Many student protesters in the U.S. vow to continue their activism, which has been fueled by Gaza’s rising death toll, which surpassed 40,000 on Thursday, according to the territory’s Health Ministry.
About 50 Columbia students still face discipline over last spring’s demonstrations after a mediation process that began earlier in the summer stalled, according to Mahmoud Khalil, a lead negotiator working on behalf of Columbia student protesters. He blamed the impasse on Columbia administrators.
“The university loves to appear that they’re in dialogue with the students. But these are all fake steps meant to assure the donor community and their political class,” said Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.
The university did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The Ivy League school in upper Manhattan was roiled earlier this year by student demonstrations, culminating in scenes of police officers with zip ties and riot shields storming a building occupied by pro-Palestinian protesters.
Similar protests swept college campuses nationwide, with many leading to violent clashes with police and more than 3,000 arrests. Many of the students who were arrested during police crackdowns have had their charges dismissed, but some are still waiting to learn what prosecutors decide. Many have faced fallout in their academic careers, including suspensions, withheld diplomas and other forms of discipline.
Shafik was among the university leaders who were called for questioning before Congress. She was heavily criticized by Republicans who accused her of not doing enough to combat concerns about antisemitism on the Columbia campus.
She announced her resignation in an emailed letter to the university community just weeks before the start of classes on September 3. The university on Monday began restricting campus access to people with Columbia IDs and registered guests, saying it wanted to curb “potential disruptions” as the new semester draws near.
“This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in the community,” Shafik wrote in her letter. “Over the summer, I have been able to reflect and have decided that my moving on at this point would best enable Columbia to traverse the challenges ahead.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters first set up tent encampments on Columbia’s campus during Shafik’s congressional testimony in mid-April, when she denounced antisemitism but faced criticism for how she responded to faculty and students accused of bias.
The school sent in police to clear the tents the following day, only for the students to return and inspire a wave of similar protests at campuses across the country as students called for schools to cut financial ties with Israel and companies supporting the war.
The campus was mostly quiet this summer, but a conservative news outlet in June published images of what it said were text messages exchanged by administrators while attending a May 31 panel discussion titled “Jewish Life on Campus: Past, Present and Future.”
The officials were removed from their posts, with Shafik saying in a July 8 letter to the school community that the messages were unprofessional and “disturbingly touched on ancient antisemitic tropes.”
Other prominent Ivy League leaders have stepped down in recent months, largely because of their response to the volatile protests on campus.
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned in December after less than two years on the job. She faced pressure from donors and criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing where she was unable to say under repeated questioning that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate the school’s conduct policy.
And in January, Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned amid plagiarism accusations and similar criticism over her testimony before Congress.
Time’s 2024 Kid of the Year
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/times-2024-kid-of-the-year
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-16, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
One advantage of using GitHub for questions tied into a blog is that you get a great archive of all the questions you asked and how people answered or contributed, going back to 2016.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/16.html#a135030
Warren Buffett ditches his near-$1B Snowflake investment
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Oracle of Omaha’s exit follows revenue growth shortfall, CEO switch, and customer data leak
Berkshire Hathaway has offloaded nearly $1 billion in Snowflake stock as it exits the former IPO chart-smashing cloud data warehousing and analytics specialist.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/16/warren_buffett_ditches_snowflake/
Russia’s Post-War Military Recruiting Strategy Emerges
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: RAND blog
Russia’s military recruiting efforts generally include offering higher wages and benefits, tightly managing public engagement and perceptions of the war to suppress bad news, and increasing military–patriotic education in schools to target the next generation of recruits.
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-16, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
BTW,
I’ve started
using
Mastodon in place of GitHub for comments on posts like the one
below. GitHub
has a better model for text with comments, supports full Markdown the
way it was meant to work. I have an instance of Masto that I can use
that supports Markdown but they do an
unacceptable
rendering of links.
Example
post. I want a simple, widely accepted easy place to comment, on the
social web, not Discourse or GitHub, that isn’t controlled by one vendor
(so ActivityPub for now is probably the best approach) and supports
plain old Markdown without any weird embellishments. I don’t work in the
Mastodon world, I’m already committed to the projects I’m doing. But we
could really use something nice, designed to plug into blogs. This is a
good use-case, and it’s pretty close.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/16.html#a134005
A Very Bad Look for Disney
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/08/16/a-very-bad-look-for-disney/
Saw this in the bookstore yesterday: The Missing Thread: A Women’s History…
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045126-saw-this-in-the-bookstore
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-16, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I wrote rules for standards-makers and it caught on, and has been used by a few open source projects. I hope that the new rules for journalism, which is just getting started, will be similarly influential. If existing journalism is going to start working again, they’re going to have to have some rules. Comments welcome on Mastodon.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/16.html#a133136
Hubble Rings in a New Galactic View
date: 2024-08-16, from: NASA breaking news
The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is situated in the Perseus Cluster, also known as Abell 426, 320 million light-years from Earth. It’s a barred spiral galaxy known as MCG+07-07-072, seen here among a number of photobombing stars that are much closer to Earth than it is. MCG+07-07-072 has quite an unusual shape for a […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-rings-in-a-new-galactic-view/
US climate agency: Last month hottest July on record
date: 2024-08-16, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-climate-agency-last-month-hottest-july-on-record/7745283.html
The Viral Paleontologist Who Unearths Pathogens’ Deep Histories
date: 2024-08-16, from: Quanta Magazine
Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer searches museum jars for genetic traces of flu, measles and other viruses. Their evolutionary stories can help treat modern outbreaks and prepare for future ones.The post The Viral Paleontologist Who Unearths Pathogens’ Deep Histories first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Hanging out in urban green spaces helps prevent heart disease, study finds
date: 2024-08-16, from: VOA News USA
Access to nature isn’t just good for your mental health. A long-term study suggests that spending time in green spaces, or by water, can help prevent heart disease. VOA’s Dora Mekouar has more.
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute…
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045125-to-celebrate-the-15th-ann
Windows can now create 2TB FAT32 file systems
date: 2024-08-16, from: OS News
Even though FAT32 supports disk sizes of up to 2TB, and even though Windows can read FAT32 file systems of up to 2TB, Windows can’t actually create them. The maximum file system limit Windows can create with FAT32 is 32GB, a limitation that dates back to Windows 95 which has never been changed. It seems Microsoft is finally changing this with the latest Insider Preview build of Windows 11, as the format command can now finally create FAT32 file systems of up to 2TB. When formatting disks from the command line using the format command, we’ve increased the FAT32 size limit from 32GB to 2TB. ↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc Sadly, this only works through the format command; it’s not yet reflected in the graphical user interface, which is just so typically Microsoft. Of course, most of us will be using exFAT at this point for tasks that require an interoperable file system, but not every device accepts exFAT properly, and even those that do sometimes have issues with exFAT that are not present when using FAT32. A more interesting new addition in this preview build is the Windows Sandbox Client Preview. This build includes the new Windows Sandbox Client Preview that is now updated via the Microsoft Store. As part of this preview, we’re introducing runtime clipboard redirection, audio/video input control, and the ability to share folders with the host at runtime. You can access these via the new “…” icon at the upper right on the app. Additionally, this preview includes a super early version of command line support (commands may change over time). You can use ‘wsb.exe –help’ command for more information. ↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc Windows Sandbox is a pretty cool feature that provides a lightweight desktop environment in which you can run applications entirely sandboxed, separate from your actual Windows installation. Changes and files made in the sandbox do not persist, unless the sandbox is shut down from within the sandbox itself. There’s a whole variety of uses this could be good for, and having it integrated into Windows is awesome. Windows Sandbox is available in Windows Pro or Enterprise – not Home – and is quite easy to use. Open up its window, copy/paste an executable to the sandbox, and run it inside the sandbox. As said, after closing the sandbox, all your changes will be lost. That process is still a bit clunky, but with a bit more work it should be possible for Microsoft to smooth this out, and, say, add an option in the right-click menu to just launch any executable in the sandbox that way.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140513/windows-can-now-create-2tb-fat32-file-systems/
New Zealand minister OKs Kim Dotcom extradition to US
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Entrepreneur vows to keep on buffering
Kim Dotcom, founder and CEO of defunct file hosting service Megaupload, revealed this week that his long-fought extradition to the United States was finally approved.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/16/kim_dotcom_us_extradition/
Think the LA Aqueduct was the city’s first water system? Nope, it’s the Zanja Madre
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: The LAist
The zanja system of pipes and trenches was first built in 1781, and remnants can still be seen in the city today.
https://laist.com/news/la-history/los-angeles-water-zanja-ditch-trench
Starting tomorrow, a very different way of buying or selling homes
date: 2024-08-16, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Some big changes to the real estate market are on the way this weekend. Under a settlement reached earlier this year, the National Association of Realtors is changing rules that determine how real estate agents make their money. Buyers and sellers, this matters to you. Then, a new McKinsey Global Institute report finds it’ll take sweeping transformation to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Vaccine-maker asks EU to extend mpox shot license to adolescents
date: 2024-08-16, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Bavarian Nordic — the manufacturer of the only mpox vaccine — wants to extend the shot’s license in Europe to include those ages 12 to 17, as a more deadly version of the virus spreads largely through young children in Africa. Also on the program: Protests in response to the violent rape and murder of a female doctor in Kolkata has reignited talks of women’s workplace safety.
If a cheesy ’80s flick is a good metaphor for how you run projects, something is wrong
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
There can be only one … annoying management technique
Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has penned a blog that gives further insight into the inner workings of the software titan under Bill Gates’s leadership.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/16/microsoft_highlander/
The Inflation Reduction Act Turns 2
date: 2024-08-16, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: A large wildfire is burning out of control in Izmir, Turkey • Typhoon Ampil has prompted thousands of evacuation orders in Japan • The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that last month was the hottest July ever recorded.
THE TOP FIVE
- Democrats commemorate IRA anniversary with Harris-Walz climate
fundraiser
Today marks the two-year anniversary of the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature climate legislation. To commemorate the event, the Democratic National Committee is hosting a virtual fundraiser for the Harris-Walz presidential campaign at 3pm EDT. The “Climate Voters for Harris Kickoff Call” will highlight the IRA’s accomplishments, and feature comments from former climate envoy John Kerry, Jane Fonda, educator Bill Nye (The Science Guy), and other guests. VP Harris herself will be busy today giving her first major policy speech in North Carolina. She reportedly plans to call for the construction of 3 million new housing units during her first term, a move Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer applauds. After all, he says, housing policy is a climate policy issue: “If America hopes to reach net-zero by 2050, then one of the easiest and cheapest ways for it to do so will be to build more housing, especially in cities and transit-connected suburbs.”
- East Coast skies darkened by Canadian wildfire smoke
Hazy skies have returned to the East Coast as Canadian wildfire smoke drifts across the country. Air quality has been affected in cities including New York, Baltimore, Boston, D.C., and Philadelphia. The smoke is expected to linger today but could disappear this weekend with the arrival of rain.
Climate change is making wildfires more frequent and more destructive. There are nearly 900 fires burning in Canada right now, many of which remain out of control, as illustrated below by the red and purple dots:
Canadian
Interagency Forest Fire Centre
- First U.S. sodium-ion battery gigafactory coming to North Carolina
Leading sodium-ion battery startup Natron Energy announced yesterday it is building a massive $1.4 billion manufacturing plant in North Carolina. Natron already has a facility in Michigan, which is the only commercial scale sodium-ion battery plant in the country. Its new operation will be the first sodium-ion battery gigafactory in the U.S., capable of producing 24GW of batteries every year and representing a 40-times scaling up of production. The factory will create 1,000 clean energy jobs. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham explained, sodium-ion technology “performs roughly the same as lithium-ion in energy storage systems,” but is far more abundant in the U.S. than lithium, cheaper, and also appears less likely to catch fire than lithium-ion. Research and consulting firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence expects to see a 350% jump in announced sodium-ion battery manufacturing capacity this year alone. And while the supply of these batteries is only in the tens of gigawatts today, Benchmark forecasts that it will be in the hundreds of gigawatts by 2030.
- Orsted delays Revolution Wind project
Danish renewable energy company Orsted, the world’s largest offshore wind developer, announced yesterday it is pushing back the launch of its Revolution Wind project, located off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The project is now expected to start commercial operations in 2026 instead of 2025. The construction delay will cost Orsted $472 million. The company also abandoned its plan to develop green fuels for various industries including shipping and aviation, even though it had already begun construction on the plant. In total, Orsted recorded $575 million in impairment losses in the second quarter of this year.
- Carbon Mapper methane satellite set for launch today
Yet another methane satellite is launching into orbit today, as early as 11:19 a.m. Pacific time, on a SpaceX rocket. Developed by a coalition of public and private partners and led by the nonprofit Carbon Mapper, the Tanager-1 satellite’s precision imaging helps fill a gap in the methane detection universe and complements the abilities of MethaneSAT, the Environmental Defense Fund-developed, Google-backed satellite launched back in March. “While MethaneSAT can detect the total emissions emanating from a particular basin, state, or country, Carbon Mapper can zoom in to figure out what’s going on within 50 meters of accuracy so that operators and regulators can be notified,” explained Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. If you want to watch the launch live, you can do so here.
THE KICKER
Tesla is selling a stainless steel cooler for its Cybertruck that can hold 90 canned beverages and “keep perishables cold and ice frozen for days at a time.” It costs $700.
https://heatmap.news/politics/the-inflation-reduction-act-turns-2
P&B: Ploum
date: 2024-08-16, from: Manu - I write blog
<p>This is the 51st edition of <em>People and Blogs</em>, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Lionel "Ploum" Dricot and his blog, <a href="https://ploum.net">ploum.net</a></p>To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.
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Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?
You should, like my wife and my children, call me Ploum!
I’m a 43 years Belgian writer, free software developer and blogger. I write novels (in French) and teach open source development at École Polytechnique de Louvain. I’m also a cyclist and a freediver. As a native French speaker, I apalogise for the English mistakes. Please read my answer with an atrocious French accent.
On the Wikipedia page about me, the first word next to my name is “blogueur” (blogger in French). I conclude that my most important activity is being a blogger. All important things in my life happened, directly or indirectly, because of my blog.
I’ve been hired in most of my professional positions because of my blog. I’ve met my wife because, after reading a tweet of mine that went viral, she started to read my blog. I’ve written the first book ever about Ubuntu because of my blog. I’ve met my current publisher through my blog. I’ve even started doing long distance bikepacking trips thanks to Thierry Crouzet, a French writer that I knew for years because we were reading each other blog.
My blog is thus irremediably linked to my identity. I would say that the only part of my life insulated from my blog is my passion for freediving. Being a freediver at heart but living far from the sea, I’ve been practising under water hockey for years. It allows me to spend time at the bottom of the pool.
What’s the story behind your blog?
I started my first website in 1998, a few weeks after my parents got an Internet connection. I quickly had multiple websites, one of them being a kind of online journal for which I was updating a monthly page by hand. I also started a quite popular generalist wiki which attracted many external contributors.
Around 2002, I declared that blog was just a stupid name for what was a normal website, that I would never have a blog myself. I’m a visionary, you see. In 1995, after trying to browse the web for the first time on a friend’s computer, I’ve said that the web had no future, that it was only a temporary fad.
At the same time, I was very active on many different forums. Remember forums? I was often repeating myself on them and posting same stuff for various communities. So, at some point, I wanted to centralise all my writing in one place. Inspired by the blogger Tristan Nitot, I installed the Dotclear CMS and opened my blog.
On forums, my avatar was often a small Waldo from the “Where is Waldo?” books. A roommate suggested that if I ever started a blog, it should be called “Where is Ploum?” So I called my first blog with that name on a subdomain from one of my websites.
There was also a hidden motivation behind the blog. At the time, I was really involved in a project called “no-name-yet” that would soon become public. And I wanted a platform to spread the word about that project. That “no-name-yet” was later released under the name “Ubuntu”. So it happens that my blog has the exact same age as Ubuntu and shares a lot of its history.
Writing on my blog quickly became a lifestyle. The success of my blog also took me by surprise: people I didn’t know were reading me, commenting, contacting me, inviting me to conferences. For 4 years, I used Dotclear. As a side gig, I started a small business hosting people’s blogs on a Dotclear version 2 platform but kept Dotclear version 1 for my own blog.
In 2008, I eventually migrated to Wordpress because it was the de facto standard in the industry. I’ve always been self-hosted and made sure to import all my old blog posts. Beside a theme change, the migration was totally transparent for my readers. Even URLs were kept because cool URLs never change.
I started to hate Wordpress more every year but, despite multiple attempts, I could not get rid of it. In 2020, I encountered the Gemini protocol and started a gemlog (a blog on Gemini), completely separated from my blog. It started to grow and I wanted to integrate my gemlog posts into my historical blog (that I was still using).
