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silveradeptLet us begin with a call for the preservation of pornography and erotica in archival collections, because of the insights they provide into how people of all stripes saw sex, saw other people, did business, and many other aspects of life and society that don't obviously appear to have anything to do with sex. Especially things like how racist or sexist the material is or was, and how porn and erotica are often extremely good at showing stereotype and the underpinnings of a society, specifically because the erotic is supposed to get at what we find alluring, attractive, and sexy, even if in polite society, it might be a taboo action.
In contrast, we present Alabama's state house, who have passed a bill that, if it becomes law, gives anyone the right to declare any book in a library obscene and demand its removal, and librarians who do not comply in seven days could be charged with a misdemeanor. It also bans schools and libraries from having anyone who might do drag or dress in a way that someone thinks is too "sexually revealing, exaggerated, or provocative." Which, as is noted, might ban certain kinds of prom dresses and jail the students wearing them. I find these kinds of bills that presume the person demanding removal of materials is right express a basic distrust in the library's willingness to go along with the hegemon and treat their views as unquestionable defaults. Since they can no longer believe that the librarians are right-thinking in the same way they are, they have to take away the ability of the librarians to decide at all. They're also doing it to teachers, through policies that require much of the resources of the Internet to be blocked from student or teacher use in lesson plans or where they might be helpful to students struggling with issues or identity questions. Because out there are people who might be both informative and accepting in their posts and articles. Or a site that has useful things might also host things that are less useful, or that have been deemed harmful because of abdicating decision-making to regexes, the zealots who program the filters initially, and intentionally making it hard to get things unblocked once they've been blocked.
With laws on the books that presume the guilt of the person and materials accused and levy heavy penalties if those materials are not removed shortly after the accusation is leveled, school librarians are committing censorship with the belief that access in an altered form is superior to having to decide between removing materials or being charged as a felon. This is a logical decision to make, specifically because the laws as written do not allow for the accused person or materials to first be reviewed and a determination made about them before they are removed or returned. And there are very few librarias who are willing to stand on their principles and be covered in the media and the court of social media as peddlers of pornography to children. Even when it's patently ridiculous that a book with an illustration of a naked butt in it is pornographic, the law does not actually say that the librarians are allowed to say "this is ridiculous." It says the material has to be removed or the state will charge the librarian with a felony and force them to defend that charge in court. And, of course, the state only has to win once, and I doubt most public libraries have the pockets to defend their librarians repeatedly against repeated bullshit charges. It sucks to be a librarian in a place that has decided they intend to use the law against you and empower the most fanatical to impose their will on you with the backing of the state.
A county in Virginia made a proclamation to honor a Girl Scout receiving her Gold Award, the highest award a Girl Scout can receive, but county councillors decided to censor the purpose of the Gold Award project, which was to fight against the council and the school board's decisions to demand censorship of books. I suppose we have to give them point for noticing they were about to admit to complete hypocrisy, but in removing the reasons for the Gold Award, the councilor's also diminish the honor and the recognition that the girl should be receiving for having decided to fly the bird at the censors in her local government and actively work to sabotage their desired results.
Unsurprisingly, trying to restrict book access and other such things generally leads to the Streisand Effect.
The person whose name is attached to the study now being wielded as a club against good gender-affirming care in the United Kingdom appears to be trying to hedge or distance herself from the report with her name on it. Given what the content of the report is and the methodology involved in it, it's probably a very smart idea for Dr. Cass to try and get herself away from it in any way she can. The dfficulty for the doctor may be in whether or not she can actually get away from the report itself that bears her name, and the consultations and methods done to produce it, or the decisions made that will likely cite the report as justification for doing harm to trans people or placing them in hostile spaces.
The other issue is that the Labour leader seems to be on board with at least some of the anti-trans material coming out of the Conservatives, which, in the States, would mean that a Kang and Kodos joke would be coming, but it's entirely possible that in the system in the UK, both Labor and the Tories could be punished for such a stance and some other party with different views come to power. It's unlikely, but it's at least possible in the framework.
