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silveradeptBeginning with A summary document of what has been bringing the NaNoWriMo organization into the news for the last year, with moderation decisions, closures of forums, statements about the use of AI, and links to other parts, either still live or their archived previous versions. It's a long document with overlapping things, but many of them point at bad organizational decision-making.
For those who are looking for something to do on the same theme, but without the NaNoWriMo organization, Writing Month is one of many options available for those who want to put down a significant number of words in the month of November (or any other month).
The prevention of pubescent children from obtaining puberty blockers for gender identity reasons is having real and lasting effects in the United Kingdom, sufficiently strong effects that a government and health system that cared about the health and well-being of those children and teenagers would immediately rescind the ban and provide blockers. As is the case in so many situations, however, the health and well-being of the trans person is subordinated to the usually-religious ideology of a trans-harming cis person.
The reality that pregnancy is difficult and potentially lethal to the person carrying the child. It is a bizarre health care system that cannot prioritize the life and health of the one carrying the child over the one that has not yet made it to the point where they can draw breath of their own. And in an environment where the legal ability of a pregnant person to receive health care that will keep them alive has been shredded, it seems likely that barring massive voter suppression, there will be punishment inflicted at the ballot box for all of those who enabled this hell. After all, the deeply Catholic Ireland shredded their abortion restrictions into dust when confronted with the reality that those restrictions were producing dead women and dead children, so there's hope that the deeply religious in the United States will continue to follow the same pathway, voting out restrictions when given the opportunity to do so themselves, instead of having restrictions piled on by zealots "elected" in twisted districts, or allowed to continue by zealots appointed by a man who brags about the damage he does. Because the people who will do the most damage will do it with a smile, inflicting their sadism while claiming that they are protecting the people they're hurting the most.
Buffer zones around reproductive health care clinics are coming into force in the UK, for while it is not nearly as violent an issue there as it is in the UK, the governments in place have sensibly taken the tack that people who are going to get health care do not need to be traumatized by religious zealots who are trying to get them to become scared or change their minds.
There is a movement afoot to remind women that the candidate they vote for is a private matter, and they should be able to successfully vote for the candidate who is better for them without fear that their husbands or the men in their lives will find out. The notes are encouraging voting for the Democratic candidate (no surprise, since the Republican candidate continues to brag that he produced the situation where women die because the doctors that know what they are supposed to do to prevent death must also be willing to face criminal charges from a state predisposed to find them guilty of murder. Which is a feature, not a bug, of the laws those states have passed to create these situations.), but I think there's also a certain amount of those women needing to either vote early and have it taken care of, or for there to be more effort in some polling places to ensure that even if a husband and wife go together to the polls, that the husband cannot look over or around dividers to ensure that his wife is voting the "right" way. Which we have anecdotes of from people who work the polls about how those husbands and men often try to engineer situations where they get the opportunity to intrude on the sanctity of the ballot.
A whole lot of people who should know better, if they had bothered to read what they claim to be their holy scriptures, say they support the idea of using concentration camps to house immigrants before they are mass-deported. 47% overall, but 79% of Republicans, 75% of white evangelicals, and majorities of white Catholics and "mainline" Protestants. So, an awful lot of white people who claim to follow a God that says explicitly and repeatedly to his people that they should not treat foreigners and aliens in their midst any differently than themselves believe the correct way to treat foreigners is as hostile invaders who should be imprisoned and then expelled. As Slacktivist put it, "Do you want plagues? Because that's how you get plagues." Which, if we wanted to think of SARS-CoV-2 as a plague sent by God to get his people right with how they're treating others, well, I think we're going to need stronger plagues for the message to get through, unfortunately.
And also to not have people with more money than sense funding operations meant to "scientifically prove" that white people are genetically superior to everyone else.
North Korea is sending troops to assist in the Russian war against Ukraine, but the troops that are coming are also deserting the front soon after arriving.
A doctor who was supposed to keep the crown princesses of Saudi Arabia on drugs and under control has spoken out about the treatment those princesses received from the king, and how even with his best efforts, the doctor could not change the imprisonment and seclusion the princesses were kept under.