In 2022, I had a “Eureka” moment. Instead of integrating my gemlog into my wordpress blog, I would do the opposite and import all my historical blog posts into my gemlog. Then, I would make an HTML version of my gemlog.
I called that “the last version of ploum.net” because I’m not dependent anymore on any external tools. Everything is now done through a handmade python script. All I have to do is to write text files in the Gemtext format. It cannot be simpler.
What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?
Firstly, I never force myself to write or publish. I don’t have any schedule or any mandatory thing to do.
Every single post is there because I wanted to write it and publish it. I’ve been through many iterations of my creative process, using stuff like Evernote or other. I threw it all away.
I simply have an “inbox” folder where there are drafts in gemtext format. They could linger there for months or years. Sometimes, they are published one hour after starting them. There’s no rule.
I’ve been greatly influenced by Cory Doctorow and his memex method. In my inbox, I keep a “today.gmi” file in which I write small reflections and links to interesting articles. When the file is bigger than 1000 words, I try to give it a direction, I reorder the nuggets and publish it without thinking too much about it.
As a consequence, my blog is a mix of focused posts that took a long time to write, focused posts that were written in a whim and posts containing random thoughts and links. I let you try to guess in which category is a given post.
The gemtext format had a great influence on my process. It doesn’t allow inline links and forces a link to be alone on its own line. This constraint was a liberating tool. Instead of putting links everywhere in my posts, I started to really think about each link. A link can only be added if it is clear why it is there and if it is not interrupting too much the reading flow. Which means that it should add real value for the reader. I feel my writing greatly improved because of this. I can write without thinking in HTML, without thinking about the links. Every post is a standalone with optional links for readers who want to investigate more the subject.
I must add that I write my own journal on a mechanical typewriter. Sometimes, I realise that an entry could be made public so I copy it to a file by hand (I’ve tried OCR but without much success. It is easier to copy everything by hand as it allows me to make corrections).
One day, I will write a whole book about my typewriter creative process.
Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?
Yes, I do believe that the body associate a physical space with a given activity. It is a learned habit. The bad news is that my body learned that my home office is the place to answer emails, read stuff and do administrative work.
When I need to work on a new book, I often need to walk away. I would take my typewriter in a hotel room or a cabin in the wood and spend multiple days disconnected to « just write ».
I also hate every single noise and don’t listen to music during the creative phase. But I may listen to loud metal, punk rock or classic music during all the “boring” steps: proofreading, general corrections, spelling, etc.
Hopefully, writing blog posts is now part of my daily automatic tasks so I can do it in my home office.
The editor is also important. I’ve been using Gedit, Pyroom, Ulysses, Zettlr. But, a few years ago, I decided to really improve my Vim skills and I’m now doing everything in Vim without any plugins nor special configuration. Vim and my Bépo keyboard are unbeatable power tools. I see my writing on the screen before thinking of it.
A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?
I’ve told above the history of my blogs. The current setup is quite interesting.
I write gemtext files and give them a name that starts with the date such as “2024-06-25-blogpost.gmi”. When this is done, I have a simple python script that does two things: first it creates an index.gmi file with a list of all blog posts in anti-chronological order. This is the gemini capsule. Then, the python file convert all the gemtext into html, creating the website itself.
There are some subtleties: the script also handle the atom feed, the fact that I write in French and English (thus generating two indexes) and send an email version for my mailing-list subscribers. But everything is done by one python file without any dependency. It is extremely simple.
The HTML template itself has around 40 lines of CSS and nothing else. Very clean, very efficient, very fast to load even on bad connections.
Currently, I host it on Sourcehut. It allows me to simply do a “git push” and have the HTML version generated on the server. Sourcehut is also, to my knowledge, one of the only Gemini hosting providers.
But if I had to move, it would be only a matter of changing my git remote.
I don’t need to backup anything from the server side: my blog and all its history are now in a git repository.
It should be highlighted than I’m a command-line junkie. So I do everything in Vim and even developed a command-line offline-first browser to read Gemini, RSS and other blogs. It is called Offpunk .
So, yeah, my screen is fully black with tiled terminals. I live with Neovim, Offpunk, Neomutt and a couple of bash/python scripts. This is so comfy that I’m frustrated each time I need to open Firefox or any other GUI application.
Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?
My blog is exactly where I want it to be. If I had to start again, I would simply do it like I did in 2022. I was quick to remove any form of comments from my blog and, later, any kind of statistics. As far as I know, I’m one of the few strong advocates for the complete removal of statistics/analytic/tracking tools. It’s not ethical to spy on users but it is also completely counterproductive. Statistics on websites are a brainworm. People are obsessed by it and it makes them write dumb stuff in order to increase a dumb counter. Getting rid of any audience-measuring tool is one of the best things I did in 2013.
There’s another thing I want to say to past me if time travel is ever invented: don’t fall into the social networks trap!
I’ve spent way too many time chasing followers on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and Google+. I’ve written many interesting stuff on those platforms, thinking they were not “interesting enough” for my blog. I regret all I’ve written on proprietary platforms. My blog is my personal history and I plan to keep it until I die.
I’ve completely deleted all my social network accounts and never felt so free. Ironically, the less I was using social networks, the more readers I had on my blog. Social networks don’t bring you an audience. This is a lie! Social networks distract you from your real work and prevent your audience from reaching you. That’s their whole business! I know how frightening it is to delete permanently an account with thousands of followers. But this number is also a lie.
Removing permanently those accounts (and not merely “deactivating them”, as I’ve done multiple times before) changed my life and my blog.
The only account I still have is a Mastodon account. That I access through the command-line “toot”. You can find me there if you really like but I don’t encourage you to follow me. Use RSS!
https://mamot.fr/@ploum - @ploum@mamot.fr
I don’t use Mastodon to reach an audience but only to communicate with interesting people. I hope Mastodon will one day hide the followers counter so we stop being obsessed with those silly numbers.
Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?
In 2006, I experimented with advertising on my blog, earning something between 35€ and 100€ every month (through Google).
I quickly realised the moral implications of that money and now consider that advertising is, by essence, a scam. Its goal is to make us consume stuff we don’t need and, in the process, make people dishonest. If you earn money through advertising, you are, by definition, dishonest. You cannot be honest as the whole definition of advertising is paying you to be dishonest. All in the name of destroying our natural resources as fast as possible.
Later, I was one of the first French bloggers to popularise the concept of “prix libre” (free price in French), asking my readers to make free donations. I managed to earn a regular income between 200€-300€ per month, mainly on the Flattr platform but also through direct donations. This was well before Patreon and similar platforms.
This experience was awesome. I was paid but I also received pictures, hand-written letters of support, nice messages. People really understood that it was not about money only, it was about supporting my work. I can never thank enough those who supported me.
With the advent of platforms like Patreon, the “free price” concept become a bit too popular for my taste. Everybody was asking for money. Also, I started to publish books. Now, I ask people that want to support me to simply buy my books. It’s the best way to support me but to also support my publisher (who took the risk of putting most of his catalogue into the Creative Commons license) and to support small bookstore.
Running the blog itself is cheap. 10€/year for a domain. To support the project, I decided to pay the maximum tier for Sourcehut, which is 100€/year. All in all, my blog costs me less than 10€ per month.
In 20 years, I’ve published ±900 blog posts. With all the pictures, this amount to less than 150Mo. If it was really needed, it could probably be hosted for next to nothing. Blogging is really cheap.
Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?
I read many blogs and gemlogs. The whole Gemini community is really interesting as it reminds me of the blogosphere I was reading in 2003-2004.
Maybe the most interesting are people I’m still reading after all those years, people that have a great influence on how I blog.
- Tristan Nitot (in French)
- Thierry Crouzet (in French)
- Cory Doctorow (in English)
I’m still reading and was also influenced a lot by Low-Tech Magazine:
- Low-Tech Magazine (in English)
For those that would like to try discovering Gemini and its gemlogs, I recommend starting with those two aggregators:
- Antenna - gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
- Cosmos - gemini://skyjake.fi/~Cosmos/recent.gmi
There are many gemlogs I like but you should probably follow Solderpunk as he’s the creator of the Gemini protocol.
- Solderpunk’s gemlog - gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/
Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?
I think I’ve covered it all about myself in all the previous questions. I’m currently working on several novels and one book about the history of computer science.
As that last one is in English and as we discuss translating my novels with my publisher, I find myself increasingly wanting to work with a literary agent. If you happen to know one, I would be happy to be put in touch.
And to all blog readers across the world: use RSS readers! Those are awesome and allows you to quickly subscribe/unsubscribe at your own pace.
This was the 51st edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Ploum. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.
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Equinix pilots use of fuel cell in ‘shipping container’ outside datacenter
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Future of low carbon sustainable tech? Not so fast, this is still a trial and only for backup power
Equinix is moving forward with trials of fuel cell technology as an alternative backup power source, revealing it has a demonstration unit at one of its facilities in Dublin, Ireland.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/16/equinix_shows_off_demo_fuel/
The Bright Side of the Trump-Musk Summit
date: 2024-08-16, from: Heatmap News
When Donald Trump speaks at length — at a rally, at a press conference, or in an interview — subsequent news reports often clean up his remarks through well-placed ellipses and generous paraphrases, imposing a coherence nowhere to be found in the original. So it was with his recent conversation with Elon Musk on X, during which the two spent a fair amount of time laying out their deep thoughts on climate change, to the horror of many observers. (Bill McKibben called it “The dumbest climate conversation of all time.”)
At the risk of being too kind to both men, there was a silver lining to be found in their tête-à-tête, even if its purpose was to help get Trump back in the White House. For all he has devolved into a right-wing internet troll, Musk might convince Trump — and the millions who follow them both — to shift their perspective on climate change a critical few degrees in a useful direction.
That’s not to say the Trump-Musk confab wasn’t uncommonly stupid, because it was. In addition to a litany of false statements and odd non sequiturs, Trump was illogically dismissive of climate concerns: “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years and you’ll have more oceanfront property.” He also lamented the imaginary fact that “you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle,” an area apparently of deep concern to him; elsewhere he has claimed that Kamala Harris “wants to pass laws to outlaw red meat to stop climate change.” Neither of these things is remotely true (though farmers forced to sell their cattle due to drought are now eligible for extra tax relief as of 2022).
The Tesla chief offered his own brand of misinformation; like many a semi-informed autodidact, he often says things that are true in some sense but deeply misleading. Talking about carbon in the atmosphere, he told Trump, “Eventually, it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe. People don’t realize this. If you go past 1,000 parts per million of CO2, you start getting headaches and nausea. And so we’re now in the sort of 400 range … we still have quite a bit of time. We don’t need to rush.” While it’s true that it would be difficult to breathe at a CO2 concentration of 1,000 parts per million, the danger of rising carbon emissions isn’t that someday we might all choke to death; as climate scientist Michael Mann said in response, by the time we reach that point the myriad effects of climate change “will be so devastating as to have already caused societal collapse.”
On the whole, the interview showed Musk praising Trump and nodding along with some of the former president’s loopier statements, but eventually attempting to convince him that carbon emissions can be lowered painlessly (albeit in ways that would just happen to make Musk even richer). “People can still have a steak and they can still drive gasoline cars, and it’s okay,” he reassured Trump. “When you look at our cars, we don’t believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer. So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they’re fast, they’re sexy. They’re cool,” Musk said, concluding that “I’m a big fan of, let’s have an inspiring future and let’s work towards a better future.”
That has always been Musk’s position, and while one certainly might disagree with parts of his argument (or his prior claim that “I’ve done more for the environment than any single human on Earth”), if the goal were to talk Trump into lessening his opposition to any and all efforts to mitigate climate change, that might be the only way to do it. Even in the course of the conversation one could see Trump coming around, at least here and there. “I’m sort of waiting for you to come up with solar panels on the roofs of your cars,” he told Musk. “I’m sure you’ll be the first, but it would seem that a solar panel on the roofs, on flat surfaces, on certain surfaces might be good, at least in certain areas of the country or the world where you have the sun.” There are already a number of cars with solar panels on their roofs — no one is waiting for Musk to devise one — but the fact of Trump speaking positively about any kind of solar power is more significant than whether he is aware of the latest technology.
For the moment, Trump’s bromance with Musk — or marriage of convenience — has even led the former president to moderate his rhetoric on electric vehicles, which he has often condemned in the past. “I’m constantly talking about electric vehicles but I don’t mean I’m against them. I’m totally for them,” he said at a rally in July. “I’ve driven them and they are incredible, but they’re not for everybody.”
None of this is to say that Trump has anything but a deeply reactionary climate agenda. The oil magnates pouring money into his campaign are not being fooled about the return they can expect on their investment. The Republican nominee himself may have few fixed ideas about climate, but the people he appoints to another administration and the Republicans in Congress that support him will be committed to rolling back President Biden’s climate programs and finding new ways to promote fossil fuels and undermine the policy changes that are beginning to reduce emissions.
Nevertheless, rhetoric does matter, and Trump doesn’t have to become a climate hawk to begin influencing his admirers to see the issue in a slightly different way. Even if all it means is that they become a little more open to looking at climate mitigation as not a dire threat to their way of life, but rather something that won’t make much of difference to them one way or the other — in other words, if they move from being hostile to climate efforts to being simply indifferent — that would be a significant change.
The theory behind favoring carrots over sticks in climate policy — more subsidies, fewer mandates — is in part that diffusing opposition is an important component of policy success. If Elon Musk encourages Trump to start talking about climate in ways that make addressing the problem sound less threatening to his supporters, it couldn’t hurt.
https://heatmap.news/politics/trump-musk-live-batteries
Australia, US look to joint production of hypersonic missile, US lawmaker says
date: 2024-08-16, from: VOA News USA
SYDNEY — Joint production of hypersonic missiles by Australia and the United States could reduce strain on the U.S. defense industrial base and boost deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region, U.S. Republican lawmaker Michael McCaul said in Sydney on Friday.
In an interview, the chair of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee said the Australian manufacture of the cutting-edge weapons provided an example of how streamlined licensing of sensitive U.S. defense technology, and license exemptions on 70% of defense exports to Australia from September 1, would help the U.S. compete with China in developing advanced weapons.
Hypersonic missiles, which travel in the upper atmosphere more than five times faster than sound, were tested by China in 2021, prompting a technology race with the United States. Their recent use by Russia in the Ukraine war, sparked concern among members of NATO.
A Chinese hypersonic weapon “could hit Australia in a matter of minutes and Australia cannot stop that right now. So we need to catch up to that,” McCaul said.
“I was at a hypersonic company just yesterday and we want to move towards co-production,” he added.
“It is already starting and that is the exciting thing and it will help relieve the stress that we see on the defense industrial base,” he added.
Australia is testing a Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) with the United States, which it will consider as its first such weapon for fighter jets, the defense and foreign ministers of the two countries said after talks last week.
McCaul said his visit focused on the AUKUS partnership with the United States and Britain to transfer nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, as well as develop other advanced defense technologies.
The AUKUS alliance was an example of a U.S. ally spending more on its own defense, he said, when asked if a reelected Donald Trump would continue to back a growing U.S. defense posture in Australia, and the sale of U.S. nuclear submarines next decade.
AUKUS talks had started under the Republican Trump presidency, he added.
“I think there will be strong support for it,” he said.
Rotations of U.S. nuclear submarines through Australia under AUKUS are a deterrent factor in the region, where the Philippines is under pressure from China in the South China Sea, he said, after visiting the Philippines.
“Chairman Xi, I think, fears this alliance more than anything else because he knows what it means - it means that nuclear submarines will be rotating, but also these innovative technologies that we have,” he added, in a reference to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In Beijing this week, the Chinese foreign ministry said AUKUS “harms efforts” to keep the region peaceful and secure and exacerbates the arms race.
PeerJ Award Winners at IBC 2024
date: 2024-08-16, from: PeerJ blog
The XXth International Botanical Congress (IBC) was recently held at IFEMA in Madrid from July 21st to July 27th, bringing together a remarkable assembly of 3,011 delegates. This prestigious event featured over 1,500 oral presentations across more than 200 symposia and showcased over 1,600 poster presentations, reflecting the vibrant and diverse field of botanical science. […]
https://peerj.com/blog/post/115284889585/peerj-award-winners-at-ibc-2024/
UK farm ministry offers £27M to support legacy systems for another three years
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Controversial payment systems set for another lease of life
The UK’s government department for farming and the environment is offering up to £27 million to keep its controversial legacy farm payments systems running for another three years as it develops a replacement.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/16/uk_farm_ministry_offers_27m/
From windfarms to Amazon Prime, UK plans to long range test six drone services
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
BVLOS operations to modernize airspace
The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has approved six new trials to test the use of drones in deliveries, inspections and emergency services, including one from e-commerce megabiz Amazon.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/16/uk_test_drones_bvlos/
Client tells techie: You’re not leaving the country until this printer is working
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A long and strange tech support story that starts in Africa and ends in a Presidential Suite
On Call Welcome yet again to On Call, the reader-contributed column in which The Register immortalizes readers’ stories of escaping tech support traumas.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/16/on_call/
Today in SCV History (Aug. 16)
date: 2024-08-16, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1956 – Battle of Palmdale rages over the skies of Santa Clarita [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-aug-16/
Webcurios 16/08/24
date: 2024-08-16, from: Web Curios blog
Reading Time: 37 minutes Look, I need to be honest with you – I am VERY VERY TIRED. For reasons literally none of you need or want to know about, this has been a week of relatively-minimal shuteye and as such I have written what follows through a general fug of insomniac incomprehension – can we all pretend that…https://webcurios.co.uk/webcurios-16-08-24/
Chancellor Henry Yang Is Retiring After 30 Years
date: 2024-08-16, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The longest serving Chancellor in UC Santa Barbara’s history.