There's still significant stigma associated with being a woman who has not had children through body birth, or being a woman that has no intent of having children through body birth. At least where I am, there's not a whole lot of social support systems set up for people who do choose to have or adopt children to make it something they don't have to agonize about whether there will be enough support, salary, and social networks for. There's an awful lot about forcing someone to give birth to a child if they choose to have sex with someone, but there's nothing on the back end about raising a child if someone is going to go through body birth, or a system of making sure that people who want to have children can get them from the people who don't want to have children or were forced to have them.
From there, we change directions forcefully and abruptly, with an article from a satirical website about autism, The Daily Tism. "I won't let my son's autism define him," says self-defined autism mum. There's plenty of other satirical gold in the website, and for those who are familiar with the stereotypes, there's a lot of knee-slappers.
Arizona follows suit of other states and charges eighteen persons in relation to the submission of fradulent documents claiming the duly elected Electoral College members from the state were Republicans, despite the Democratic candidate having won the state by a considerable margin. It is good to know that the state still takes seriously election fraud and misrepresentation of official state processes and duties.
Especially because they seem to be failing at other elements. Despite passing a bill that would repeal the 1864 territorial law that the Arizona Supreme Court said was the law of the land on abortion access, because there was no emergency measure attached to it, such a repeal goes into effect at the end of the legislative session, and even having done so, that would only allow the other abortion ban on the books to take effect. If the correct citizen's initative passes, then it will become a constitutional right in the state, but for now, it's still 1864 in Arizona, and there are plenty of people there that would like it to stay that way.
Migrants who were flown to Martha's Vineyard as part of a stunt by Florida Governor Ron Desantis have made application for visas to stay in the United States as victims of trafficking, based on evidence presented about how they were approached and tricked into going somewhere else on false promises. Which, y'know, I'm sure that the Governor will be pleased that the victims of the crime were allowed to stay legally in the country.
University and college students, instructors, professors, and others have made their voices heard loudly in protest over Israel's treatment of Gaza and Palestinians, and the United States' continued supply and funding of those efforts with both money and materiel. The response to those encampments and demonstrations across the nation has usually been the calling in of police to forcefully disperse the crowds and their places, and the police have been more than happy to exercise the monopoly of violence the authority gives them on the people making the protests. Dispatches from Columbia University, for example, about what is going on in those spaces when the police are not actively trying to destroy them. As the police continue to be set upon the protesters, the protesters so far have had their ranks reinforced and reclaim their spaces, even as counter-demonstrators set up next to them, often with more resources at their disposal. We are, once again, at a moment in time where we see clearly that the protections supposedly enhsrined in law are conditional, that it matters who is doing the talking, and what they are talking about, as to whether they will be afforded the protections of the law, whether their institutions will back them, or even do the minimum of holding space where discussion and learning is supposed to happen instead of, say, canceling the entire commencement exercise because they did not wish to risk having a student give an address that was critical.
Once again, the system is working as intended, when it sends police in to crush the voices of those calling for a more just world and allows the voices of those calling for the end of rule by the people to proceed unmolested through public spaces. And there are plenty of apologists everywhere for the use of those police forces.
The Federal Trade Commission banned and voided most noncompete agreements, where workers in an industry had to promise they would not work for a competitor or launch a business that would compete with their employer for a certain amount of time, usually several years, if they left their current employer.
The use of advertising trackers and similar surveillance items on Kaiser Permanente's websites likely resulted in the transmission of sensitive data to the third parties that were providing the surveillance trackers. Because of course it did, and this is why adtech is a cancer on the Web and should be removed or blocked without remorse by browsers and by entities that actually give a damn about user privacy.
If you are going to crime, do not have biometrics as an unlock method for your devices, otherwise the police may be able to use them to force-unlock them.
The Harvard University Library had decided to remove the human skin cover on one of the books in its collection, citing ethical concerns about the use of the skin and the origins of it. Which is apparently a thing rising above the surface of the iceberg that is the debate about what to do with human remains and materials that use human remains, where institutions are coming to their own decisions about what to do, usually in the contexts of the colonial artifacts they have that could be repatriated to the places and peoples they came from.