FIFA, the governing body for association football worldwide, is trying their best to get a chant from footballs fans excised because it's also a homophobic slur. The people who are in favor of the chant say they don't mean anything homophobic by it, but with a World Cup being shared between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico in 2026, cleaning up the language is a priority for FIFA.
A site that wants to reassure people who might be voting for the Democratic candidate for President that polling is an inexact science and there have been a fair number of very off polls in the last few years.
The Republican candidate for President is openly and repeatedly proving he does not have the qualifications to be President again, including twelve minutes spent on the topic of golfer Arnold Palmer, that ended with a remark about the golfer's penis size, and repeatedly expressing adoration for the methods and people around Adolf Hitler as he authorized mass death, and those responsible for the attack in Tiananmen Square . (And continuing to do so even after being told that those same generals repeatedly attempted to kill Adolf Hitler, and what kind of very bad move it would be to turn the military against protesting civilians.) His continued viability in the contest, and the viability of many other Republican candidates, can be attributed to the billionaires that pour money into the campaign, able to use their wealth in such ways thanks to Citizens' United and other decisions that removed limits on their ability to use their fortunes to purchase legislators ane executives through campaign contributions and political action committees.
A nominal comedian doing warm-up for the Republican candidate in a Madison Square Garden rally used his comedy platform to refer to Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage in the ocean" and made a joke comparing Latino immigration as having the same methods as sex without using contraception. When confronted about the content of the comedy routine, the candidate distanced himself, but news coverage suggests that campaign staff, at the very least, demanded to vet all the material, and then allowed all of the "roast" comedy to go through. (Which included a watermelon joke about Black people, so the comedy is very clearly intended to be offensive on as broad a scale as possible.)
If someone were hoping to have a candidate that would move the needle on how Israel is treating Palestinians and their neighbors, Ta-Nehisi Coates says we should not look to the Harris campaign, and it looks like the current Prime Minster of Israel wants to have the Republican candidate elected so that he can have a freer hand in his campaign, instead of having a major ally trying to get them to tone it down rather that escalate. (A relative of the Republican candidate seems to think the best option for Gaza is for all the people to be removed forcibly from it and then have it developed into luxury waterfront property.)
We are, unfortunately, stuck in a situation where the bad end is catastrophically bad, and the good end simply means that there is more work to do toward a true good ending.
The Editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times newspaper resigned her position after the owner of the paper dictated to her that the paper would not be endorsing a presidential candidate. The demand struck a serious blow to the paper's credibility and perceived independence, and it was immediately capitalized on for political purposes by the minions of the Republican candidate and spun as though the paper was expressing a reservations about Kamala Harris, which the editorial board had planned to endorse before receiving the demand from the paper owner. The reporting also suggests that the owner is trying to gaslight the staff and the public about what he demanded the paper do and that the editorial board refused to do what he asked and chose to not say anyhting on their own.
Not to be outdone, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, spiked the paper's planned endorsement of Kamala Harris and said the paper would not be endorsing any candidate in the future. The paper's columnists, former columnists, and political cartoonists all slammed the decision and the clear interference from the owner in the editorial decisions of the paper.
A Boeing strike continues after the union workers rejected an offer for a new contract from the company, one that did not have pension elements and a sufficient wage increase for the skilled work of the machinists.
Seattle Public Library is once again the site of anti-trans folk choosing to have their meetings there, and they explain the part where they can't discriminate based on viewpoint about who gets to use their meeting rooms, and that they've tried to make the meeting happen in a way that will cause the least disruption to the library and the surrounding community. I get the part where their options are limited by the law, but I don't see much for "this happened, and in response, we will be doing this" or "and in response, we have solicited counterprogramming from our community to happen at the same time" or anything else that suggests this is anything more than the library folk going "you don't understand, our sacred neutrality is supposed to be a virtue, stop expecting us to actually expend effort to refute this message in ways that we can do."