The post Chancellor Henry Yang Is Retiring After 30 Years appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/15/chancellor-henry-yang-is-retiring-after-30-years/
A Better Way to Do News
date: 2024-08-16, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog
Twelfth in the News Commons series Last week at DWeb Camp, I gave a talk titled The Future, Present, and Past of News—and Why Archives Anchor It All. Here’s a frame from a phone video: DWeb Camp is a wonderful gathering, hosted by the Internet Archive at Camp Navarro in Northern California. In this post I’ll […]
https://doc.searls.com/2024/08/15/better-way-to-do-news/
Hurricane Ernesto moves toward Bermuda
date: 2024-08-16, from: VOA News USA
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — U.S. forecasters said Hurricane Ernesto remained a category 2 storm Friday as it churns in the Atlantic Ocean on a path toward the island of Bermuda, where it is predicted to bring high winds, heavy rain and strong surf.
At last report, Ernesto was about 415 kilometers (258 miles) south-southwest of Bermuda and was moving to the north-northeast at 20 kph (13 mph). It has maximum sustained winds of 155 kph (about 100 mph).
A hurricane warning remains in effect for Bermuda, where Ernesto is expected to produce 15 to 30 centimeters (up to 12 inches) of rain with isolated maximum amounts up 38 centimeters (15 inches). Forecasters said this could result in considerable life-threatening flash flooding.
Officials in the British territory announced Thursday they would suspend public transportation and close the airport by Friday night. National Security Minister Michael Weeks had urged people to complete their hurricane preparations by Thursday.
While forecasters initially predicted Ernesto would continue to strengthen and possibly become a major storm — a Category 3 hurricane or stronger — by the time it reached Bermuda, they now say that strengthening seemingly halted overnight, although it has not lost its punch.
Ernesto was expected to strengthen further Friday before it passes near or over Bermuda sometime Saturday.
Forecasters said the size is generally larger than their previous forecast, with hurricane-force winds extending outward up to 110 kilometers (68 miles) from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extending outward up to 425 kilometers (265 miles), so the life-threatening hazards from Ernesto are unchanged.
Even though Ernesto is expected to remain well off the U.S. East Coast, forecasters said the storm is expected to generate swells along the shoreline into the weekend. The swells could pose a significant risk of life-threatening surf and rip currents.
High surf and rip currents are also possible in the northern Caribbean along the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Turks and Caicos, and the Bahamas
during the next few days.
Ernesto brought heavy wind and rain to the northern Caribbean as it moved through Wednesday. It knocked out power, downed trees and forced schools and businesses to close in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, where many of the island’s businesses and homes lost power.
Ernesto is the fifth named storm and the third hurricane of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season.
Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press.
Aug. 19: Road Rehab Overlay Construction Begins in Saugus
date: 2024-08-16, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The city of Santa Clarita has announced that the Road Rehab Overlay Program which will start construction on residential streets in various neighborhoods throughout the city is kicking off in Saugus on Monday, Aug. 19.
https://scvnews.com/aug-19-road-rehab-overlay-construction-begins-in-saugus/
Oct. 5: Fil-Am of SCV 2024 Annual Cultural Festival
date: 2024-08-16, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Fil-Am Association of SCV, Inc. and Santa Clarita Sister Cities Program will present the 2024 Annual Cultural Festival, “Bakasyon Sa Pinas” (Vacation in the Philippines) in celebration of Filipino American History Month on Saturday, Oct.
https://scvnews.com/oct-5-fil-am-of-scv-2024-annual-cultural-festival/
Launch This
date: 2024-08-16, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
I just wanted to thank Nick Welsh for all his fabulous reporting throughout the years.
The post Launch This appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/15/launch-this/
TMU Ranks No. 1 for Student Life Among California Christian Colleges
date: 2024-08-16, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Master’s University has been ranked as having the best student life among Christian colleges in California, according to the 2024 numbers for mid-sized colleges released by Niche, a leading college review and ranking site
https://scvnews.com/tmu-ranks-no-1-for-student-life-among-california-christian-colleges/
Matadors Open Exhibition Play with 6-1 Win Over TMU
date: 2024-08-16, from: SCV New (TV Station)
California State University, Northridge Men’s Soccer recently opened up exhibition play with a 6-1 victory over The Master’s University at Matador Soccer Field
https://scvnews.com/matadors-open-exhibition-play-with-6-1-win-over-tmu/
Chamber Announces 2024 Candidate Forum
date: 2024-08-16, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Valley Chamber announced Thursday their Election Watch 2024 Candidate Forum, an essential event designed for local business and community members to engage with candidates ahead of the November elections
https://scvnews.com/chamber-announces-2024-candidate-forum/
Reckoning: Part 4 — The Way Out
date: 2024-08-16, updated: 2024-08-16, from: Alex Russel’s blog
https://infrequently.org/2024/08/the-way-out/
Highlighting Community Starter Packs
date: 2024-08-16, from: Bluesky web news
Join a starter pack today!
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-16-2024-community-starter-packs
ChatGPT app for Mac
date: 2024-08-15, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog
So I went to the ChatGPT website to ask a question and got hit with a popover promo for the new Mac app version. So I got it. Here is the dialog that followed my first question (which is boring, so we’ll skip it), copied over from the ChatGPT website, where I went after this […]
https://doc.searls.com/2024/08/15/chatgpt-app-for-mac/
Wilk’s Bill to Reduce Animal Shelter Overcrowding Clears Hurdle
date: 2024-08-15, from: SCV New (TV Station)
California State Sen. Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, announced Thursday his bill to help reduce overcrowding at animal shelters across the state, by expanding access to low and no-cost spay/neuter services, will advance to the Assembly Floor after making it off of the Assembly Appropriations Committee’s Suspense File
https://scvnews.com/wilks-bill-to-reduce-animal-shelter-overcrowding-clears-hurdle/
Bond voyage: Supporters yank California’s largest-ever affordable housing measure
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The LAist
Backers pulled a $20-billion affordable housing bond off Bay Area ballots Thursday amid fears that it wouldn’t pass.
A Safer Way to Retrieve Rare Earth Elements Used in Electronics
date: 2024-08-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The world is going to need a lot of weird metals in the coming years, according to chemistry professor Justin Wilson at UC Santa Barbara.
The post A Safer Way to Retrieve Rare Earth Elements Used in Electronics appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Santa Barbara Rescue Mission Announces Their 23rd Annual Event Passport to the Bayou Fundraiser to Remember and Honor Rob Fredericks
date: 2024-08-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, CA – Santa Barbara Rescue Mission is holding its twenty-third annual fundraiser on Saturday, October 5, 2024, at
The post Santa Barbara Rescue Mission Announces Their 23rd Annual Event Passport to the Bayou Fundraiser to Remember and Honor Rob Fredericks appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
JCI Santa Clarita Hosting Two Upcoming Training Opportunities
date: 2024-08-15, from: SCV New (TV Station)
JCI Santa Clarita is happy to share two training opportunities for the month of August.
https://scvnews.com/jci-santa-clarita-hosting-two-upcoming-training-opportunities/
Name that Ware, August 2024
date: 2024-08-15, from: Bunnie’s Studio Blog
The Ware for August 2024 is shown below. Thanks to Howie M for contributing this ware!
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2024/name-that-ware-august-2024/
Winner, Name that Ware July 2024
date: 2024-08-15, from: Bunnie’s Studio Blog
The ware for July 2024 is an Ingenico Axium DX8000. I hadn’t had a chance to tear down a modern POS terminal myself, so it was pretty interesting to see all the anti-tamper traces built into the product (thank you jackw01 for sharing it!). I wonder how effective these are, and how they mitigate manufacturing […]
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2024/winner-name-that-ware-july-2024/
Southern California Student Wins NASA Scholarship
date: 2024-08-15, from: NASA breaking news
Sabrina Redifer, a 2024 graduate of Quartz Hill High School in Lancaster, California, won a NASA College Scholarship Award. Redifer plans to major this fall in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned a 4.0 grade-point average – a weighted GPA of 5.29 – and ranked fourth academically […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/southern-california-student-wins-nasa-scholarship/
L.A. County’s Court Reporter Shortage Worsening
date: 2024-08-15, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Superior Court of Los Angeles County unveiled Thursday a Court Reporter Crisis Dashboard, available [here], which highlights the staggering number of court proceedings in Los Angeles County that have taken place without any verbatim record because of the well-documented court reporter shortage and continued statutory restrictions on electronic recording, as well as outcome data relating to the Court’s extraordinary efforts to recruit and retain court reporters to fill its over 125 vacancies, Presiding Judge Samantha P. Jessner and Executive Officer/Clerk of Court David W. Slayton announced
https://scvnews.com/l-a-countys-court-reporter-shortage-worsening/
Drive Smart for Back-to-School Month: Slow and Look for Children
date: 2024-08-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, CA – August 15, 2024 As summer draws to a close and students prepare to return to school,
The post Drive Smart for Back-to-School Month: Slow and Look for Children appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Film Review | Adventures with an Emotional Posse
date: 2024-08-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
An ultimately feel-good animated Film, “Inside Out 2” takes on teen life, from an emotional command post.
The post Film Review | Adventures with an Emotional Posse appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/15/film-review-adventures-with-an-emotional-posse/
Oil-Trucking Proposal Hits Bump in Road at Santa Barbara County Planning Commission
date: 2024-08-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Santa Barbara County Action Network has appealed Sentinel Peak Resources’ permit to construct a truck loading facility near Lompoc that would allow the company to truck an average of six tanker loads of crude daily to Coalinga for up to 50 years.
The post Oil-Trucking Proposal Hits Bump in Road at Santa Barbara County Planning Commission appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Long Beach to use Supreme Court’s Grants Pass ruling to clear encampments of unhoused people
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The LAist
The city is upping enforcement of its anti-camping ordinances and will cite people for setting-up encampments or sleeping in public.
Man Fatally Struck by Car While Entering Parked Vehicle on Side of Highway 101 in Gaviota
date: 2024-08-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Bystanders attempted to revive the man, who was sideswiped by a passing vehicle on the southbound shoulder of the highway on Thursday.
The post Man Fatally Struck by Car While Entering Parked Vehicle on Side of Highway 101 in Gaviota appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Musk is just getting started
date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Podcast: 11 minutes.
I see happy talk all over the place that Twitter is done, Musk is killing it, blah blah blah.
It’s bullshit. In the next few months Twitter is going to morph into the political system that Barack Obama could have and should have built.
It turns out creating a president of the United States is worth a lot of money. Trump is inept at squeezing the money out of it, he’s a loudmouth who proved one thing, Twitter is all you needed in 2016 to get elected president. That’s going to change, as competition shows up (Zuckerberg, for example, with Threads).
They know, even if you don’t – that it can be very profitable to own the presidency.
If Trump loses, Musk won’t get it on this round, but eventually he will own a big piece of the president, and then he will move his deals with SpaceX and Tesla up a notch.
Listen to the podcast, it’s only 11 minutes. You probably haven’t considered this angle, but I promise you he’s moving, and he’s mostly unopposed right now. He’s not the nudnick so many people seem to think he is.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/15/214026.html?title=muskIsJustGettingStarted
Geospatial AI Foundation Model Team Receives NASA Marshall Group Achievement Award
date: 2024-08-15, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s science efforts aim to empower scientists with the tools to perform research into our planet and universe. To this end, a collaborative effort between NASA and IBM created an AI geospatial foundation model, which was released as an open-source application in 2024. Trained on vast amounts of NASA Earth science data, the foundation model […]
https://science.nasa.gov/open-science/geospatial-artificial-intelligence-team-award/
Biden’s remarks on Venezuela prompt questions over US policy
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
white house — President Joe Biden said Thursday he supports new elections in Venezuela, giving a VOA reporter a two-word response — “I do” — when asked “do you support new elections in Venezuela?”
Brazil’s leader had proposed a rerun of the July 28 election, which the White House says opposition challenger Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia won. Protests have bubbled up in the wake of President Nicolas Maduro’s victory claim, and the leader of the opposition is calling for massive protests this Saturday.
But the administration told VOA hours later that Biden understood VOA’s question differently, leaving it unclear whether this represents a shift in Washington’s position on Venezuela’s political crisis.
A National Security Council spokesperson reiterated the administration’s stance, telling VOA in an email that Biden “was speaking to the absurdity of Maduro and his representatives not coming clean about the July 28 elections.”
“It is abundantly clear to the majority of the Venezuelan people, the United States, and a growing number of countries that Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia won the most votes on July 28. The United States again calls for the will of the Venezuelan people to be respected and for discussions to begin on a transition back to democratic norms.”
The spokesperson did not say definitively where Biden stands on whether the election should be repeated.
Earlier Thursday, an NSC spokesperson told VOA that the Biden administration is “considering a range of options to incentivize and pressure Maduro to recognize the election results and will continue to do so.”
White House seeks vote data
Separately, White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby told reporters: “We want to see the actual vote tallies, the data, and we haven’t seen that yet. So, we still need to see that.”
Kirby also added, “it is not true that there’s been amnesty offered to Mr. Maduro” as part of any deal to resolve the crisis.
Shortly after the election, Maduro began cracking down on political opponents, prompting rights groups to sound the alarm.
Strained ties
Washington has long had strained ties with Caracas, Venezuela, caused by ideological differences with the left-leaning country, doubts about the validity of previous elections, U.S. sanctions on officials over human rights abuses, and crippling American economic sanctions on the oil-rich nation.
Venezuela’s situation has led to a northward exodus of millions of Venezuelans, leaving both American authorities and those migrants in a delicate position.
Celia Mendoza, Carolina Valladares and Patsy Widakuswara contributed to this story.
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-remarks-on-venezuela-prompt-questions-over-us-policy/7744469.html
Maxtang NX-N100 is a fanless mini PC with an Intel N100 Alder Lake-N processor
date: 2024-08-15, from: Liliputing
The Maxtang NX-N100 is a small fanless PC with support for up to 32GB of DDR4 memory, up to three displays, and two 2.5 GbE Ethernet ports. It’s powered by a 6-watt, quad-core Intel Processor N100 Alder Lake-N processor. The little computer went on sale in Japan last summer, but wasn’t widely available in other […]
The post Maxtang NX-N100 is a fanless mini PC with an Intel N100 Alder Lake-N processor appeared first on Liliputing.
Disney claims agreeing to Disney+ terms waives man’s right to sue over wife’s death
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
NYU doc died from allergic reaction after eating at Florida resort pub
Walt Disney Parks and Resorts wants a wrongful death lawsuit filed against it and one of its tenants, an Irish pub, to be booted from court into arbitration.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/disney_plus_death_lawsuit_waive/
FlightAware Exposed Pilots’ and Users’ Info
date: 2024-08-15, from: 404 Media Group
The popular flight tracking website informed users that it inadvertently exposed user data, including names, physical addresses, aircraft owned, pilot status, and flights tracked.
https://www.404media.co/flightaware-exposed-pilots-and-users-info-2/
US applauds Sudan’s decision to open Adre border crossing with Chad
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The United States welcomed Thursday’s announcement by Sudan’s sovereign council to allow the use of the Adre border crossing with Chad for three months, while continuing efforts to bring both sides of Sudan’s warring military factions to the negotiating table.
The opening of the Adre border crossing is a long-awaited move by aid organizations aiming to deliver humanitarian assistance to famine-threatened areas of the Darfur region. The war-torn country faces one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
We “welcome the news as it relates to this border crossing with Chad,” State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told VOA during a briefing on Thursday. “We are continuing to call on the SAF [Sudanese Armed Forces] and RSF [Rapid Support Forces] to facilitate unrestricted humanitarian access through any and all available channels.”
The United States has invited leaders from both warring factions to Geneva, Switzerland, for talks aimed at negotiating a potential cease-fire to end the 16-month civil war.
The SAF had already rejected the talks several days earlier, while the RSF delegation, though in Switzerland, was absent from Wednesday’s open session.