Staying in the realm of books and reading, an exhortation to read for fun, rather than as a wellness exerise or a thing you have to force yourself to do. If you want to, you can use some tips on how to get back in the reading habits, most of which is the various bits and pieves of what the local librarian will do to try and get a book that you have a high probability of enjoying into your hands. But seriously, those kinds of things should be for enjoyment, rather than as yet another chore.
The Bibilotheque Nationale of France quarantined several books the Poison Book Project identified as potentially containing quantities of arsenic in their covers. Much like how toxic chemicals were present in wallpapers and the paste for them, and in building materials that were meant to retard fire, bookbinding practices of the past sometimes used chemicals that we now know are toxic and potentially dangerous to those that handle them. The Poison Book Project details many of the works that may be possibly laced with such things.
A Finnish man who hacked a therapy practice, stole confidential notes, and then attempted to extort the practice and the patients against the release of the data has been sentenced to six years in prison, as well as having to pay restitution to those he attempted to extort.
The defendant in a New York trial accused of election interference through the use of reimbursement of "catch and kill" practice from a New York tabloid was fined the maximum amount for several contempt of court citations and violations of his gag order. The amount was negligible, and the judge then threated the possibility of incarceration if the violations continued. Which, of course, might be perfect for the martyr image that the defendant is trying to project for his presidential comapign.
The piece of Chicago sidewalk with the impression of the rat and/or squirrel has been removed by the city, although it has supposedly been preserved for the moment, so it may end up somewhere else. Fat Bird Week, for when you want to see some really chonky borbs. Reconstructing the face of an ancient ancestor.
In technology, a triumph! Voyager 1 is once again communicating coherently with Earth, which will allow for further commands to rearrange the memory blocks and avoid known bad spaces on the computer storage and hopefully continue to squeeze yet more science data out of the probe's interstellar readings.
And another triumph. The SLIM lander, the one that went in point-first and wasn't expected to last one lunar night, has now made it through three of them and is still sending back data. The engineers for that project deserve kudos and praise for having engineered a device that has well-exceeded expectations.
After nearly 50 years of production, the Zilog Z80 microprocessor, an absolute workhorse of 8-bit computing, will no longer be manufactured after a final burst this year. The Z80 has been around for a long time, and has clearly found lots of uses over time for those that only need what it is capable of.
The current Federal Communications Commission has re-classified Internet Service Providers as common carriers, putting them under rules that forbid them from discriminating for or against certain types of traffic. Net neutrality has returned, but because this was an administrative action, rather than a legislative one, it will last only as long as the administration believes in it.
A significant number of laptop-type computers are moving in the direction of directly soldering their RAM to the mainboard, which makes them less upgradable, but brings the benefit of making them lighter and less clunky. If we were in a situation the viable life of a computing device were such that it would start failing out completely at about the time the needs for computing had changed to something beefier, that would probably be okay, but we have machines already that can outlast their software's support life and should be able to go through several upgrades without sacrificing performance. And the failure of one component really shouldn't bring the entire house down and e-waste the whole device. Unfortuantely, that's kind of where we're headed, and I'm not fond of it. I want our devices to keep ticking until the point where they physically can no longer do the thing, and for them to have been designed and manufactured with that idea in mind and with the expansion capability to do so as more and more resources are demanded to do the same things.
Unsurprisingly, all of the people who want to tout their large learning models as genuine artificial intelligence find themselves running up against the reality that the power grid cannot support their data center electricity demands. At this point, the greedy ones who want to power their toys will have to develop the ability to harness the sun's energy output first. And probably also having to figure out how to clean up the pollution all of those data centers are producing or off-world it so they don't have to deal with those pesky regulations.
Climate optimism, of the possibility that we might be at the tipping point, or the peak before there's a lot of activity that will help with the transition away from fossil fuel carbons to more renewable sources of energy. So, maybe those data-hungry companies can help, if only to save their own operations.