After faculty members and students took part in a study-in protest in the main Harvard campus library, the faculty were banned from the library they had protested in for two weeks. The protest itself consisted of reading books and having signs visible for passers-by to read as to why they were there, which related to the suspension of students who did a similar study-in protest in favor of better treatment for Palestinians. Rather than fiercely defend the rights of the students and the faculty to protest and to do so in the library space, because of a commitment to intellectual freedom and the need to have all points of view available in the library's collection and its spaces, the head of the library banning the faculty members for their protest complained that protests are disruptive and attention-seeking, turning the private reading room into a public forum, and really, those faculty members and the students before them should have chosen somewhere else to do their protest, or some other method, instead of letting the library believe that having a robust collection and allowing everyone to access it is all they will ever need to do to fulfill the mission of being a library that welcomes all points of view. You can feel the vocational awe radiating off of that page, and especially the idea of the library reading room as a sanctuary, a place where you supposedly don't have to encounter politics outside of the books you choose. The sacred neutrality has been violated by the study-in protestors, we are told, and so the library has decided to punish the violators by barring them from accessing the place where they violated the sacred neutrality for a little while.
So, on the one hand, the sacred neutrality demands that no action be taken against people who would disrupt the public space with their community-damaging speech, because partisan or doctrinal disapproval is wrong and censorship and intellectual freedom demands all points of view have access to library spaces. On the other hand, the sacred neutrality demands the removal of people who disrupted the public space with silent reading and signage indicating their reading was a protest action, because intellectual freedom demands that library spaces be kept scrupulously clean of any partisan or dictrinal opinions except those officially approved of through their inclusion in the library's collections. It's a very flexible ideal that can encompass anything it needs so long as everyone understands that the library has none/all of the power to decide what it wants to do.
Even as they frustrated efforts to create a registry that could track who owned what firearms, gun manufacturers were turning over sensitive data about gun owners to lobbying organizations so those lobbyists could influence politicians, likely in violation of laws and the privacy policies of those companies governing data usage and sharing. So, as with so many things, privacy was being touted as supreme, but it was subordinated to profit and the accumulation of political power.
Sending out a group of volunteers to clean up Grizzly Peak, and then turning your attention to the more difficult task of getting the local jurisdictions to stop being so lax about letting the littering and dumping happen in the area.
Egypt receives a malaria-free designation as the culmination of 100 years of effort, and as the beginning of new efforts to maintain that designation. Elsewhere, while still extremely rare, scurvy cases are increasing in specific populations that have the most difficulty obtaining fruits and vegetables in sustained times and quantities. And An e. coli outbreak that seems to be related to the onions put on the McDonalds Quarter Pounder with Cheese, on the heels of several different listeria outbreaks in frozen meats from BrucePAC, Boar's Head meats, and frozen waffles, pancakes, and other toaster products. (At least some supporters of the Republican Presidential candidate believe the outbreak was engineered by his opponent to make him look foolish after he engaged in a photo shoot at a McDonalds before open hours, shuffling fries and serving carefully selected "customers." Many of these people are also the kind that believe the Democrats can control and summon hurricanes and other extreme weather patterns to destroy their political opponents.)
Polar bears in the United Kingdom, but in places that want most of the effort to be about conserving their habitat in the wild, and that are taking the bears because there's always someone that needs help. Hedgehogs are now on a "near threatened" designation and could use some numbers boosting. The National Park Service in the US is offering pumpkin-carving templates, including one where a curious tourist gets launched into the air by an aggressive bison.
In technology, both Google and Apple have made overtures to reduce the number of days any given security (SSL/TLS) certificate is valid down to one to three months maximum. They want this to reduce the number of possible vulnerabilities and time that exploits are available, but they still have to consider how many items cannot automatically renew or update their certificates.
Libraries that preserve video and computer games were told they could not share emulated versions of games to researchers who would have trouble physically trekking to their library collections. The Copyright Office choose an extremely flimsy argument about possible "market harm" and the thought that having emulated collections available online might mean, gasp, that people play those games, over the very real needs of researchers and the libraries themselves, whose hardware collections are also beginning to fail with age, even with their best efforts to ensure their systems stay functional. Yet another encouragement of keeping files circulating, and for a need of reforming the copyright law so that things are more quickly moved into the public domain and can be built upon or more effectively preserved.(And it's possible the Register of Copyrights didn't engage with the question well or consider even the statements of some of the industry professionals saying that scholarly access to out-of-print works wouldn't harm a nonexistent market.)
The Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress granted an exemption to DMCA 1201 for things like McDonalds franchisees to engage in non-manufacturer diagnostics and repair of their ice cream machines, but they did not grant exemptions to non-manufacturer devices that would help with obtaining and interpreting diagnostic codes to facilitate those repairs, because that would mean admitting that DMCA 1201 is mostly used as a way of preventing people from doing their own cheap repairs and gaining understanding of their machines, or sharing the things they have purchased with others, rather than actually protecting any kind of proprietary or trade secret information that would allow for someone to create a similar product. I would prefer it if Dr. Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, made suggestions to the Register of Copyrights that they should come down more on the side of openness, research, and sharing, and less on the side of industry making flimsy excuses as to why they should be allowed to continue to operate with impunity and to use digital locks as legal barriers rather than anything more useful.
A startup claims that it can screen embryos for their IQ, based on genetics, and therefore select the smartest possible child to be implanted, even though their methods are suspect in efficacy and a giant red flag about eugenics on principle.
A Boeing telecom satellite experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly after what was described as an "anomaly."
Microsoft is delaying the rollout of the Recall feature again, claiming it needs to be the very best, and reassuring us that it will be opt-in and fully removable. I think that's what we'll get told, and then we'll find out that opting-out means opting-out of other essential features, or that removing it means that things are significantly degraded in the experience, or other such things that aren't obvious punishment, but are clearly punishment.
A key understanding about people and computers - Linux may be usable by people who are not computer enthusiasts, but they will almost certainly need someone who will handle the awful business of updates and mitigating the changes that happen with updates. Which, paradoxically, means that non-enthusiasts might do better running less beginner-friendly systems, because they're supported by someone who knows how to use those systems and customize them to the desires of the non-enthusiast.
Last for tonight, taking a look at where campaigns spend their money on food, and what the preferences of the parties are.
And also, teenagers find a new way to prove the Pythagorean theorem, using trigonometry and calculus.
(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.)
For those who are looking for something to do on the same theme, but without the NaNoWriMo organization, Writing Month is one of many options available for those who want to put down a significant number of words in the month of November (or any other month).
The prevention of pubescent children from obtaining puberty blockers for gender identity reasons is having real and lasting effects in the United Kingdom, sufficiently strong effects that a government and health system that cared about the health and well-being of those children and teenagers would immediately rescind the ban and provide blockers. As is the case in so many situations, however, the health and well-being of the trans person is subordinated to the usually-religious ideology of a trans-harming cis person.
The reality that pregnancy is difficult and potentially lethal to the person carrying the child. It is a bizarre health care system that cannot prioritize the life and health of the one carrying the child over the one that has not yet made it to the point where they can draw breath of their own. And in an environment where the legal ability of a pregnant person to receive health care that will keep them alive has been shredded, it seems likely that barring massive voter suppression, there will be punishment inflicted at the ballot box for all of those who enabled this hell. After all, the deeply Catholic Ireland shredded their abortion restrictions into dust when confronted with the reality that those restrictions were producing dead women and dead children, so there's hope that the deeply religious in the United States will continue to follow the same pathway, voting out restrictions when given the opportunity to do so themselves, instead of having restrictions piled on by zealots "elected" in twisted districts, or allowed to continue by zealots appointed by a man who brags about the damage he does. Because the people who will do the most damage will do it with a smile, inflicting their sadism while claiming that they are protecting the people they're hurting the most.
Buffer zones around reproductive health care clinics are coming into force in the UK, for while it is not nearly as violent an issue there as it is in the UK, the governments in place have sensibly taken the tack that people who are going to get health care do not need to be traumatized by religious zealots who are trying to get them to become scared or change their minds.
There is a movement afoot to remind women that the candidate they vote for is a private matter, and they should be able to successfully vote for the candidate who is better for them without fear that their husbands or the men in their lives will find out. The notes are encouraging voting for the Democratic candidate (no surprise, since the Republican candidate continues to brag that he produced the situation where women die because the doctors that know what they are supposed to do to prevent death must also be willing to face criminal charges from a state predisposed to find them guilty of murder. Which is a feature, not a bug, of the laws those states have passed to create these situations.), but I think there's also a certain amount of those women needing to either vote early and have it taken care of, or for there to be more effort in some polling places to ensure that even if a husband and wife go together to the polls, that the husband cannot look over or around dividers to ensure that his wife is voting the "right" way. Which we have anecdotes of from people who work the polls about how those husbands and men often try to engineer situations where they get the opportunity to intrude on the sanctity of the ballot.