“We’re still very focused on getting both sides in Sudan back to the table and to come to meaningful agreements about laying their arms down and doing the right thing for the people of Sudan,” White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Thursday.
“You certainly need both military actors to be part of” the conversation on a cessation of violence, Patel told reporters on Thursday.
Diplomats from the African Union, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates and the United Nations were at the U.S.-mediated talks, which opened on Wednesday.
“Day 2 of our diplomatic talks on Sudan is under way. We continue our relentless work with international partners to save lives and ensure we achieve tangible results that build upon the Jeddah Process and implement the Jeddah Declaration,” U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan Tom Perriello wrote on X.
The Jeddah Declaration, reached in May 2023, calls for full aid access by land and air to all populations regardless of who controls the area.
More than a year of fighting between SAF and RSF troops has displaced nearly 10 million people across the greater Horn of Africa country and left 26 million facing crisis-level hunger.
“The medical system in Sudan is at a breaking point. Hospitals designed to serve tens of thousands are overwhelmed with over half a million displaced people, while the international community’s pledged aid remains largely undelivered,” Adil Al-Mahi, humanitarian organization MedGlobal’s country director in Sudan, told VOA on Thursday.
He added that the last operational hospital in El Fasher may be forced to close due to intense shelling. El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, is the battleground for intense conflict between the SAF and RSF.
“The Saudi Hospital, the last public hospital in North Darfur, is barely functioning after continued bombardments. With each attack, it becomes increasingly clear that there is no regard for the protection of health facilities or the civilians within them. The international community must urgently intervene to protect these vital lifelines before it’s too late,” Al-Mahi said.
Investors Are Spending More to Capture Carbon Than to Capture Wind
date: 2024-08-15, from: Heatmap News
There’s a lot of money in carbon management. Like, a lot. Investment in the full suite of technologies designed to capture, store, and transport carbon has skyrocketed this year, according to data from Rhodium Group and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Clean Investment Monitor.
Overall investment in clean energy technology — which includes manufacturing of batteries, vehicles, and solar panels, clean energy generation, and retail products like heat pumps — was $284 billion in the last year, with $76 billion in the second quarter of this year alone, a record figure.
The fastest growth came from “emerging climate technologies,” which includes carbon management, which had $3 billion in investment in the second quarter — more than the $1.7 billion invested in wind generation. Compare that to the same time last year, when wind investment stood at $2.6 billion and carbon management investment was just under half a billion dollars. (Solar generation, meanwhile, had $9.3 billion in investment in the second quarter of this year, while storage saw $5.4 billion poured in.)
What changed?
Basically, wind — and its tax incentives — are hardly new to the U.S. economy, and while the Inflation Reduction Act expanded and extended those tax incentives, it was building on an existing policy. And in that post-IRA period up to today (almost exactly two years from the day the law was signed), wind, which requires long construction periods and substantial upfront spending, has been hampered by high interest rates. That’s true for solar, too, although to a lesser extent, explained Trevor Houser, a parter at the Rhodium Group, as wind projects take more time to build and so rely more on borrowed money.
With carbon management, on the other hand, the IRA was a complete gamechanger, hugely boosting the 45Q tax credit for carbon sequestered underground to as much as $85 per metric ton for capturing emissions where they happen, and then to as high $180 per metric ton for direct air capture.
“The majority of the growth that we’re seeing right now is due to that incentive,” Houser told me, as the tax credits have opened up the field to something beyond just using carbon for literal oil drilling.
Jack Andreasen, who runs carbon management policy at Breakthrough Energy, told me basically the same thing. “The boom in carbon management is driven nearly entirely by the support made available in the [Bipartisan Infrastructure Law] and IRA,” he said.
That scale of investment will be necessary to build out any reasonably sized carbon management sector, Andreasen told me. Building out new industrial and generation facilities equipped with carbon capture will be extremely capital-intensive, as will retrofitting existing facilities.
“That is the brilliance and importance of the federal funding — there is
money for new builds and for retrofits. And both of these will
be key in our net-zero future,” Andreasen said.
But while carbon management does have a fair amount of bipartisan political support, as with any large project, the necessary infrastructure — industrial facilities and especially pipelines — can attract local opposition. The nearly 700-mile-long planned Summit pipeline, which is supposed to link dozens of ethanol plants to a carbon sequestration site in North Dakota, has been strenuously opposed by environmental groups and landowners in Iowa, uniting progressives with a group of Republican lawmakers against the state’s powerbrokers and much of its agribusinesses interests.
“Carbon management does face similar siting and permitting barriers, particularly around pipelines,” to renewables like wind, Houser told me. And while that could potentially slow down development, “it’s starting from a lower base — you can get pretty rapid growth if you’re starting from zero.”
https://heatmap.news/sparks/carbon-management-investment
Antec Core HS now available for $499 and up (Handheld gaming PC with Ryzen 7 7840U and QWERTY keyboard)
date: 2024-08-15, from: Liliputing
The Antec Core HS is a handheld gaming PC with a 6 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS LCD display that slides upward to reveal a QWERTY keyboard designed for thumb typing. Under the hood the system is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U processor with Radeon 780M mobile graphics. If it looks familiar, that’s […]
The post Antec Core HS now available for $499 and up (Handheld gaming PC with Ryzen 7 7840U and QWERTY keyboard) appeared first on Liliputing.
Invasive ‘ManhattAnts’ Are Taking Over New York City and Spreading Quickly
date: 2024-08-15, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Since appearing on Manhattan in 2011, the species has become one of the island’s most dominant ants, and scientists formally identified it this year
Mass Deportation Now
date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
http://scripting.com/2024/08/15/203149.html?title=massDeportationNow
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Brian Lehrer podcast: Trump's Mass Deportation Pledge.
https://www.wnyc.org/story/trumps-mass-deportation-pledge/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump is putting mass deportations at the heart of his campaign.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-mass-deportations-latino-voters-ec64f85e3633c9c7a8a247eaf9feb64f
HPE nabs long-time ally Morpheus Data
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The CMP boasts to be the orchestration platform behind GreenLake since 2022
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced the acquisition of yet another partner, this time scooping up cloud management biz Morpheus Data for an unspecified sum. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/hpe_morpheus_data/
Stargazers to Enjoy Summer Viewing
date: 2024-08-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Westmont’s monthly stargazing event features a triangle asterism, a globular cluster and a waxing moon on Friday, August 16, beginning
The post Stargazers to Enjoy Summer Viewing appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/15/stargazers-to-enjoy-summer-viewing-2/
Annual MTD Service Changes Start to Go into Effect on Monday, August 19, More Changes to Follow in Coming Weeks
date: 2024-08-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA – Santa Barbara MTD makes service changes to local bus service every year in mid-August. This year’s service
The post Annual MTD Service Changes Start to Go into Effect on Monday, August 19, More Changes to Follow in Coming Weeks appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Cartridge software for the Psion Series 3
date: 2024-08-15, from: OS News
Similar to less popular handheld of the era, the Gameboy, the Psion used a proprietary cartridge format for distributing commercial software. Psion sold blank cartridges, flashing hardware and duplicators to software houses, as well as releasing a number of titles under their own license. There’s a wide range of commercial software available for the Series 3 family, and only some of it was ported to the Series 5 (I really wish Scrabble had been released on Series 5). The range of software available was significant. Cartridges unlocked the Psion 3’s ability to play a large number of games, provide phrase book translation to a number of languages (Berliz Interpreter), route plan your car journeys (Microsoft Autoroute), look up the best wines for this year (Hugh Johnson’s Wine Guide) or build your organisation chart Purple Software’s OrgChart. ↫ Kian Ryan I have a Psion 3, but the only cartridges I have are empty ones you can use for personal storage. I’ve always wanted to buy a selection of cartridges on eBay, but sadly, my Psion 3 died due to me forgetting to remove the batteries when immigrating to Sweden, something I only discovered like five years later. I was smart enough to remove all batteries from every single device in my massive collection, but I guess the Psion 3 slipped through my fingers. Anyway, this article is a great look at some of the cartridges that existed for the Psion 3, and it’s really making me want to replace my broken Psion 3 and buy one that comes with a set of cartridges. There’s something really attractive about how the Psion 3’s EPOC operating system worked, and the third party programs look like so much fun to explore and use.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140509/cartridge-software-for-the-psion-series-3/
Why the World Needs Yet Another Methane Satellite
date: 2024-08-15, from: Heatmap News
Yet another methane satellite is launching into orbit Friday, as early as 11:19 a.m. Pacific time, on a SpaceX rocket. Developed by a coalition of public and private partners and led by the nonprofit Carbon Mapper, its precision imaging helps fill a gap in the methane detection universe and complements the abilities of MethaneSAT, the Environmental Defense Fund-developed, Google-backed satellite launched back in March.
Riley Duren, CEO of Carbon Mapper, likens his company’s satellite to a telephoto lens, saying it “has a resolution that’s about 10 times higher than the MethaneSAT instrument” — although the tradeoff is that the field of view is about 10 times smaller. The ultimate goal is to identify “super-emitters” of methane and carbon dioxide at the facility level. So while MethaneSAT can detect the total emissions emanating from a particular basin, state, or country, Carbon Mapper can zoom in to figure out what’s going on within 50 meters of accuracy so that operators and regulators can be notified.
Both companies use an imaging technology known as spectroscopy, which involves splitting the light reflected by Earth’s surface into its constituent wavelengths. Methane and carbon dioxide each have their own spectroscopic signature. “It’s not unlike being able to perceive the distinction in human fingerprints,” Duren told me.
The Carbon Mapper Coalition satellite, called Tanager-1, came from a partnership between Planet Labs, which developed the satellite, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which developed the particular spectrometer used onboard. Duren helped create the tech during his nearly 28-year career at JPL, where his research revealed the outsized importance of super-emitters. That helped inspire Duren to found Carbon Mapper in 2020, though until now the organization has mostly done suborbital aerial surveys to track methane and carbon dioxide emissions.
Promisingly, he’s found that distributing his team’s findings often leads to a rapid response. “When we’ve shared our data with oil and gas companies, landfill operators, and regulators, what they tell us is nearly half of the emissions that we’re reporting were previously unknown,” Duren told me. “And in many cases, they can quickly repair them.”
The data from these surveys is publicly accessible on the Carbon Mapper data portal, and the data from Tanager-1 will be published there as well. In addition to Planet Labs and JPL, other coalition partners include the California Air Resources Board, University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and RMI. To date, Carbon Mapper has raised over $130 million in philanthropic funding, from donors including the High Tide Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.
Ultimately, Carbon Mapper aims to launch a constellation of more than 10 satellites, which together will detect and track up to 90% of high-emitting methane sources with near-daily frequency. But this will require funding beyond what the philanthropic sector is likely to pony up.
“Scaling up this to the full constellation and sustaining it will hinge on the ability of governments and the private sector to pay for data,” Duren told me. (MethaneSAT is also philanthropically supported.) “We’re hopeful that as these programs scale up and we demonstrate their utility and the regulators depend on them, that we’ll see governments begin to match what philanthropy has started,” Durian said.
If you want to watch the launch live, you can do so here.
https://heatmap.news/sparks/carbon-mapper-methane-satellite
Matthew Perry’s assistant among 5 people charged in ‘Friends’ star’s death
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
los angeles — A prosecutor says five people have been charged in connection with Matthew Perry’s death from a ketamine overdose last year, including the actor’s assistant and two doctors.
U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada announced the charges Thursday, saying the doctors supplied Perry with a large amount of ketamine and even wondered in a text message how much the former “Friends” star would be willing to pay.
“These defendants took advantage of Mr. Perry’s addiction issues to enrich themselves. They knew what they were doing was wrong,” Estrada said.
Perry died in October due to a ketamine overdose and received several injections of the drug on the day he died from his live-in personal assistant. The assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, is the one who found Perry dead later that day.
The actor went to the two charged doctors in desperation after his regular doctors refused to give him ketamine in the amounts he wanted. DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in one instance the actor paid $2,000 for a vial of ketamine that cost one of the physicians about $12.
Two of the people, including one of the doctors charged, were arrested Thursday, Estrada said. Two of the defendants, including Iwamasa, have pleaded guilty to charges already, and a third person has agreed to plead guilty.
Multiple messages left seeking comment from lawyers or offices for all the defendants have not yet been returned.
Among those arrested Thursday are Dr. Salvador Plasencia, who is charged with seven counts of distribution of ketamine and also two charges related to allegations he falsified records after Perry’s death.
The other person arrested Thursday is Jasveen Sangha, who prosecutors described as a drug dealer known as the “ketamine queen.”
Ketamine supplied by Sangha caused Perry’s death, authorities said.
Sangha and Plasencia could make their first court appearances later Thursday.
Records show Plascencia’s medical license has been in good standing with no records of complaints, though it is set to expire in October.
A San Diego physician, Dr. Mark Chavez, has agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to distribute ketamine. Prosecutors allege Chavez funneled ketamine to Plasencia, securing some of the drug from a wholesale distributor through a fraudulent prescription.
The prosecutor said the defendants exchanged messages soon after Perry’s death referencing ketamine as the cause of death. Estrada said they tried to cover up their involvement in supplying Perry ketamine, a powerful anesthetic that is sometimes used to treat chronic pain and depression.
Los Angeles police said in May that they were working with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service with a probe into why the 54-year-old had so much of the surgical anesthetic in his system.
Iwamasa found the actor face down in his hot tub on Oct. 28, and paramedics who were called immediately declared him dead.
The assistant received the ketamine from Eric Fleming, who has pleaded guilty to obtaining the drug from Sangha and delivering it to Iwamasa. In all, he delivered 50 vials of ketamine for Perry’s use, including 25 handed over four days before the actor’s death.
Perry’s autopsy, released in December, found that the amount of ketamine in his blood was in the range used for general anesthesia during surgery.
Ketamine has seen a huge surge in use in recent years as a treatment for depression, anxiety and pain. People close to Perry told coroner’s investigators that he was undergoing ketamine infusion therapy.
But the medical examiner said Perry’s last treatment 1½ weeks earlier wouldn’t explain the levels of ketamine in his blood. The drug is typically metabolized in a matter of hours. At least two doctors were treating Perry, a psychiatrist and an anesthesiologist who served as his primary care physician, the medical examiner’s report said. No illicit drugs or paraphernalia were found at his house.
Ketamine was listed as the primary cause of death, which was ruled an accident with no foul play suspected, the report said. Drowning and other medical issues were contributing factors, the coroner said.
Drug-related celebrity deaths have in other cases led authorities to prosecute the people who supplied them.
After rapper Mac Miller died from an overdose of cocaine, alcohol and counterfeit oxycodone that contained fentanyl, two of the men who provided him the fentanyl were convicted of distributing the drug. One was sentenced to more than 17 years in federal prison, the other to 10 years.
And after Michael Jackson died in 2009 from a lethal dose of propofol, a drug intended for use only during surgery and other medical procedures and not for the insomnia the singer sought it for, his doctor, Conrad Murray, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 2011. Murray has maintained his innocence.
Stonehenge’s Massive Central Stone May Have Been Shipped From Hundreds of Miles Away
date: 2024-08-15, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Researchers think they’ve solved the mystery of the monument’s Altar Stone, which could have traveled all the way from Scotland
What Military History Tells Us About Ukraine’s Kursk Invasion
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: RAND blog
The ambiguity of Ukraine’s ground offensive into the southern Kursk region of Russia underscores its boldness. At least now, in Kursk proper, and in the larger political realm, Ukraine has the initiative. And in war, as military history shows, initiative is everything.