Elon Musk's attempt at building a truck continues to embarass him. All 3,878 currently-sold Cybertrucks are under recall because their accelerator pedal can be stuck in a way that keeps the throttle wide-open, which is both an embarassment about how few trucks have been sold and yet another of the problems that come with owning such a thing. Like how putting the truck through a car wash, without engaging the "Car Wash Mode" required a five-hour reboot process from the manufacturer. It says something about the things that they have to have a specific "Car Wash Mode," I'm sure. And also the bit where Tesla cars have overly-complicated manual overrides for things like door locks that will not work well in a panic situation. And the more "manual" way of shifting gears in the cybertruck was poorly designed and is prone to falling off its mount.
The actual solution for the slipping problem is driving a rivet into place so the clipped-on-object doesn't slide off. Which is an effective recall solution, but I'm sure it infuriates the person in charge that he had to do it in the first place.
Beyond that, the Tesla shareholders are being asked to approve the executive compensation package the Chancery Court of Delaware rejected, claiming the Board of Directors was "beholden" to the CEO, and also to approve a reincorporation of the company in Texas because the Chancery Court rejected the executive compensation package. Which ceratinly feels like the kind of decision that would make a shareholder feel very confident that the company itself is doing well and is beind headed by someone who can be trusted to make good decisions for it.
All of these things, including the behavior of the CEO, has resulted in intentions to lay off a decimating amount of staff, since sales are slowing and it seems that the fans are really the only people still on the Tesla ship. And several more divisions get laid off, too., including people who would be helpful for the announced intention to provide robot taxi service. We'll see if anything actually comes to market, and whether such things, if they do, will pass sufficient safety checks.
If he does bring them to market, though, they'll probably be subject to the province of British Columbia's ban on cars that are above SAE Level 2 in autonomy and self-driving, with the province wanting to be sure, at least at this point, that multi-ton vehicles need to have a human that can react to human situations.
Retiring Bay Area Rapid Transit cars are being repurposed into different facilities, like a cabin retreat, a firefighter training car, and also some museum pieces, which is an excellent way of making sure that the materials used to build and run them still get used and remain part of the history and currency of the Bay Area.
In praise of the bicycle and pedal power as the most efficient way of translating human power into mechanical work, accompanied by a piece about the "drawbacks" of using an electric bike, including cost savings, exercise benefits, seeing other people on the road, and not having guilt about your carbon footprint. Commuting by bike is workable for people who have the benefit of living close to where they work. Or who have places to shop close to where they live. Which is still a fair number of people who live in urban areas, but for those people who have to live somewhere affordable and commute to work in their major metropolis, there will have to be more solutions implemented than "buy a bike and use it."
An improperly secured server showed that North Koreans were working on animation for properties being made by United States companies and networks, despite North Korea being officially interdicted by those countries. Because animation is often farmed out to smaller studios under the direction of the larger ones, it seems like it wouldn't take all that many hops before you get to a place that works with North Korea and the people who are supposed to ensure compliance with sanctions don't know this, because the top levels don't talk to the bottom levels, but only to the levels directly above and below them, and if it's in countries that don't have the sanctions, or don't really have a lot of enforcement on them, then you get the whole chain working as intended and nobody making any kind of fuss about the fact that it's in violation of sanctions.
Women Who Code has officially made the decision to dissolve the organization due to an inability to raise sufficent funds. Which is both emblematic of how much progress still needs to happen regarding women in technology.
Because airline systems were designed without thinking about someone who might want to travel when older than 99 years of age, a 101 year-old flier keeps being reported as an 01 year-old flier, leaving the crews expecting an infant instead of a passenger. It seems like there's a system there that it only using two digits instead of four and has a line where it becomes 19XX instead of 20XX.
The Federal Communications Commission fined major wireless carriers for selling customer location data to any third party willing to pay for it. Unfortunately, the total fines amounted to about 200 million dollars across the companies, who regularly make millions in profits. At some point, fines are going to have to be percentages of goss revenue if we want behavior to change, or other similar penalties that will actually count as punishments rather than the figured-in cost of doing business.
