Sep. 13th, 2014

silveradept: A head shot of Firefox-ko, a kitsune representation of Mozilla's browser, with a stern, taking-no-crap look on her face. (Firefox-ko)
We start with a frustration - if you are building a keyboard for touch devices, make absolutely goddamn sure that you include some sort of undo function, especially if your keyboard allows you to do things like select everything through a keyboard shortcut. That way, people like me, who have fingers that aren't always accurate to the keyboard layout, don't trash the draft of their post TWICE before saying "Fuck it, I'm going to my desktop to build this post" because they accidentally tapped a Ctrl-A and then another key when trying to type the word "an".

Anyway, moving on.

The Dead Pool Comedy Club says "Oh, oh, oh!" to Joan Rivers at 81 years of age.

Scotland's referendum on independence is getting remarkably close to 100% of the population registering to vote on the matter. So THAT's what it takes to increase turnout...

A request to not say the altered Pledge of Allegiance so as not to give legitimacy to one specific kind of theism in governmental affairs. Which will be joined by the Air Force's insistence that "so help me God" be said by every person enlisting or re-enlisting in their service.

Despite looking for excuses to deploy militarized weapons given to police departments for a purpose that is no longer manifest, police will disclaim any sort of double standard, even if a white man behaving erratically with his gun gets talked down instead of shot up.

Think about how the coverage from Ferguson would have looked had it happened outside the United States. Then realize that police interactions with young black men have filled the niche where extralegal groups of white men used to do violence to black men for many of the same stated reasons.

There may be progress - Oakland's mayor said that Urban Shield, a police and first responsder conference and training exercise, would not be held in the city next year, although other people in the city say that she has no authority to say that. And Ferguson and other police departments are starting to adopt the use of cameras on police officers so that there is a record of their interaction with citizens.

Missouri's legislature believes women are stupid and should have to wait three days before receiving an abortion. Because, aparently, women who go to the lengths to get abortions just need more time to think about it so they can choose to keep the kid. The legislature passed this bill over the veto of the state's governor.

A federal judge ruled that British Petroleum was grossly negligent in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, paving the way for a possible fine of $18 billion USD on top of all the other costs the company has incurred in cleaning up and reimbursing residents.

Governor Cash and Prizes, Bob McDonnell, was convicted on 11 felony counts related to the acceptance of gifts while in office by a jury, with his wife being convicted on 9 counts of the same. The "our marriage was awful, so we couldn't have colluded" defense did not convince the jury to find him not guilty on the majority of offered charges. The governor and his wife rejected a plea deal that would have reduced the charges to one felony for the governor, none for his wife, and that would have skipped the trial part altogether. Instead, now he had to deal with 11 convictions and a potentially long jail term, and his wife has 9.

Now that school is back in session, we can look forward to the new round of school shootings. Not that anyone knows where it will happen this time, because it will keep happening as long as schools are zones where social pressures are brought to bear on individuals to conform to the group, instead of being able to be their unique selves.

Four students have developed a nail polish that can (theoretically) discreetly detect whether a drink has been spiked with common date rape drugs. Which is an excellent thing to have at all times, even if one is going to a party where one feels safer. That said, sex education is woefully inadequate in many places, and parents are implicitly trusting their children to find the good sex education websites to fill in the gaps, instead of teaching them what the school won't.

Activism carries costs with it in terms of time and energy - and sometimes produces results that are ignored by a system that prioritizes output over efficiency.

The phrase "gamer" should be used as a pejorative, so long as people who keep claiming that moniker continue to behave in misogynistic, anti-women ways.

Better scientific analysis of Viking barrow remains suggests that about half of the warriors buried in them are women, calling into question the current beliefs of what Vikings were doing as they sailed about.

[livejournal.com profile] xiphias posits a form of depression where self-harm happens on the upswing out of depression instead of on the downswing, as well as a framework for seeing depression as an outside disease, and therefore being able to rally support to fight it off, instead of accepting it as an internal, eternal matter.

A comparison between two conventions, one oriented at a more social-justice aware part of fandom, that correspondingly draws younger and more diverse audiences, and the other that runs on its own inertia, attracting and often playing to and perpetuating less savory elements of fandom that the social-justice aware are trying to eradicate. And speaking of conventions, make sure your Accessibility chair is going for 100% solutions, because if they don't, the thing they miss usually comes back to bite them in the ass.

Oddly enough, states with legalized medical marijuana have less deaths from opioid painkillers. Not because weed lessens pain, but apparently because weed makes people care less about the pain. Which is probably a preferable result to the hallucinogenic honey that bees pollinating specific rhododendron plants make.

For writers - the question of whether a character is likable is often secondary, to a reader, to the question fo whether the character is real in their world.

In technology, wearable computing devices may provide unexpected data to those who know where to look, like how many people were awakened by an earthquake near them.

Caffeine and electricity may have similar functions when applied to the brain. Which may help, as some low level electromagnetic treatments can help get neural networks back into functioning order. And apparently magnetic stimulatio ncan help boost memory, as well.

Speaking of neurons, it appears skin neurons can perform edge detection and other calculations related to the dimensionality of objects without requiring a trip to the brain.

Thou Shalt Not Use Science To Blame They Mother. Or anyone else's, for that matter, because the things that usually invoke blame are based on values and shoulds, and not data and is. And once mothers are gone, the process of grieving for them takes a very long time, if it ever finishes at all.

The winners of a yearly contest that showcase radiographs of the odd things pets tend to eat. All pets radiographed are fine and doing healthy.

Darknet drug sellers are innovating in many arenas, including privacy, anonymity, and methods for providing excellent customer service so as not to lose customers to their competitors. Several large conglomerations could stand to learn a thing or five from these sellers about customer service.

It appears the Dairy Queen chain of stores has suffered a security breach, releasing credit card data into the black market. Home Depot also suffered a security breach. Thieves are using the weak automatic systems in place to reset debit card PINs and then drain accounts dry with ATM withdrawals. Some banks are even being successfully socially-engineered to increase the daily withdrawal limit after being spun a story by the fraudsters about traveling in a foreign country.

Sanrio, keepers of the Hello Kitty brand, would like to remind us that Hello Kitty is not an actual animal, but is instead an anthropomorphized cat-like entity in the same vein that Disney's Goofy is a dog-like entity. I'm sure there are many furs rejoicing at having a major property be explicity one of them.

Last for tonight, an iProduct app that wants to replicate the look and feel of a mnual typewriter, but with all the benefits of iProduct technology, how every browser ever lies and says it's Mozilla, because in the beginning, only Mozilla got the good webpages, attempting to disrupt the ability of bacteria to sense a critical mass, and thus prevent them from attacking the body, a hotel with paleontological items and dinosaur relics, and a love story that started between two teenagers, attempted to grow to encompass all the complicated religious feelings associated with that love, and then eventually discarded the religion in favor of the love story.

Oh, and Babymetal, a group that fuses the highly-stylized worlds of metal music and J-pop, generating an idol group that does dark songs. From all accounts, it's a highly successful pairing.

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silveradept: A kodama with a trombone. The trombone is playing music, even though it is held in a rest position (Default)
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