DARPA, ARPA-H award $14m to 7 AIxCC semifinalists, with a catch
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Teams wanting the cash have to commit to handing their models to OpenSSF after next year’s final
One year after it began, the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) has whittled its pool of contestants down to seven semifinalists.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/darpa_arpah_award_14m_to/
Let’s talk 64-bit with Gerph – ROUGOL, 19th August
date: 2024-08-15, from: RiscOS Story
In the RISC OS world, we (should) all know that RISC OS runs on ARM processors in either 26 or 32-bit mode, depending what hardware (or emulator) you are running it on – and that we are now at the stage where 64-bit only ARM processors are becoming the norm, and RISC OS is unable to run on them. Right from its outset, the ARM was a 32-bit processor with 32-bit registers, one of which was the ‘program counter’, a special register used to determine the address in memory from…
https://www.riscository.com/2024/lets-talk-64-bit-rougol-19th-august/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Deals struck to cut prices of popular Medicare drugs, White House says.
https://apnews.com/article/biden-drug-prices-medicare-prescriptions-34886d6f362c242be268c05d5efd5411
Clickbait arguments in AI Lawsuits (will number 3 shock you?)
date: 2024-08-15, from: Authors Union blogs
The booming AI industry has sparked heated debates over what AI developers are legally allowed to do. So far, we have learned from the US Copyright Office and courts that AI created works are not protectable, unless it is combined with human authorship. As we monitor two dozen ongoing lawsuits and regulatory efforts that address […]
WHO Declares Mpox Global Health Emergency. Here’s What to Know
date: 2024-08-15, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A new virus strain has been spreading primarily the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as nearby countries that had previously not reported mpox cases
Epic Games Pays AltStore PAL’s CTF
date: 2024-08-15, from: Michael Tsai
Epic Games (tweet, MacRumors): Epic also plans to bring our own mobile games including Fortnite to other mobile stores that give all developers a great deal. And, we will be ending distribution partnerships with mobile stores that serve as rent collectors without competing robustly and serving all developers fairly, even if those stores offer us […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/15/epic-games-pays-altstore-pals-ctf/
iPhone NFC Access Outside EU
date: 2024-08-15, from: Michael Tsai
Hartley Charlton (Hacker News): Apple today announced that developers will soon be able to offer NFC transactions in their own apps for the first time – something that is mostly exclusive to Apple Pay at present. Starting with iOS 18.1 later this year, developers will be able to offer in-app contactless transactions, separate from Apple […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/15/iphone-nfc-access-outside-eu/
FastSpring Store Unexpectedly Offline
date: 2024-08-15, from: Michael Tsai
Christian Tietze: I think I will need to be leaving FastSpring as the sole shop for my apps and ebooks and stuff.At the very least, I’ll need to set up an alternative as a fallback:2 days ago I received an email that one of the shop backends was being ‘offline’d and no live transactions will […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/15/fastspring-store-unexpectedly-offline/
Halide 2.15: Process Zero
date: 2024-08-15, from: Michael Tsai
Ben Sandofsky (Mastodon, MacRumors, tweet, Reddit):Today, we are launching something unlike any tech product in 2024: a product that uses zero AI and zero computational photography to produce natural, film-like photos. We call it Process Zero. It lives in Halide, and it turns your iPhone into a classic camera.Process Zero is a new mode in […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/15/halide-2-15-process-zero/
Gartner mages: Payback from office AI expected in around two years
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Hype is peaking now and digital employee experience stuck in trough of disillusionment
Mainstream adoption of AI in the office and among employees remains around two years off, according to analysis from consultancy Gartner.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/gartner_see_payback_from_office/
São Francisco’s Colorful Palette
date: 2024-08-15, from: NASA breaking news
This Dec. 27, 2023 image of the São Francisco River in southeast Brazil showcases the range of vibrant colors in the area including blues, reds, greens, and yellows. Much of the unvegetated land, such as unplanted fields and unpaved roads, appears in bright shades of red and yellow. This coloration comes from the underlying clays […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/sao-franciscos-colorful-palette/
Archaeologists Unearth Two More Vesuvius Victims at Pompeii
date: 2024-08-15, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Recent excavations provide a glimpse into the choices a man and woman made in their final moments
Hacker Breaks Into GPS Tracker Tool, Looks Up User Locations
date: 2024-08-15, from: 404 Media Group
A set of credentials related to the GPS tracking company Trackimo let a hacker access an internal troubleshooting tool and retrieve customers’ recent locations.
https://www.404media.co/hacker-breaks-into-gps-tracker-tool-looks-up-user-locations/
Daily Deals (8-15-2024)
date: 2024-08-15, from: Liliputing
Paramount+ is giving away 1-month subscriptions for free. The Epic Games Store is giving away two PC games. And Humble Bundle and StoryBundle both have deals that let you save a bunch of money on a (virtual) stack of eBooks or PC games. Meanwhile there are also deals on Android tablets, Windows PCs, and more […]
The post Daily Deals (8-15-2024) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/daily-deals-8-15-2024/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-15, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Via @reduz Godot contributions to 4.3:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112967225199942311
Why We Need More Hybrid Managers
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: RAND blog
Hybrid-native managers innately understand how to blend traditional and remote workplaces. They need to be highly effective communicators to ensure clarity and consistency. Equally important is the ability to build trust and foster a culture of accountability.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/08/why-we-need-more-hybrid-managers.html
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Introducing Rivian Travel Kitchen by Rivian.
https://stories.rivian.com/travel-kitchen
Trump holds another news conference while Harris touts drug price cuts
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
On “patient.” with Bettina Judd
date: 2024-08-15, from: Logic Magazine
<p>“I’m really self-aware at this point, in writing patient, that I am a researcher doing research in an attempt to recover that which cannot be recovered, and that is their voices.”</p>https://logicmag.io/issue-21-medicine-and-the-body/on-patient
Before We Were Born
date: 2024-08-15, from: Logic Magazine
<p>“Brain–body transfers (BBTs) became popular with influencers and celebrity couples first. The only way to truly understand someone is to become them, the ads read.”</p>https://logicmag.io/issue-21-medicine-and-the-body/before-we-were-born
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
August 15, 2004: My audio blog post from NYC, from my Podcast0 feed. Had just listened to an Adam Curry podcast and one from the Gillmor Gang. Played a bit of music, described how a podcatcher would work, pretty close to the way they work today. Shortly after the feature would be in Radio UserLand. It was the only episode I did in August 2004. The next one is on September 1 and there are a total of nine shows in September, including the first Trade Secrets which is a podcast Adam and I did together. Here’s the archive for this blog in August 2004.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/15.html#a165716
Google raps Iran’s APT42 for raining down spear-phishing attacks
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
US politicians and Israeli officials among the top targets for the IRGC’s cyber unit
Google has joined Microsoft in publishing intel on Iranian cyber influence activity following a recent uptick in attacks that led to data being leaked from the Trump re-election campaign.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/google_iran_apt42_campaigns/
Mars Hosts a Giant Reservoir of Water Underground, We Just Can’t Easily Reach It, Study Finds
date: 2024-08-15, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The water is enough to cover the Martian surface in a mile-deep ocean, but it’s beyond the reach of drills for now, according to researchers
Over a Decade of SENSES Block Parties: The Big 100
date: 2024-08-15, from: City of Santa Clarita
By Mayor Pro Tem Bill Miranda The number 100 holds impressive significance in society. Just think how amazing it would be to live to 100 years of age, to be able to do 100 pushups or get 100 percent on a test, which is why an incredible celebration is necessary to mark the City of […]
The post Over a Decade of SENSES Block Parties: The Big 100 appeared first on City of Santa Clarita.
https://santaclarita.gov/blog/2024/08/15/over-a-decade-of-senses-block-parties-the-big-100/
Open source A2FPGA module brings audio, 480p video, and HDMI output to the Apple II
date: 2024-08-15, from: Liliputing
The original Apple II computer went on sale in 1977, but enthusiasts are still finding new ways to use the classic computers. Case in point: the A2FPGA is a new peripheral card for Apple II computers that not only lets you hook up any member of the Apple II family to a modern display with […]
The post Open source A2FPGA module brings audio, 480p video, and HDMI output to the Apple II appeared first on Liliputing.
NASA Selects 5 New Roman Technology Fellows in Astrophysics
date: 2024-08-15, from: NASA breaking news
NASA has awarded Nancy Grace Roman Technology Fellowships (RTF) to five early-career researchers in astrophysics for the class of 2023. The program will support the advancement of their ideas for new technologies to further the exploration of the universe. This annual fellowship gives researchers the opportunity to develop the skills necessary to become principal investigators […]
Trump asks judge to delay hush money sentencing until after election
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — Donald Trump is asking the judge in his New York hush money criminal case to delay his sentencing until after the November presidential election.
In a letter made public Thursday, a lawyer for the former president and current Republican nominee suggested that sentencing Trump as scheduled on September 18 — about seven weeks before Election Day — would amount to election interference.
Trump lawyer Todd Blanche wrote that a delay would also allow Trump time to weigh next steps after the trial judge, Juan Merchan, is expected to rule September 16 on the defense’s request to overturn the verdict and dismiss the case because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s July presidential immunity ruling.
“There is no basis for continuing to rush,” Blanche wrote.
Blanche sent the letter to Merchan on Wednesday after the judge rejected the defense’s latest request that he step aside from the case.
In the letter, Blanche reiterated the defense argument that the judge has a conflict of interest because his daughter works as a Democratic political consultant, including for Kamala Harris when she sought the 2020 presidential nomination. Harris is now running against Trump.
By adjourning the sentencing until after that election, “the Court would reduce, even if not eliminate, issues regarding the integrity of any future proceedings,” Blanche wrote.
Merchan, who has said he is confident in his ability to remain fair and impartial, did not immediately rule on the delay request.
A message seeking comment was left with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Trump’s case.
Trump was convicted in May of falsifying his business’ records to conceal a 2016 deal to pay off porn actor Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with him. Prosecutors cast the payout as part of a Trump-driven effort to keep voters from hearing salacious stories about him during his first campaign.
Trump says all the stories were false, the business records were not and the case was a political maneuver meant to damage his current campaign. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a Democrat.
Trump’s defense argued that the payments were indeed for legal work and so were correctly categorized.
Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years behind bars. Other potential sentences include probation, a fine or a conditional discharge which would require Trump to stay out of trouble to avoid additional punishment. Trump is the first ex-president convicted of a crime.
Trump has pledged to appeal, but that cannot happen until he is sentenced.
In a previous letter, Merchan set September 18 for “the imposition of sentence or other proceedings as appropriate.”
Blanche argued in his letter seeking a delay that the quick turnaround from the scheduled immunity ruling on September 16 to sentencing two days later is unfair to Trump.
To prepare for sentencing, Blanche argued, prosecutors will be submitting their punishment recommendation while Merchan is still weighing whether to dismiss the case on immunity grounds. If Merchan rules against Trump on the dismissal request, he will need “adequate time to assess and pursue state and federal appellate options,” Blanche said.
The Supreme Court’s immunity decision reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal. Trump’s lawyers argue that in light of the ruling, jurors in the hush money case should not have heard such evidence as former White House staffers describing how the then-president reacted to news coverage of the Daniels deal.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Now Hillary Clinton is doing the work that journalism should be doing.
https://www.threads.net/@hillaryclinton/post/C-pzzulxwMc
قبور وراء النافذة / “Graves behind the Window” معذبو الأرض / “The Wretched of the Earth”
date: 2024-08-15, from: Logic Magazine
<p>A selection of poems by Gazan poet Anees Ghanima, Translator’s Note Leena Aboutaleb, and preface by Abdalhadi Alijla</p>https://logicmag.io/issue-21-medicine-and-the-body/2-poems
If the world had a hyperscale datacenter capital, it would be… Northern Virginia
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
If you guessed Beijing, sorry – but it is number 2, according to Synergy Research figures
If the internet can be said to have a geographic location, then perhaps it is Northern Virginia, which has the largest share of the hyperscale datacenter capacity within which the world’s data is stored.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/hyperscale_capacity_global_research/
All That Glitters
date: 2024-08-15, from: Tedium site
I just learned an amazing fact about gold records from the Beastie Boys that you need to learn about, too.
https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/16772128/gold-platinum-records-not-real
NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1 Million Miles Per Hour
date: 2024-08-15, from: NASA breaking news
Most familiar stars peacefully orbit the center of the Milky Way. But citizen scientists working on NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have helped discover an object moving so fast that it will escape the Milky Way’s gravity and shoot into intergalactic space. This hypervelocity object is the first such object found with the mass similar to or […]
US imposes sanctions targeting Houthi, Hezbollah trade
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The United States on Thursday issued more sanctions targeting Houthi and Hezbollah trade networks, the U.S. Treasury Department said, as Washington increases pressure on Tehran and the Iranian-backed groups.
The U.S. Treasury Department in a statement said it targeted companies, individuals and vessels accused of being involved in the shipment of Iranian commodities, including oil and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) to Yemen and the United Arab Emirates on behalf of a Houthi financial official’s network.
It said the revenue from Sa’id al-Jamal’s network helps finance the Houthis’ targeting of shipping in the Red Sea and civilian infrastructure. Attacks on vessels in the Red Sea by Iran-aligned Houthi militants have disrupted a shipping route vital to east-west trade, with prolonged rerouting of shipments pushing freight rates higher and causing congestion in Asian and European ports.
Also targeted on Thursday were Hezbollah shipments of LPG, including through the designation of a Hong Kong-based ship manager and operator as well as several tankers.
The Treasury said the Hezbollah-controlled Talaqi Group used two of the tankers to ship LPG worth tens of millions of dollars from Iran to China.
“Today’s action underscores our continued commitment to disrupting Iran’s primary source of funding to its regional terrorist proxies like Lebanese Hizballah (Hezbollah) and the Houthis,” said Treasury’s Acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Bradley Smith.
“Our message is clear: those who seek to finance these groups’ destabilizing activities will be held to account.”
Thursday’s action freezes any U.S. assets of those targeted and generally bars Americans from dealing with them. Financial institutions and others that engage in certain transactions with them also risk being hit with sanctions.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-imposes-sanctions-targeting-houthi-hezbollah-trade/7743906.html
A “discerning but not defeated” consumer
date: 2024-08-15, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Shoppers were shopping more energetically than expected in July, with retail sales up 1%. This is boosting stocks but making players in the bond market fret that they might not get as many interest rate cuts this year with the U.S. economy still showing such strength. We’ll discuss at the top of show. Also on the program: a look at banned fake reviews and what happens when a Chinese EV-maker comes to Turkey.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/a-discerning-but-not-defeated-consumer
NASA pushes decision on bringing crew back in Starliner to the end of August
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
When is a mishap not really a mishap?
NASA has continued to twist itself into a pretzel over whether Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner – now two months past its original return date – can be used to bring back its crew to Earth and whether a failure to do so would be classed as a mishap.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/nasa_starliner_decision_end_august/
Vance, Walz agree to VP debate Oct. 1; Harris floats 2nd debate with Trump
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
COLUMBIA, South Carolina — Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance have agreed to debate each other on October 1, setting up a matchup of potential vice presidents as early voting in some states gets underway for the general election.
And Vice President Kamala Harris has forecast the scheduling of a second debate between Donald Trump and herself, although that matchup appeared to be contingent on the Republican nominee participating in the scheduled September 10 debate with Harris.
CBS News on Wednesday posted on its X feed that the network had invited both Vance and Walz to debate in New York City, presenting four possible dates — September 17, September 24, October 1 and October 8 — as options.
Walz reposted that message from his own campaign account, “See you on October 1, JD.” The Harris-Walz campaign followed up with a message of its own, saying Walz “looks forward to debating JD Vance — if he shows up.”
Vance posted on X that he would accept the October 1 invitation. He also challenged Walz to meet on September 18.
Officials with the Harris-Walz campaign did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Vance’s acceptance of the earlier debate that he said would be on CNN or whether Walz would participate in that one as well.
Representatives for CNN confirmed that Vance had accepted the network’s debate invitation.
“CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of “Face the Nation” will moderate the October 1 debate, according to the network.
Whether Walz and Vance would debate before the November 5 general election had been in question.
The debate is three weeks after the September 10 top-of-the-ticket debate recently solidified between Trump and Harris on ABC News.
Trump has said he negotiated several other debate dates, on three different networks. Fox News has also proposed a debate between Harris and Trump to take place on September 4, and NBC News is angling to air one on September 25.
During an appearance in Michigan, Harris said she was “happy to have that conversation” about an additional debate.
On Thursday, Harris’ campaign said Trump had “accepted our proposal for three debates,” meaning one between the vice presidential running mates, in addition to two presidential debates. Provided that Trump participates in the September 10 CBS debate, Harris-Walz spokesperson Michael Tyler said that “the American people will have another opportunity” to see the vice president and Donald Trump on the debate stage in October,” without mentioning a specific date or network.
Neither campaign immediately responded to a message seeking comment on whether a date or network had been agreed to for a second presidential debate.
https://www.voanews.com/a/vance-walz-agree-to-vice-presidential-debate-on-oct-1/7743865.html
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Let’s stay organized after the election.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/15.html#a141834
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-15, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Public service announcement
I am not paid for this or have any interest in this company
We give our kids debit cards using tillfinancial.com - we give their allowance there, and they get credit cards and Apple Pay integration
Zero fees, or hidden shenanigans.
Love it.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112966422886759133
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
In today’s installment of the Adventures of Wordle Kitty, the world’s cutest and most adorable kitten was sentenced to life at Attica.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/15.html#a140432
Mental Well-Being in Space
date: 2024-08-15, from: NASA breaking news
Science in Space: August 2024 Life on the International Space Station is quite different from life on the ground. Crew members experience multiple sunrises and sunsets each day, spend their time in a confined space, have packed schedules, and deal with microgravity. These and other conditions during spaceflight can negatively affect the performance and well-being […]
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/iss-research/mental-well-being-in-space/
Mexico’s Nogales border center provides haven for migrants
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
As thousands of migrants continue to make their way to the United States, and stricter immigration policies make legal entry increasingly difficult, a Mexican border center south of Arizona has become a crucial source of humanitarian aid to migrants. Veronica Villafañe narrates the story reported by Paula Díaz.
https://www.voanews.com/a/nogales-mexico-border-center-provides-haven-for-migrants/7743817.html
Tesla’s Supercharger Network Has Already Gotten Worse
date: 2024-08-15, from: Heatmap News
I resent my go-to charging depot.