Last for tonight, in case anyone wondered whether or not Microsoft Excel is a programming language (it is), a person has created an RPG-style adventure in Mircosoft Excel, so you never need to use the boss key to make it look like you're doing work while you adeventure on company time.
And the use of communication cards to both communicate and to make a good three-line joke work well.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
In contrast, we present Alabama's state house, who have passed a bill that, if it becomes law, gives anyone the right to declare any book in a library obscene and demand its removal, and librarians who do not comply in seven days could be charged with a misdemeanor. It also bans schools and libraries from having anyone who might do drag or dress in a way that someone thinks is too "sexually revealing, exaggerated, or provocative." Which, as is noted, might ban certain kinds of prom dresses and jail the students wearing them. I find these kinds of bills that presume the person demanding removal of materials is right express a basic distrust in the library's willingness to go along with the hegemon and treat their views as unquestionable defaults. Since they can no longer believe that the librarians are right-thinking in the same way they are, they have to take away the ability of the librarians to decide at all. They're also doing it to teachers, through policies that require much of the resources of the Internet to be blocked from student or teacher use in lesson plans or where they might be helpful to students struggling with issues or identity questions. Because out there are people who might be both informative and accepting in their posts and articles. Or a site that has useful things might also host things that are less useful, or that have been deemed harmful because of abdicating decision-making to regexes, the zealots who program the filters initially, and intentionally making it hard to get things unblocked once they've been blocked.
With laws on the books that presume the guilt of the person and materials accused and levy heavy penalties if those materials are not removed shortly after the accusation is leveled, school librarians are committing censorship with the belief that access in an altered form is superior to having to decide between removing materials or being charged as a felon. This is a logical decision to make, specifically because the laws as written do not allow for the accused person or materials to first be reviewed and a determination made about them before they are removed or returned. And there are very few librarias who are willing to stand on their principles and be covered in the media and the court of social media as peddlers of pornography to children. Even when it's patently ridiculous that a book with an illustration of a naked butt in it is pornographic, the law does not actually say that the librarians are allowed to say "this is ridiculous." It says the material has to be removed or the state will charge the librarian with a felony and force them to defend that charge in court. And, of course, the state only has to win once, and I doubt most public libraries have the pockets to defend their librarians repeatedly against repeated bullshit charges. It sucks to be a librarian in a place that has decided they intend to use the law against you and empower the most fanatical to impose their will on you with the backing of the state.
A county in Virginia made a proclamation to honor a Girl Scout receiving her Gold Award, the highest award a Girl Scout can receive, but county councillors decided to censor the purpose of the Gold Award project, which was to fight against the council and the school board's decisions to demand censorship of books. I suppose we have to give them point for noticing they were about to admit to complete hypocrisy, but in removing the reasons for the Gold Award, the councilor's also diminish the honor and the recognition that the girl should be receiving for having decided to fly the bird at the censors in her local government and actively work to sabotage their desired results.
Unsurprisingly, trying to restrict book access and other such things generally leads to the Streisand Effect.
The person whose name is attached to the study now being wielded as a club against good gender-affirming care in the United Kingdom appears to be trying to hedge or distance herself from the report with her name on it. Given what the content of the report is and the methodology involved in it, it's probably a very smart idea for Dr. Cass to try and get herself away from it in any way she can. The dfficulty for the doctor may be in whether or not she can actually get away from the report itself that bears her name, and the consultations and methods done to produce it, or the decisions made that will likely cite the report as justification for doing harm to trans people or placing them in hostile spaces.
The other issue is that the Labour leader seems to be on board with at least some of the anti-trans material coming out of the Conservatives, which, in the States, would mean that a Kang and Kodos joke would be coming, but it's entirely possible that in the system in the UK, both Labor and the Tories could be punished for such a stance and some other party with different views come to power. It's unlikely, but it's at least possible in the framework.
There's still significant stigma associated with being a woman who has not had children through body birth, or being a woman that has no intent of having children through body birth. At least where I am, there's not a whole lot of social support systems set up for people who do choose to have or adopt children to make it something they don't have to agonize about whether there will be enough support, salary, and social networks for. There's an awful lot about forcing someone to give birth to a child if they choose to have sex with someone, but there's nothing on the back end about raising a child if someone is going to go through body birth, or a system of making sure that people who want to have children can get them from the people who don't want to have children or were forced to have them.
From there, we change directions forcefully and abruptly, with an article from a satirical website about autism, The Daily Tism. "I won't let my son's autism define him," says self-defined autism mum. There's plenty of other satirical gold in the website, and for those who are familiar with the stereotypes, there's a lot of knee-slappers.
Arizona follows suit of other states and charges eighteen persons in relation to the submission of fradulent documents claiming the duly elected Electoral College members from the state were Republicans, despite the Democratic candidate having won the state by a considerable margin. It is good to know that the state still takes seriously election fraud and misrepresentation of official state processes and duties.
Especially because they seem to be failing at other elements. Despite passing a bill that would repeal the 1864 territorial law that the Arizona Supreme Court said was the law of the land on abortion access, because there was no emergency measure attached to it, such a repeal goes into effect at the end of the legislative session, and even having done so, that would only allow the other abortion ban on the books to take effect. If the correct citizen's initative passes, then it will become a constitutional right in the state, but for now, it's still 1864 in Arizona, and there are plenty of people there that would like it to stay that way.
Migrants who were flown to Martha's Vineyard as part of a stunt by Florida Governor Ron Desantis have made application for visas to stay in the United States as victims of trafficking, based on evidence presented about how they were approached and tricked into going somewhere else on false promises. Which, y'know, I'm sure that the Governor will be pleased that the victims of the crime were allowed to stay legally in the country.
University and college students, instructors, professors, and others have made their voices heard loudly in protest over Israel's treatment of Gaza and Palestinians, and the United States' continued supply and funding of those efforts with both money and materiel. The response to those encampments and demonstrations across the nation has usually been the calling in of police to forcefully disperse the crowds and their places, and the police have been more than happy to exercise the monopoly of violence the authority gives them on the people making the protests. Dispatches from Columbia University, for example, about what is going on in those spaces when the police are not actively trying to destroy them. As the police continue to be set upon the protesters, the protesters so far have had their ranks reinforced and reclaim their spaces, even as counter-demonstrators set up next to them, often with more resources at their disposal. We are, once again, at a moment in time where we see clearly that the protections supposedly enhsrined in law are conditional, that it matters who is doing the talking, and what they are talking about, as to whether they will be afforded the protections of the law, whether their institutions will back them, or even do the minimum of holding space where discussion and learning is supposed to happen instead of, say, canceling the entire commencement exercise because they did not wish to risk having a student give an address that was critical.
Once again, the system is working as intended, when it sends police in to crush the voices of those calling for a more just world and allows the voices of those calling for the end of rule by the people to proceed unmolested through public spaces. And there are plenty of apologists everywhere for the use of those police forces.
The Federal Trade Commission banned and voided most noncompete agreements, where workers in an industry had to promise they would not work for a competitor or launch a business that would compete with their employer for a certain amount of time, usually several years, if they left their current employer.
The use of advertising trackers and similar surveillance items on Kaiser Permanente's websites likely resulted in the transmission of sensitive data to the third parties that were providing the surveillance trackers. Because of course it did, and this is why adtech is a cancer on the Web and should be removed or blocked without remorse by browsers and by entities that actually give a damn about user privacy.
If you are going to crime, do not have biometrics as an unlock method for your devices, otherwise the police may be able to use them to force-unlock them.
The Harvard University Library had decided to remove the human skin cover on one of the books in its collection, citing ethical concerns about the use of the skin and the origins of it. Which is apparently a thing rising above the surface of the iceberg that is the debate about what to do with human remains and materials that use human remains, where institutions are coming to their own decisions about what to do, usually in the contexts of the colonial artifacts they have that could be repatriated to the places and peoples they came from.