Don’t get me wrong: I was psyched when Tesla opened a Supercharger in the parking lot of a nearby In-N-Out burger. The other local Supercharger is located in a garage that charges for parking by the hour. Plus, it’s fun to grab a neapolitan shake while your vehicle gets juice. The problem is that everybody in Southern California loves In-N-Out, so reaching the chargers at dinnertime means navigating through the unruly drive-thru line. This sucks, especially when the battery is nearly depleted and the burger faithful won’t get out of the way.
More than a year ago, salvation was promised in the form of a new Supercharger at a nearby mall, one where I already frequent the Petco. But construction has mysteriously stalled. I stare at the charging map and repeatedly refresh, waiting for the station to come online.
I shouldn’t be surprised at Supercharger deployment being stuck, of course. Earlier this year, in a move nominally intended to keep Tesla nimble and innovative, Elon Musk laid off the team responsible for the Supercharger network at a moment when they were perhaps the most useful people at the company.
While the rest of Tesla sputtered with the rollout of the Cybertruck and reversed course on what to do next, the Supercharger team was preparing for a future in which drivers in EVs from basically all the other car brands could stop at Tesla’s fast-chargers and give the company their money. Instead of leaning into this advantage, Tesla has done the opposite. The Supercharger network is growing, but deployment has proceeded at a slower pace than during the same period in 2023. Before the mass layoff, Tesla was opening more than 30 new Supercharger sites per week; that number dipped to about 15 afterward.
The slowdown matters to a lot of people on the road. Despite Tesla’s recent sales slowdown, its cars make up the vast majority of EVs in America. Deprioritizing the Supercharger network is an annoyance for all those drivers, who may have a harder time taking a road trip to Big Bend National Park, Branson, or Aunt Betty’s house in the boondocks if promised charging depots stay in limbo.
Fewer new Superchargers will make existing stations more congested, too, and that’s before vehicles from other car companies begin to arrive en masse. On a road trip to Lake Tahoe last week I saw my first Rivian plugged into a Tesla station. Ford EVs are starting to get their adapters. Next year, carmakers will begin to build their EVs with Tesla’s North American Charging Standard plug, which will greatly increase congestion at existing Superchargers, especially on popular highway routes.
Whether future EV road trips are convenient or frustrating depends in large part on whether the rest of the industry can pick up the slack should Tesla continue to slow down Supercharger deployment. The track record of competitors like Electrify America and EVgo isn’t inspiring, as their stations have, to date, tended to be rarer, smaller, and more prone to mechanical failure.
Other car companies have pledged to build their own charging depots, which would ease some of the strain. Hope for a better charging future, however, lies largely with the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, which came out of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and allocated $5 billion to build fast-charging stations along designated highway corridors across the country — see a map of them here.
That money is slowly rolling out in tranches to the states, which had the responsibility of putting forth plans for where they’d build plugs with the money. The result is a patchwork, state-by-state agenda for upgrading the American charging network, but the work is underway. Ohio began construction of the first NEVI-funded charger last October, and you can see where Alabama and Virginia, for example, plan to put theirs. Crucially, much of the funding has already been dispersed. If an EV-unfriendly new president takes office in January, the ball is already rolling.
What’s unclear is whether all these charging depots can match the standard of excellence the Supercharger team created before Musk blew it to bits. Take Alabama’s chargers, which will mostly be built at existing Love’s gas stations. The new stations meet the bare minimum required for NEVI, which is that they have four plugs each capable of delivering 150 kilowatts of power. Tesla’s newest batch of Superchargers deliver 250 kilowatts; Electrify America has some that reach 350. The 20-odd Superchargers already in Alabama offer at least six to eight plugs, with many stations hosting 12 or 16.
Every plug counts. Every time a new station fills in a spot on the nation’s charging map, drivers will be a little more confident that an EV will be able to take them anywhere they need to go. But if the Biden dollars dispersed through NEVI are going to take the place of Tesla’s Supercharger outfit, then the states need to do more than the bare minimum.
https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/tesla-supercharger-slowdown
Google’s ex-CEO U-turns after saying staff ‘going home early’ killed winning
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Eric Schmidt blamed WFH and work-life balance policies for Google’s stumbles in AI race
Eric Schmidt, Google’s ex-CEO and executive chairman has had to row back on remarks he made that linked the megacorp’s poor showing in the AI race with the company’s flexible working policies.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/googles_exceo_steps_back_from/
2024-08-14 Web applications
date: 2024-08-15, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
2024-08-14 Web applications
For my own peace of mind, I have resolved to no longer think of websites as “websites”. Instead, there are web documents and web applications. I find it easier to accept to use a browser like Firefox like a virtual computer for web applications. Many of the websites these days are in fact web applications.
There’s no point in railing against web applications. I like to write web applications! And I use many of them myself, too. Things like Face Generator, Text Mapper or Hex Describe are impossible to do as documents. In an emergency, you could have a form that then generates a PDF to download, maybe? But is that really preferable? I don’t think so.
And don’t get me started on writing native graphical user-interface applications. It takes so much energy to get it right. It gives me a headache. I tried. Take a look at Gridmapper with Common Lisp and SDL2, if you want. Compare it with regular Gridmapper. Is that really preferable? I don’t think so.
And the reverse is also not cool. I wrote a text user interface tool to generate maps, which can then be downloaded as SVG files. Give Hex Populate a try, it works over SSH. Is that really preferable? I don’t think so.
I’ve tried Gemtext for a long time. I was very much into Gemini. But these days I no longer think it’s the answer. It’s like a piece of performance art: the doing of it is a statement. People who step into it are confounded, their beliefs challenged. It’s good art! It’s interesting technology. But it’s not a replacement for web applications. It’s not even a good format for web documents! I want inline emphasis – bold, italics, code – and accessible tables with captions and cell navigation, and row-spans, and column-spans. I tried writing code that translated Wikipedia tables into ASCII tables to be used as pre-formatted text in Gemtext. It’s hard to do well with the sizing of columns, the line wrapping in cells, the limited space available in a terminal, and when you’ve solved all of that, it’s still hell for people with bad eye-sight or cognitive problems trying to understand what they’re seeing. It’s terrible. You could of course do away with all tables. But is that really preferable? I don’t think so.
And so… there’s that bifurcation in the road. For this site, for most of the pages that I think of as web documents, I write (or generate) HTML that doesn’t require fonts or scripts. If one uses browsers such as eww, links2, w3m, lynx or dillo, it should just work. I wasn’t going to convert the corporate web, anyway.
I still serve my site as Gemini and Gopher. But I do it as a political statement, as a piece of performance art.
At the same time, I swallow my pride and setup Firefox.
I still wish we would all push for a web that does not require a lot of resources.
Nearly all growth in smartphone sales volume since the mid ‘10s occured in the ‘budget’ and ‘low-end’ categories. … if portals fail to work well on phones, smartphone-dependent folks are predictably excluded … Framework-based, “full-stack” development is now the default in Silicon Valley, but should obviously be avoided in universal services. – Reckoning: Part 1 – The Landscape
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-08-14-web-applications
Pundits are idiots, part 2,297,748
date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
The stupidest thing about all the pundits remarking on Kamala’s rise in the polls is they are completely missing the story.
Here’s the headline.
- “Thank god the Trump nightmare is almost over.”
If you want an illustration, it’s the flip side of this New Yorker cover.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/15/132203.html?title=punditsAreIdiotsPart2297748
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I
am addicted to buying domains. Latest
example. Ideally it would be a news
site with all the latest videos from the Land of Kamala aka the
United States of America.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/15.html#a131623
Over a Decade of Senses Block Parties: The Big 100
date: 2024-08-15, from: The Signal
The number 100 holds impressive significance in society. Just think how amazing it would be to live to 100 years of age, to be able to do 100 pushups or […]
The post Over a Decade of Senses Block Parties: The Big 100 appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/over-a-decade-of-senses-block-parties-the-big-100/
Community Hot Rod Project Raises Funds for Vocational Training Center
date: 2024-08-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Nonprofit proposes converting airport hangars into center and museum.
The post Community Hot Rod Project Raises Funds for Vocational Training Center appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
So what are we doing on Threads and why does Facebook (aka Meta) want to get the best minds of Twitter using their software. I am not a lawyer and I haven’t read the user agreement, but that said, I bet it has something to do with building out their AI model so they can compete with OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/15.html#a125634
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-15, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Testing a handful of features, but the whole UI is starting to come together.
Need to sort out scene switching, the bottom tools and some 30 more bugs and should be ready for a TestFlight
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112966133152671276
US judge says he’ll ‘tear the barriers down’ on Google’s app store monopoly
date: 2024-08-15, from: OS News
Last week wasn’t the first time Google was declared a monopoly – eight months ago, in the Epic vs. Google case, Google’s control over the Play Store was also declared monopolistic. The judge, Google, and Epic have been arguing ever since over possible remedies, and in two weeks’ time, we’ll know what the judge is going to demand of Google. Eight months after a federal jury unanimously decided that Google’s Android app store is an illegal monopoly in Epic v. Google, Donato held his final hearing on remedies today. While we don’t yet know what will happen, he repeatedly shut down any suggestion that Google shouldn’t have to open up its store to rival stores, that it’d be too much work or cost too much, or that the proposed remedies go too far. “We’re going to tear the barriers down, it’s just the way it’s going to happen,” said Donato. “The world that exists today is the product of monopolistic conduct. That world is changing.” Donato will issue his final ruling in a little over two weeks. ↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge I was a bit confused by what “opening up” the Play Store really meant, since Android is already quite friendly to installing whatever other applications and application stores you want, but what they’re talking about here is allowing rival application stores inside the Play Store. This way, instead of downloading, say, the F-Droid APK from the web and installing it, you could just install the F-Droid application store straight from within the Play Store. Epic wants the judge to take it a step further and force Google to also give rival application stores access to every Play Store application, allowing them to take ownership of said applications, I guess? I’m not entirely sure how that would work, considering I doubt there’d be much overlap between the offerings of the various stores. The prospect of micromanaging where every application gets its updates from seems like a lot of busywork, but at the same time, it’s the kind of fine-grained control power users would really enjoy. A point of contention is whether or not Google would have to perform human review on every application store and their applications inside the Play Store, and even if Google should have any form of control at all. What’s interesting about all these court cases in the United States is how closely the arguments and proposed remedies align with the European Digital Markets Act. Where the EU made a set of pretty clear and straightforward rules for megacorporations to follow, thereby creating a level playing field for all of them, the US seems to want to endlessly take each offending company to court, which feels quite messy, time-consuming, and arbitrary, especially when medieval nonsense like jury trials are involved. This is probably a result of the US using common law, whereas the EU uses civil (Napoleonic) law, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
The best journalism is coming from the candidate. I think you could make a pretty good hour-length show on MSNBC with 12 of their posts, five minutes each, one after the other, with a small panel of pundits quickly snarking about what they just saw. Go have a look at the feed and see if you agree. The best thing about it is that the writing is totally blogger-style.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/15.html#a122518
Russian man who sold logins to nearly 3,000 accounts gets 40 months in jail
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
He’ll also have to pay back $1.2 million from fraudulent transactions he facilitated
A Russian national is taking a trip to prison in the US after being found guilty of peddling stolen credentials on a popular dark web marketplace.…
A Youth League’s Stolen Jackie Robinson Statue Has Been Replaced
date: 2024-08-15, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The original statue of the pioneering baseball player vanished from a ballpark in Wichita, Kansas, earlier this year
Geothermal Energy Storage is Making a Big Leap in Texas
date: 2024-08-15, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Hurricane Ernesto could strengthen into a category 3 storm by Friday • Several days of heavy rain in Majorca, Spain, flooded streets and grounded flights • The heat index is hovering around 115 degrees Fahrenheit for parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
THE TOP FIVE
- Texas to host first grid-connected geothermal energy storage project
Plans are underway in Texas to build what will become the first geothermal energy storage project to deliver power to the grid. The 3-megawatt EarthStore project will be located in Christine, Texas, and operated by Sage Geosystems. It will connect with the ERCOT grid, storing energy to be deployed on demand. Advanced geothermal reservoirs harness the heat under the Earth’s surface to generate energy. They can store power that’s been generated by wind or solar in the form of hot water or steam, and some research suggests this process could be more efficient and perhaps cheaper than using batteries. Either way, as renewable capacity ramps up, the more storage options, the better. The project is expected to be ready by the end of 2024.
- Greece assesses damage from wildfire near Athens
The wildfire on the outskirts of Athens this week burned 40 square miles of land, or an area about twice the size of Manhattan, according to satellite data from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. One person was killed and at least 78 homes were lost to the flames. Intense drought conditions, combined with soaring temperatures, have turned Greece into a tinderbox, with more than 3,500 fires ignited since May, up nearly 50% from the same period last year. More than one-third of the forests surrounding Athens have been scorched by wildfires over the last eight years.
Copernicus
Emergency Management Service
- Report: U.S. will back global plastics treaty
The U.S. will support a United Nations treaty to cap the amount of new plastic produced annually, Reuters reported. America is one of the world’s most prolific plastic makers, and has previously supported the idea that each country should be able to manage its own production. But many other nations have called for limiting and phasing down new plastic production to curb pollution and toxic chemicals, an initiative the U.S. seems to be warming to. Most plastics are made from fossil fuels, and major producers like China and Saudi Arabia have argued that the focus should be on recycling and reusing, instead of limiting production overall. The final talks over the UN plastics treaty are scheduled for November.
- Maersk joins initiative to study nuclear-powered ships
Danish shipping giant Maersk is interested in studying the feasibility of nuclear-powered cargo ships. The company will team up with maritime services firm Lloyd’s Register and Core Power to figure out how a nuclear reactor could be fitted on a vessel, plus what kinds of safety precautions and regulations would need to be in place. “Nuclear power holds a number of challenges related to for example safety, waste management, and regulatory acceptance across regions, and so far, the downsides have clearly outweighed the benefits of the technology,” Ole Graa Jakobsen, Maersk’s head of fleet technology, said in a statement. “If these challenges can be addressed by development of the new so-called fourth-generation reactor designs, nuclear power could potentially mature into another possible decarbonization pathway for the logistics industry 10 to 15 years in the future,” he said. The shipping sector accounts for about 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions, and guidelines from the International Maritime Organization set out in 2023 require companies to cut emissions by 40% by 2030.
- China’s OceanX floating wind turbine reaches wind farm
This week a giant, two-headed, floating offshore wind turbine has been on a 50-hour, 191-nautical-mile journey from Guangzhou, China, to its final destination in the Qingzhou IV Offshore Wind Farm in Yangjiang. Yesterday it finally arrived safely. The OceanX is the world’s largest floating wind turbine platform in terms of capacity. The company behind it, Mingyang Smart Energy, says the platform can produce 54 million kWh annually, enough to power 30,000 households. It’s made to be used in deep water and the company says it can withstand the kind of high winds and waves generated by typhoons.
THE KICKER
New analysis finds that enacting the policies outlined in the conservative blueprint Project 2025 would result in 1.7 million fewer jobs, 2,000 pollution-related premature deaths, and boost U.S. emissions by about 780 million metric tons per year by 2030.
https://heatmap.news/technology/geothermal-energy-storage-texas-grid
High-Tech Lunar Tires
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/08/15/high-tech-lunar-tires/
What might a Justice Department break-up of Google look like?
date: 2024-08-15, from: Marketplace Morning Report
This week, the Justice Department is reportedly considering asking for a break up of Google after the company was deemed an illegal monopoly. We’ll describe how that may pan out and how it could potentially help smaller search engines. But first, the Biden administration is expected to unveil the results of Medicare’s first price negotiations with drug companies today. And later: What do vet clinics and Skittles have in common?
A Forest In Flight
date: 2024-08-15, from: The Lever News
As the climate changes, how much should we intervene to save species?
https://www.levernews.com/a-forest-in-flight/
Google is a monopoly. The fix isn’t obvious
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A business breakup may be coming – but what comes after may not be better
Comment After more than 15 years of insisting that “competition is only a click away,” Google’s antitrust mantra is no longer keeping the regulators at bay.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/google_monopoly_fix/
US-Russian dual national Ksenia Khavana sentenced to 12 years in prison on treason conviction
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
The Chinese carmaker taking on European rivals in their own backyard
date: 2024-08-15, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: China’s biggest electric carmaker, BYD, is planning a $1 billion factory in Turkey, which will allow it to avoid new tariffs imposed by Europe on Chinese exporters. We hear from the where the factory will be built. Then, Germany issues an arrest warrant linked to explosions that hit the subsea pipeline carrying Russian gas to Europe. Plus, North Korea is partially reopening to foreign tourists.
The IRA’s Labor Provisions Look Like They’re Working
date: 2024-08-15, from: Heatmap News
The Inflation Reduction Act is by far the most important climate law ever passed in the U.S. But it also may go down as one of the most important labor laws of recent history. Overnight, jobs installing solar farms that were largely performed by an itinerant, low-wage workforce had the potential to become higher-paid positions occupied by skilled tradespeople — maybe even union jobs.
That’s because in order to qualify for a 30% tax credit on their investment or operating costs, clean energy developers now have to follow two key labor standards. They have to pay construction workers the federally determined prevailing wage for their region, plus hire a designated number of apprentices, who are provided with paid classroom instruction in addition to on-the-job-training.
“I don’t think people have a sense of the scale and the scope of what this law has done and is going to do,” Rick Levy, the president of the Texas AFL-CIO, told me. “From our perspective, putting community well-being and labor standards in the very fabric of this industrial expansion is going to pay dividends for generations.”
On the eve of the IRA’s two-year anniversary, a new report provided exclusively to Heatmap has identified 6,285 utility-scale clean energy projects planned, under construction, or already operating, that are likely candidates for these tax credits. Together, they represent an estimated 3.9 million jobs, according to the Climate Jobs National Resource Center, a nonprofit that supports unions fighting for worker-centered climate action, which compiled the data.
There’s no way to know, at least right now, how many of the projects still in progress will actually get built, or how many have or will adhere to labor standards. Safe harbor provisions in the law also allow developers to claim the full tax credit without adhering to the rules as long as they started construction by the end of January 2023, so the full effect of the provisions will take some time to be realized.
But the report reveals the vast potential for the law to create higher-quality jobs in clean energy all over the country. Based on my reporting, that potential is starting to materialize. Union leaders told me they’re now having conversations with developers who never returned their calls before. And renewable energy developers and tax credit consultants told me it was a no-brainer to meet the labor standards, even though they create substantial administrative burdens. Otherwise, they’ll only be eligible for a 6% credit, leaving a huge amount of money on the table.
“The lawyers are scaring everyone about this”
Mike Fishman, the executive director of the Climate Jobs National Resource Center, told me that when he first started advocating for high-road climate jobs, he found that many trades workers were afraid of clean energy. “If they had a good job in the fossil fuel industry, then saying, we’re going to reach these goals and shut down all the fossil fuel plants, that was very scary to people.” But since the IRA passed, he’s seen a change in workers’ attitudes about supporting climate action. “It creates a sense that there’s a future for everyone — an economic future, as well as a climate future,” Fishman said.
The IRA’s potential to spur well-paid jobs and training opportunities is actually even larger than the Resource Center’s estimate indicates. The report only covers clean energy generation projects like wind and solar farms, but the law also tied labor standards to tax credits for the construction of clean energy manufacturing plants, EV chargers, carbon capture projects, hydrogen plants, clean fuel factories, and new, energy-efficient buildings.
The standards are likely to affect each of these industries in different ways, but it’s instructive to look at what’s already happening in renewable energy development. To do so, you first have to understand that developers sit near the top of a ladder of companies involved in bringing an energy project into the world. Above them sits investors; below, a series of contractors and subcontractors who manage the project on the ground and hire the workers who ultimately build it.
Before the IRA, everyone along this ladder had an incentive to keep costs as low as possible. At the top, developers are competing for power contracts with utilities. Contractors would try to win bids by quoting the lowest construction costs. Staffing agencies would source temporary workers from all over the country and negotiate wages and benefits on a case by case basis. An investigation into solar work by Vice found that it was “common to have two workers doing the same job for vastly different pay and living stipends.” Some would travel to a new place for a gig and “pile into motel rooms with other workers on the same projects in order to save money.”
The IRA disrupts that incentive structure, creating a new regime whereby the top priority is getting that 30% tax credit. The law also extended the ladder, creating new rungs of accountability thanks to new tax credit transferability rules that allow developers to sell their tax credits to third parties. That means there are a host of other companies looming over developers’ shoulders with a stake in making sure they don’t cheat the rules. Tax credit buyers don’t want to end up in a situation where the IRS audits the developer who sold them the credits, finds that there weren’t enough apprentices on the project, and claws back the money. The risk is serious enough that buyers also purchase insurance for these transactions, adding another layer of oversight.
“The lawyers are scaring everyone about this,” Derek Silverman, the co-founder and chief product officer of Basis Climate, a startup that matches tax credit buyers and sellers, told me. For example, the law contains a loophole for companies to claim the credit without hiring the required number of apprentices as long as they show they made a “good faith effort.” Treasury defines that as having reached out to at least one registered apprenticeship program in the area every year the project is operating. Silverman said he’s seen lawyers challenge companies that are trying to get around the requirement, asking them who they reached out to and berating them if it wasn’t a legitimate effort.
“They’re saying, you have a huge part of your capital stack that’s based off this tax credit,” said Silverman. “It’s not worth the downside of the government questioning through an audit that you didn’t meet these requirements, and then, boom, you owe them $20 million when it would have cost you $100,000 to do the documentation and get that all square.”
The upside is valuable enough that it’s generated a whole new cottage industry in tax credit compliance. Empact Technologies, for example, is a software company that collects and evaluates payroll data from contractors to make sure they are paying the correct wages and have the right number of apprentices. “Then we have to go back and essentially fix all of the mistakes that they made every single week” — like classifying workers incorrectly and paying them the wrong amount, or falling behind on apprenticeship hours — “which every single contractor does. It’s insane,” Charles Dauber, Empact’s founder, told me.
All of this has added much complexity — and cost — to renewable energy development. David Yaros, who co-leads Deloitte’s US Tax Sustainability Practice, told me that the cost of compliance, including hiring companies like Empact and Deloitte to compile all the documentation, could eat into 5% to 20% of the tax benefits.
“This has raised our costs,” Rodrigo Inurreta Acero, a government affairs manager at the international developer EDP Renewables, confirmed, referring specifically to the added cost of consultants rather than the mostly negligible cost of paying prevailing wages. “But, we are very, very happy to comply with this, because the juice is worth the squeeze.”
Building a union pipeline
There’s clear incentives for developers to do everything in their power to meet the labor standards. The key question is whether these two little provisions — prevailing wage and apprenticeships — are strong enough to “build a strong pipeline of highly-skilled workers” and “ensure clean energy jobs are good-paying jobs,” as the Biden administration has said.
The need is definitely there. A census of U.S. solar jobs in 2022 found that 52% of solar installation and project development companies found it “very difficult” to find qualified workers, with electricians and construction workers being among the most difficult positions to fill.
But even if armies of lawyers are scaring companies into making serious efforts to hire apprentices, that doesn’t mean they are actually finding them. “It’s not clear at this stage whether apprenticeship programs are scaling up fast enough to match labor supply to project demand,” Derrick Flakoll, a policy associate at BloombergNEF told me. He pointed to an announcement made by the White House just last month of $244 million in grants to expand the Registered Apprenticeship system throughout the country. “I’d be skeptical that apprenticeship programs have been able to scale up yet,” said Flakoll.
There’s a catch with the wage requirement, too: “Prevailing wage” doesn’t necessarily mean a living wage, and it can vary dramatically from place to place. The rate is determined by surveys sent out to contractors and labor organizations, and is typically higher in jurisdictions with active labor unions. For example, in Falls County, Texas, where the 640 megawatt Roseland Solar project is under construction, prevailing wage for a general laborer is $8.75 an hour. In Sangamon County, Illinois, where the 800 megawatt Black Diamond Solar project is being built, prevailing wage for a laborer is $34.04 an hour plus benefits worth $29.26 an hour.
Nico Ries, the lead organizer for the Green Workers Alliance, which organizes solar and wind workers, told me solar wages seem to have only increased in places with higher union density. That’s because unions are now on a more even playing-field to compete for jobs in those areas, since their typical rates have become the de facto minimum.
To be clear, the prevailing wage and apprenticeship provisions do not require developers to hire union workers to build their projects. And there are plenty of non-union, registered apprenticeships. Ries told me that the temp staffing agencies that have served the solar industry in the past are quickly standing up apprenticeship programs to stay on top of the market under the IRA. The main problem with that, they said, is that unlike union apprentices, these workers have no representation.
“There’s a lot of misinformation,” Ries said. “People think they are joining an apprenticeship and it’s going to be a whole thing, but it’s really just a little training or two, and then they slap a sticker on your hard hat.”
Nonetheless, unions are starting to make inroads in solar in places that have long been hostile to organized labor. Ethan Link, the assistant business manager for the Southeast Laborers’ District Council, which has members in right-to-work states throughout the south, told me that before and after the IRA was like “night and day.” For the first time, solar developers are calling the union directly to talk about projects on the horizon and to figure out how to work with them. As a result, the union is investing in more solar-specific training for its apprenticeship instructors.
“The Inflation Reduction Act is one of the most consequential and, I think, also most innovative ways of inducing the market to have broad based benefits for the community,” Link said. “The way I’ve experienced it, it’s changed the landscape on the ground with these developers within a matter of months, rather than a matter of years.” He said they don’t yet have a lot of workers actually assigned to projects, but “we’re really optimistic about where things sit right now.”
Kent Miller, president of the Wisconsin Laborers’ District Council, told me his union has been able to double its apprenticeship program from around 300 to 400 students a few years ago to closer to 700 to 800 post-IRA. It’s now looking to build another training campus to expand its capacity. Not all of that growth is thanks to renewable energy, he said, but the union now has a significant portion of its membership that just works in utility-scale solar.
Earlier this year, Wisconsin’s four biggest electric utilities pledged to employ local, union labor on all future renewable energy projects. Miller doesn’t think this would have happened without the incentives in the IRA. Though every wind farm in Wisconsin has been built by union labor, the more nascent solar industry was starting to bring in non-union workers from out of state to build projects. The IRA incentives gave Miller’s union leverage in negotiations with the utilities, because future projects were going to need to be able to find registered apprentices. “Unions run the best registered apprenticeship programs,” he said. “It was showing what we could do, what we could bring to the table.”
There is one more small but potentially powerful incentive for developers to work with unions. The Internal Revenue Service has said that if companies sign a project labor agreement — an agreement with one or more unions, made prior to hiring, that establishes wages and benefits — then they are less likely to be audited, and won’t have to pay penalties if they are found to be non-compliant.
A post-post-industrial future
To Levy, of the AFL-CIO in Texas, and others in the labor movement, getting workers to support clean energy is essential to tackling climate change. “Unless workers see themselves and their interests reflected in these new energy technologies, there’s never going to be the kind of political support that we need to be able to do the things we need to do to save the planet,” Levy said. The first step to achieve that, he said, is making sure these jobs are “good union jobs.”
The Climate Jobs National Resource Center connected me with Kim Tobias, a union electrician in Maine, as an example of how union jobs can change lives. Tobias used to work in call centers, providing customer service for healthcare software companies, before leaving to join the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. She was making $16 an hour in her last call center job after more than 10 years in the field, and was fed up after getting passed over for a promotion. When she started as an electrical apprentice in 2019, she essentially doubled her salary overnight once benefits were taken into account.
Today, in part because of the IRA, but also because of a state law that requires developers to pay prevailing wage on all large renewable projects in Maine, Tobias mainly works on solar projects. The work isn’t always ideal — she told me she once had to commute 75 miles away for a solar job — while she was pregnant, no less. “Then again, a year and a half later, I worked a solar job that was 0.9 miles away from my house. So it’s give and take,” she said.
But Tobias also said she sees potential to create high-quality clean energy jobs beyond solar in Maine, where, she lamented, “people under the age of 30 are leaving in droves.” She noted that an old paper mill in Lincoln, Maine, is being turned into an energy storage site, and the developer has already said it would establish a collective bargaining agreement with the Maine Building and Construction Trades. Illustrating Levy’s point about political support, the union is also now advocating for the construction of a new port to support the offshore wind industry, which would have to be built with union labor under a recent state law.
Even if the IRA’s labor provisions are starting to work, which it seems they are, they contain one significant weakness. The rules only apply to the construction of projects — not to their operations. It’s an improvement to have labor standards for construction jobs. But once they are built, wind and solar farms don’t take many people to operate. The federally subsidized clean energy manufacturing plants springing up around the country due to the IRA will create a lot more jobs, but, at least right now, those jobs don’t have to be “good.”
“I think that people need to understand the opportunity here,” said Levy, and make sure that we continue to build on it and not turn back.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the “good
faith effort” exception to the apprenticeship provision and that both
provisions apply only to construction.
https://heatmap.news/economy/ira-anniversary-labor
Mad Liberator extortion crew emerges on the cyber-crook scene
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Anydesk is its access tool of choice
A new extortion gang called Mad Liberator uses social engineering and the remote-access tool Anydesk to steal organizations’ data and then demand a ransom payment, according to Sophos X-Ops.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/mad_liberator_extortion/
The Summer Triangle’s Hidden Treasures
date: 2024-08-15, from: NASA breaking news
With the Summer Triangle high in the sky, it’s a great time to lie back, relax, and explore some of its hidden treasures: the small constellations of Vulpecula, Sagitta, and Delphinus!
Kim Dotcom to be extradited from New Zealand after 12-year fight with US
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
Wellington, New Zealand — Kim Dotcom, who is facing criminal charges relating to the defunct file-sharing website Megaupload, will be extradited to the United States from New Zealand, the New Zealand justice minister said on Thursday.
German-born Dotcom, who has New Zealand residency, has been fighting extradition to the United States since 2012 following a FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed an extradition order for Dotcom, a spokesperson for the Minister of Justice said
“I considered all of the information carefully and have decided that Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the U.S. to face trial,” Goldsmith said in a statement.
“As is common practice, I have allowed Mr Dotcom a short period of time to consider and take advice on my decision. I will not, therefore, be commenting further at this stage.”
In a post on social media website X on Tuesday, Dotcom said “the obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload,” in what appears to be a reference to the extradition order.
Reuters could not immediately contact Dotcom for a response.
U.S. authorities say Dotcom and three other Megaupload executives cost film studios and record companies more than $500 million by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted material, which generated more than $175 million in revenue for the website.
The company’s chief marketing officer Finn Batato and chief technical officer and co-founder Mathias Ortmann, both from Germany, along with a third executive, Dutch national Bram van der Kolk, were arrested with Dotcom in 2012.
Ortmann and van der Kolk entered plea deals that saw them sentenced in 2023 to jail terms in New Zealand but allowed them to avoid extradition. Batato died in 2022 in New Zealand.
Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Remember the ‘go hardcore or go home’ email? Turns out: not super compatible with Irish employment law
Twitter has been ordered to pay €550,000 ($607,000) compensation for unfair dismissal to a former senior executive in Ireland, said to be a record amount awarded in the country over such a case.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/twitter_unfair_dismissal/
A Home Nestled in a Hidden Garden
date: 2024-08-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Dance classes, a green thumb, and a teen star all made their home here.
The post A Home Nestled in a Hidden Garden appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/15/a-home-nestled-in-a-hidden-garden/
Cisco slashes thousands of staff, 7% of entire workforce, pivots into AI
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Reorg of entire biz as tech giant addresses downturn in core networking segment
Networking titan Cisco has confirmed in a filing with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) that it is eliminating 7 percent of its global workforce as it embarks upon a restructuring plan.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/cisco_cuts_workforce/
Ask the Motor Cop | Did you know … Some obscure vehicle laws
date: 2024-08-15, from: The Signal
Question: Hi Jerry. A friend of mine said that you can park next to a fire hydrant sometimes. What’s that all about? He was also referring to other strange vehicle […]
The post Ask the Motor Cop | Did you know … Some obscure vehicle laws appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/ask-the-motor-cop-did-you-know-some-obscure-vehicle-laws/
AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn’t know – or care
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Everyone knows automation will happen, which is why everyone needs proof of human involvement
Column Earlier this year I got fired and replaced by a robot. And the managers who made the decision didn’t tell me – or anyone else affected by the change – that it was happening.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/robot_took_my_job/
Today in SCV History (Aug. 15)
date: 2024-08-15, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1849 – Eight-pound gold nugget found in San Feliciano Canyon (Val Verde/Piru area) [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-aug-15/
Over 40 million Kakao Pay users’ data somehow ended up with Alipay
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Payment arm of Korean messaging app denies any illegal activity
Kakao Pay, a subsidiary of Korea’s WhatsApp analog Kakao, handed over data from more than 40 million users to the Singaporean arm of Chinese payment platform Alipay, without user consent, Korea’s financial watchdog revealed Tuesday.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/kakao_pay_data_leak/
As Colorado River states await water cuts, they struggle to agree on longer-term plans
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The federal government is expected to announce water cuts soon that would affect some of the 40 million people reliant on the Colorado River, the powerhouse of the U.S. West. The Interior Department announces water availability for the coming year months in advance so Western cities, farmers and others can plan.