Staying in the realm of books and reading, an exhortation to read for fun, rather than as a wellness exerise or a thing you have to force yourself to do. If you want to, you can use some tips on how to get back in the reading habits, most of which is the various bits and pieves of what the local librarian will do to try and get a book that you have a high probability of enjoying into your hands. But seriously, those kinds of things should be for enjoyment, rather than as yet another chore.
The Bibilotheque Nationale of France quarantined several books the Poison Book Project identified as potentially containing quantities of arsenic in their covers. Much like how toxic chemicals were present in wallpapers and the paste for them, and in building materials that were meant to retard fire, bookbinding practices of the past sometimes used chemicals that we now know are toxic and potentially dangerous to those that handle them. The Poison Book Project details many of the works that may be possibly laced with such things.
A Finnish man who hacked a therapy practice, stole confidential notes, and then attempted to extort the practice and the patients against the release of the data has been sentenced to six years in prison, as well as having to pay restitution to those he attempted to extort.
The defendant in a New York trial accused of election interference through the use of reimbursement of "catch and kill" practice from a New York tabloid was fined the maximum amount for several contempt of court citations and violations of his gag order. The amount was negligible, and the judge then threated the possibility of incarceration if the violations continued. Which, of course, might be perfect for the martyr image that the defendant is trying to project for his presidential comapign.
The piece of Chicago sidewalk with the impression of the rat and/or squirrel has been removed by the city, although it has supposedly been preserved for the moment, so it may end up somewhere else. Fat Bird Week, for when you want to see some really chonky borbs. Reconstructing the face of an ancient ancestor.
In technology, a triumph! Voyager 1 is once again communicating coherently with Earth, which will allow for further commands to rearrange the memory blocks and avoid known bad spaces on the computer storage and hopefully continue to squeeze yet more science data out of the probe's interstellar readings.
And another triumph. The SLIM lander, the one that went in point-first and wasn't expected to last one lunar night, has now made it through three of them and is still sending back data. The engineers for that project deserve kudos and praise for having engineered a device that has well-exceeded expectations.
After nearly 50 years of production, the Zilog Z80 microprocessor, an absolute workhorse of 8-bit computing, will no longer be manufactured after a final burst this year. The Z80 has been around for a long time, and has clearly found lots of uses over time for those that only need what it is capable of.
The current Federal Communications Commission has re-classified Internet Service Providers as common carriers, putting them under rules that forbid them from discriminating for or against certain types of traffic. Net neutrality has returned, but because this was an administrative action, rather than a legislative one, it will last only as long as the administration believes in it.
A significant number of laptop-type computers are moving in the direction of directly soldering their RAM to the mainboard, which makes them less upgradable, but brings the benefit of making them lighter and less clunky. If we were in a situation the viable life of a computing device were such that it would start failing out completely at about the time the needs for computing had changed to something beefier, that would probably be okay, but we have machines already that can outlast their software's support life and should be able to go through several upgrades without sacrificing performance. And the failure of one component really shouldn't bring the entire house down and e-waste the whole device. Unfortuantely, that's kind of where we're headed, and I'm not fond of it. I want our devices to keep ticking until the point where they physically can no longer do the thing, and for them to have been designed and manufactured with that idea in mind and with the expansion capability to do so as more and more resources are demanded to do the same things.
Unsurprisingly, all of the people who want to tout their large learning models as genuine artificial intelligence find themselves running up against the reality that the power grid cannot support their data center electricity demands. At this point, the greedy ones who want to power their toys will have to develop the ability to harness the sun's energy output first. And probably also having to figure out how to clean up the pollution all of those data centers are producing or off-world it so they don't have to deal with those pesky regulations.
Climate optimism, of the possibility that we might be at the tipping point, or the peak before there's a lot of activity that will help with the transition away from fossil fuel carbons to more renewable sources of energy. So, maybe those data-hungry companies can help, if only to save their own operations.
Elon Musk's attempt at building a truck continues to embarass him. All 3,878 currently-sold Cybertrucks are under recall because their accelerator pedal can be stuck in a way that keeps the throttle wide-open, which is both an embarassment about how few trucks have been sold and yet another of the problems that come with owning such a thing. Like how putting the truck through a car wash, without engaging the "Car Wash Mode" required a five-hour reboot process from the manufacturer. It says something about the things that they have to have a specific "Car Wash Mode," I'm sure. And also the bit where Tesla cars have overly-complicated manual overrides for things like door locks that will not work well in a panic situation. And the more "manual" way of shifting gears in the cybertruck was poorly designed and is prone to falling off its mount.
The actual solution for the slipping problem is driving a rivet into place so the clipped-on-object doesn't slide off. Which is an effective recall solution, but I'm sure it infuriates the person in charge that he had to do it in the first place.
Beyond that, the Tesla shareholders are being asked to approve the executive compensation package the Chancery Court of Delaware rejected, claiming the Board of Directors was "beholden" to the CEO, and also to approve a reincorporation of the company in Texas because the Chancery Court rejected the executive compensation package. Which ceratinly feels like the kind of decision that would make a shareholder feel very confident that the company itself is doing well and is beind headed by someone who can be trusted to make good decisions for it.
All of these things, including the behavior of the CEO, has resulted in intentions to lay off a decimating amount of staff, since sales are slowing and it seems that the fans are really the only people still on the Tesla ship. And several more divisions get laid off, too., including people who would be helpful for the announced intention to provide robot taxi service. We'll see if anything actually comes to market, and whether such things, if they do, will pass sufficient safety checks.
If he does bring them to market, though, they'll probably be subject to the province of British Columbia's ban on cars that are above SAE Level 2 in autonomy and self-driving, with the province wanting to be sure, at least at this point, that multi-ton vehicles need to have a human that can react to human situations.
Retiring Bay Area Rapid Transit cars are being repurposed into different facilities, like a cabin retreat, a firefighter training car, and also some museum pieces, which is an excellent way of making sure that the materials used to build and run them still get used and remain part of the history and currency of the Bay Area.
In praise of the bicycle and pedal power as the most efficient way of translating human power into mechanical work, accompanied by a piece about the "drawbacks" of using an electric bike, including cost savings, exercise benefits, seeing other people on the road, and not having guilt about your carbon footprint. Commuting by bike is workable for people who have the benefit of living close to where they work. Or who have places to shop close to where they live. Which is still a fair number of people who live in urban areas, but for those people who have to live somewhere affordable and commute to work in their major metropolis, there will have to be more solutions implemented than "buy a bike and use it."
An improperly secured server showed that North Koreans were working on animation for properties being made by United States companies and networks, despite North Korea being officially interdicted by those countries. Because animation is often farmed out to smaller studios under the direction of the larger ones, it seems like it wouldn't take all that many hops before you get to a place that works with North Korea and the people who are supposed to ensure compliance with sanctions don't know this, because the top levels don't talk to the bottom levels, but only to the levels directly above and below them, and if it's in countries that don't have the sanctions, or don't really have a lot of enforcement on them, then you get the whole chain working as intended and nobody making any kind of fuss about the fact that it's in violation of sanctions.
Women Who Code has officially made the decision to dissolve the organization due to an inability to raise sufficent funds. Which is both emblematic of how much progress still needs to happen regarding women in technology.
Because airline systems were designed without thinking about someone who might want to travel when older than 99 years of age, a 101 year-old flier keeps being reported as an 01 year-old flier, leaving the crews expecting an infant instead of a passenger. It seems like there's a system there that it only using two digits instead of four and has a line where it becomes 19XX instead of 20XX.
The Federal Communications Commission fined major wireless carriers for selling customer location data to any third party willing to pay for it. Unfortunately, the total fines amounted to about 200 million dollars across the companies, who regularly make millions in profits. At some point, fines are going to have to be percentages of goss revenue if we want behavior to change, or other similar penalties that will actually count as punishments rather than the figured-in cost of doing business.
Last for tonight, in case anyone wondered whether or not Microsoft Excel is a programming language (it is), a person has created an RPG-style adventure in Mircosoft Excel, so you never need to use the boss key to make it look like you're doing work while you adeventure on company time.
And the use of communication cards to both communicate and to make a good three-line joke work well.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