Behind the scenes, however, more elusive plans are being hashed out: how the basin will share water from the diminishing 2,334-kilometer river after 2026, when many current guidelines that govern it expire.
The Colorado River supplies water to seven Western states, more than two dozen Native American tribes, and two states in Mexico. It also irrigates millions of acres of farmland in the American West and generates hydropower used across the region. Years of overuse combined with rising temperatures and drought have meant less water flows in the Colorado today than in decades past.
That’s made the fraught politics of water in the West particularly deadlocked at times. Here’s what you need to know about the negotiations surrounding the river.
What are states discussing?
Plans for how to distribute the Colorado River’s water after 2026. A series of overlapping agreements, court decisions and contracts determine how the river is shared, some of which expire at the end of 2025.
In 2007, following years of drought, the seven U.S. states in the basin — Arizona, Nevada, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — and the federal government adopted rules to better respond to lower water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Those are the river’s two main reservoirs that transfer and store Colorado River water, produce hydropower and serve as barometers of its health.
The 2007 rules determine when some states face water cuts based on levels at Lake Mead. That’s why states, Native American tribes, and others are drafting new plans, which anticipate even deeper water cuts after 2026 based on projections of the river’s flow and climate modeling of future warming in the West.
“The ultimate problem is that watershed runoff is decreasing due to an ever-warming climate,” said Jack Schmidt, professor of watershed sciences at Utah State University, and director of the Center for Colorado River studies. “The proximate problem is we’ve got to decrease our use.”
How are these talks different from expected cuts this month?
Sometime this month, the federal government will announce water cuts for 2025 based on levels at Lake Mead. The cuts may simply maintain the restrictions already in place. Reclamation considers factors like precipitation, runoff, and water use to model what levels at the two reservoirs will look like over the following two years. If Lake Mead drops below a certain level, Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico are subject to cuts, though California has so far been spared because of its senior water rights.
In recent years, Arizona has faced the bulk of these cuts, while Mexico and Nevada also saw reductions. But these are short-term plans, and the guidelines surrounding them are being renegotiated for the future.
What are states already doing to conserve water?
Arizona, Nevada and Mexico faced federal water cuts from the river in 2022. Those deepened in 2023 and returned to 2022 levels this year. As the crisis on the river worsened, Arizona, California and Nevada last year agreed to conserve an additional 3 million acre-feet of water until 2026, with the U.S. government paying water districts and other users for much of that conservation.
Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — the state’s so-called Upper Basin — don’t use their full 7.5 million acre-foot allocation from the river, and get a percentage of the water that’s available each year.
An acre-foot is enough water to serve roughly two to three U.S. households in a year.
Have these efforts worked?
Yes, for now. A wet 2023 plus conservation efforts by Lower Basin states improved the short-term outlook for both reservoirs. Lake Powell is at roughly 39% capacity while Mead is at about 33%.
Climate scientists and hydrologists say that higher temperatures driven by climate change will continue to reduce runoff to the Colorado River in coming years, and cause more water to be lost to evaporation, so future plans should prepare for less water in the system. Brad Udall, a senior water and climate scientist at Colorado State University, said predicting precipitation levels is harder to do.
The short-term recovery in the Colorado River basin should be viewed in the context of a more challenging future, he added.
“I would push back heartily against any idea that our rebound over the last couple of years here is some permanent shift,” Udall said.
What can’t states agree on?
What to do after 2026. In March, Upper and Lower Basin states, tribes and environmental groups released plans for how the river and its reservoirs should be managed in the future.
Arizona, California and Nevada asked the federal government to take a more expansive view of the river management and factor water levels in seven reservoirs instead of just Lake Powell and Lake Mead to determine the extent of water cuts. If the whole system drops below 38% capacity, their plan said, deeper cuts should be shared evenly with the Upper Basin and Mexico.
“We are trying to find the right, equitable outcome in which the Upper Basin doesn’t have to take all of the pain from the long-term reduction of the river, but we also can’t be the only ones protecting Lake Powell,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources and the state’s lead negotiator in the talks.
Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming called for addressing shortages based on the combined capacity of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, as opposed to just Lake Mead. It proposed more aggressive cuts that would affect California, Arizona and Nevada sooner when the major reservoir levels fall. Their plan doesn’t call for reductions in how much water is delivered to Upper Basin states.
Becky Mitchell, the lead negotiator for the state of Colorado, said the Upper Basin’s plan focuses more on making policy with an eye on the river’s supply, rather than the demands for its water.
“It’s important we start acknowledging that there’s not as much water available as folks would like,” Mitchell said.
Where does it go from here?
The federal government is expected to issue draft regulations by December that factor in the different plans and propose a way forward. Until then, states, tribes and other negotiators will continue talking and trying to reach agreement.
Hurricane Ernesto strengthens overnight, moves toward Bermuda
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
SOhO Goes the Big 3-0
date: 2024-08-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SOhO, Santa Barbara’s premier and longest-running showcase music club, survives highs and lows to reach the 30th anniversary milestone, mascot in tow.
The post SOhO Goes the Big 3-0 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/14/soho-goes-the-big-3-0/
‘Notebook,’ ‘Gloria’ actress Gena Rowlands dies at 94
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/notebook-gloria-actress-gena-rowlands-dies-at-94-/7743478.html
China-linked cyber-spies infect Russian govt, IT sector
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
No, no, go ahead, don’t let us stop you, Xi
Cyber-spies suspected of connections with China have infected “dozens” of computers belonging to Russian government agencies and IT providers with backdoors and trojans since late July, according to Kaspersky.…
State Fair of Texas bans firearms, drawing threats from state AG
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
DALLAS — The State Fair of Texas is laying down a new rule before millions of visitors flock through the gates for corn dogs, deep-fried delights and a friendly wave from a five-story cowboy named Big Tex: No guns allowed.
But that decision by fair organizers — which comes after a shooting last year on the 112-hectare fairgrounds in the heart of Dallas — has drawn outrage from Republican lawmakers, who in recent years have proudly expanded gun rights in Texas. On Wednesday, the state’s attorney general threatened a lawsuit unless the fair reversed course.
“Dallas has 15 days to fix the issue,” Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement, “otherwise I will see them in court.”
Tensions over where and how gun owners can carry firearms in public are frequent in Texas, but the standoff with one of the state’s most beloved institutions has moved the fight onto unusual turf. The fair has not backed down since cowboy hat-wearing organizers announced the new policy at a news conference last week.
The fair, which reopens in September and lasts for nearly a month, dates back to 1886. In addition to a maze of midway games, car shows and the Texas Star Ferris wheel — one of the tallest in the U.S. — the fairgrounds are also home to the annual college football rivalry between the University of Texas and University of Oklahoma. And after Big Tex, the towering cowboy that greets fairgoers, went up in flames in 2012 due to an electrical short, the fair mascot was met with great fanfare upon its return.
But a shooting near the rows of food booths last year dampened the revelry.
Investigators said one man opened fire on another, injuring three people and resulting in police clearing the fairgrounds. Videos posted on social media showed groups of people running along sidewalks and climbing barriers as they fled.
Defending the new policy Wednesday, fair spokesperson Karissa Condoianis acknowledged it has attracted “both criticism and praise.” She noted that the fair previously allowed gun owners to carry concealed weapons “even after virtually all other public events ceased to allow the same.”
“This is the right decision moving forward to ensure a safe environment and family-friendly atmosphere,” Condoianis said.
Republican lawmakers urged the fair to reconsider in a letter signed by more than 70 legislators, arguing that the ban made the fairgrounds less safe and was “anything but a celebration of Texas.”
In a separate letter to the City of Dallas, Paxton argued that the ban infringes on the rights of Texas gun owners. The city owns Fair Park, where the annual fair takes place; Paxton argued that gun owners can carry on property owned or leased by the government unless otherwise prohibited by state law.
A city spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday that they were reviewing Paxton’s letter “and will respond accordingly.”
Condoianis said Wednesday that the fair, which is a private, not-for-profit organization, “is not a government entity nor is it controlled by a government entity.” She said they are aware of Paxton’s letter to the city, and that it appears he’s “seeking clarification” on the city’s relationship with the fair and its use of Fair Park under the long-term lease agreement between the two parties.
Condoianis also disagreed that the ban makes the fair less safe, saying the policy is similar to rules at large community gatherings such as sporting events and concerts. She also noted that 200 uniformed and armed Dallas police officers and fair safety team members will be patrolling the fairgrounds. The fair said on its website that attendees go through a screening process before entering.
The fair is a “microcosm of the kind of mystique that comes with Texas,” said Brian Franklin, associate director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The fair, he said, speaks to Texans’ desire to emphasize the state’s rural cowboy heritage and being on the cutting edge of technology.
“You can go to the hall where it’s all the most amazing new cars and maybe other exhibits about technology,” he said, “and then you can also go and see the show cows.”
Columbia’s president resigns after months of turmoil, including Gaza protests
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — Columbia University President Minouche Shafik resigned Wednesday after a brief, tumultuous tenure that saw the head of the prestigious New York university grapple with protests over the Israel-Hamas war and criticism over how the school handled divisions related to the conflict.
The school in upper Manhattan was roiled this year by student protests, culminating in scenes of police officers carrying zip ties and riot shields storming a building that had been occupied by pro-Palestinian protesters. Similar protests swept college campuses nationwide.
In addition to the protests, the school in July removed three deans, who have since resigned, after officials said they exchanged disparaging texts during a campus discussion about Jewish life and antisemitism. Shafik said in a July 8 letter to the school community that the messages were unprofessional and “disturbingly touched on ancient antisemitic tropes.”
Shafik was also among the university leaders called for questioning before Congress earlier this year. She was heavily criticized by Republicans who accused her of not doing enough to combat concerns about antisemitism on Columbia’s campus.
In her letter announcing her resignation, Shafik heralded “progress in a number of important areas” but lamented that her tenure had also been a “period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.” In her statement, she acknowledged the campus protests factored into her decision to resign.
“This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in the community,” Shafik wrote. “Over the summer, I have been able to reflect and have decided that my moving on at this point would best enable Columbia to traverse the challenges ahead.”
Shafik said she will return to the United Kingdom to lead an effort by the foreign secretary’s office reviewing the government’s approach to international development and how to improve capability.
“I am very pleased and appreciative that this will afford me the opportunity to return to work on fighting global poverty and promoting sustainable development, areas of lifelong interest to me,” she wrote. “It also enables me to return to the House of Lords to reengage with the important legislative agenda put forth by the new UK government.”
The Board of Trustees announced that Katrina Armstrong, the CEO of Columbia University Irving Medical Center, agreed to serve as interim president. The board said Armstrong, who is also the executive vice president for the university’s Health and Biomedical Sciences, “is the right leader for this moment.”
Armstrong said she was “deeply honored” to be leading the university at a “pivotal moment for Columbia.”
“Challenging times present both the opportunity and the responsibility for serious leadership to emerge from every group and individual within a community,” Armstrong wrote. “This is such a time at Columbia. As I step into this role, I am acutely aware of the trials the University has faced over the past year.”
Shafik was named president of the university last year and was the first woman to take on the role, and she was one of several women newly appointed to take the reins at Ivy League institutions.
She had previously led the London School of Economics and before that worked at the World Bank, where she rose through the ranks to become the bank’s youngest-ever vice president. Shafik also worked at the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, followed by stints at the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England.
At the time of Shafik’s appointment, Columbia Board of Trustees chair Jonathan Lavine described her as a leader who deeply understood “the academy and the world beyond it.”
“What set Minouche apart as a candidate,” Lavine had said in a statement, “is her unshakable confidence in the vital role institutions of higher education can and must play in solving the world’s most complex problems.”
No charges against US serviceman in shooting of Chechen man
date: 2024-08-15, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/no-charges-against-us-serviceman-in-shooting-of-chechen-man/7743454.html
SCV Black Business Council celebrates Black Business Month
date: 2024-08-15, from: The Signal
The Santa Clarita Black Business Council hosted its second annual Black Business Month celebration last week at California Institute of the Arts, where they presented awards to three honorees. Di […]
The post SCV Black Business Council celebrates Black Business Month appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/scv-black-business-council-celebrates-black-business-month/
SCV Clergy Council discusses unity at Sheriff’s Station
date: 2024-08-15, from: The Signal
On the Sunday following the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump, Senior Pastor Mauricio Ruiz had more than 250 of his congregation at Elevate Church on Main Street in […]
The post SCV Clergy Council discusses unity at Sheriff’s Station appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/scv-clergy-council-discusses-unity-at-sheriffs-station/
Aug. 28: Coffee with a Cop at Sand Canyon Country Club
date: 2024-08-15, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station has announced it is switching things up this month for Coffee with a Cop. On Wednesday, Aug. 28 zone deputies from the station will meet with SCV residents on the driving range 9 a.m.-11 a.m. of the Sand Canyon Country Club
https://scvnews.com/aug-28-coffee-with-a-cop-at-sand-canyon-country-club/
Moonbound
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: Robin Rendle Essays
https://robinrendle.com/notes/moonbound/
Actors can license AI voice clones in union deal
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Thesps at least get final say on what their doppelgängers will say
AI-generated voices in ads might become more common thanks to an agreement between SAG-AFTRA and an AI cloning upstart.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/actors_union_ai_voice_clone/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-15, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
On iOS 18, when you are editing a screenshot you just took, there is automatic image snapping to things that feel like natural snapping points.
Like window edges.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112963155948862469
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Kamala Harris doesn't owe the national press anything.
Expose your local Kubernetes Ingress Controller via Hetzner Cloud
date: 2024-08-15, updated: 2024-08-15, from: Inlets.dev, cloud tunneling
There are two ways to configure inlets to expose an Ingress Controller or Istio Gateway to the public Internet, both are very similar, only the lifecycle of the tunnel differs.
https://inlets.dev/blog/2024/08/15/inlets-operator-with-hetzner.html
Pigsty Supplementary APT/YUM Repository with 254 additional PostgreSQL Extensions!
date: 2024-08-15, from: PostgreSQL News
Pigsty v3.0 (beta) introduces a public YUM/APT repository, featuring 121 pre-packaged RPM extension packages and 133 DEB extension packages.
In conjunction with the official PGDG YUM/APT repositories, users now have access to 333 PostgreSQL extensions, with 326 available on RHEL and 312 on Debian/Ubuntu, out-of-box with the default OS package manager.
This repo contains PostgreSQL 16 extensions for EL7,8,9, Debian 12, and Ubuntu 22.04 systems on amd64 architecture now. Expect more in the future.
This repository is hosted on Cloudflare and public available, fully open-sourced with all scripts and metadata available here.
Eager to hear any thoughts and would greatly appreciate any feedback.
WAL-G 3.0.3 released
date: 2024-08-15, from: PostgreSQL News
WAL-G team is happy to announce the release of WAL-G 3.0.3
WAL-G is a tool for archival database restoration for PostgreSQL, GreenplumDB, MySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB, etcd and several other databases.
Major feature of this release is full support for OrioleDB. WAL-G supported block-level incremental backups since v0.1.3, but it previously treated OrioleDB data as a collection of unknown files. Now WAL-G understands if OrioleDB is installed into cluster and makes efficient backup copies of OrioleDB data. Thanks to Supabase engineers for working on WAL-G.
Additionally, this release includes two new commands for Postgres:
catchup-send and catchup-receive. These
commands are useful when you need to bring a lagging replica up to date
without pushing a new backup to the storage. In essence, they work like
pg_rewind but in reverse. Perhaps we should rename them to pg_wind.
This release also mitigates several CVEs in dependencies (CVE-2023-39325, GHSA-9763-4f94-gfch) and fixes assorted bugs.
WAL-G v3.0.3 is available for download on our GitHub releases page.
Have a nice day!
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/wal-g-303-released-2911/
Pgpool-II 4.5.3, 4.4.8, 4.3.11, 4.2.18 and 4.1.21 released.
date: 2024-08-15, from: PostgreSQL News
What is Pgpool-II?
Pgpool-II is a tool to add useful features to PostgreSQL, including:
- connection pooling
- load balancing
- automatic failover and more.
Minor releases
Pgpool Global Development Group is pleased to announce the availability of following versions of Pgpool-II:
- 4.5.3
- 4.4.8
- 4.3.11
- 4.2.18
- 4.1.21
Please take a look at release notes.
You can download the source code and RPMs.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pgpool-ii-453-448-4311-4218-and-4121-released-2914/