A whole lot of people who should know better, if they had bothered to read what they claim to be their holy scriptures, say they support the idea of using concentration camps to house immigrants before they are mass-deported. 47% overall, but 79% of Republicans, 75% of white evangelicals, and majorities of white Catholics and "mainline" Protestants. So, an awful lot of white people who claim to follow a God that says explicitly and repeatedly to his people that they should not treat foreigners and aliens in their midst any differently than themselves believe the correct way to treat foreigners is as hostile invaders who should be imprisoned and then expelled. As Slacktivist put it, "Do you want plagues? Because that's how you get plagues." Which, if we wanted to think of SARS-CoV-2 as a plague sent by God to get his people right with how they're treating others, well, I think we're going to need stronger plagues for the message to get through, unfortunately.
And also to not have people with more money than sense funding operations meant to "scientifically prove" that white people are genetically superior to everyone else.
North Korea is sending troops to assist in the Russian war against Ukraine, but the troops that are coming are also deserting the front soon after arriving.
A doctor who was supposed to keep the crown princesses of Saudi Arabia on drugs and under control has spoken out about the treatment those princesses received from the king, and how even with his best efforts, the doctor could not change the imprisonment and seclusion the princesses were kept under.
FIFA, the governing body for association football worldwide, is trying their best to get a chant from footballs fans excised because it's also a homophobic slur. The people who are in favor of the chant say they don't mean anything homophobic by it, but with a World Cup being shared between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico in 2026, cleaning up the language is a priority for FIFA.
A site that wants to reassure people who might be voting for the Democratic candidate for President that polling is an inexact science and there have been a fair number of very off polls in the last few years.
The Republican candidate for President is openly and repeatedly proving he does not have the qualifications to be President again, including twelve minutes spent on the topic of golfer Arnold Palmer, that ended with a remark about the golfer's penis size, and repeatedly expressing adoration for the methods and people around Adolf Hitler as he authorized mass death, and those responsible for the attack in Tiananmen Square . (And continuing to do so even after being told that those same generals repeatedly attempted to kill Adolf Hitler, and what kind of very bad move it would be to turn the military against protesting civilians.) His continued viability in the contest, and the viability of many other Republican candidates, can be attributed to the billionaires that pour money into the campaign, able to use their wealth in such ways thanks to Citizens' United and other decisions that removed limits on their ability to use their fortunes to purchase legislators ane executives through campaign contributions and political action committees.
A nominal comedian doing warm-up for the Republican candidate in a Madison Square Garden rally used his comedy platform to refer to Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage in the ocean" and made a joke comparing Latino immigration as having the same methods as sex without using contraception. When confronted about the content of the comedy routine, the candidate distanced himself, but news coverage suggests that campaign staff, at the very least, demanded to vet all the material, and then allowed all of the "roast" comedy to go through. (Which included a watermelon joke about Black people, so the comedy is very clearly intended to be offensive on as broad a scale as possible.)
If someone were hoping to have a candidate that would move the needle on how Israel is treating Palestinians and their neighbors, Ta-Nehisi Coates says we should not look to the Harris campaign, and it looks like the current Prime Minster of Israel wants to have the Republican candidate elected so that he can have a freer hand in his campaign, instead of having a major ally trying to get them to tone it down rather that escalate. (A relative of the Republican candidate seems to think the best option for Gaza is for all the people to be removed forcibly from it and then have it developed into luxury waterfront property.)
We are, unfortunately, stuck in a situation where the bad end is catastrophically bad, and the good end simply means that there is more work to do toward a true good ending.
The Editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times newspaper resigned her position after the owner of the paper dictated to her that the paper would not be endorsing a presidential candidate. The demand struck a serious blow to the paper's credibility and perceived independence, and it was immediately capitalized on for political purposes by the minions of the Republican candidate and spun as though the paper was expressing a reservations about Kamala Harris, which the editorial board had planned to endorse before receiving the demand from the paper owner. The reporting also suggests that the owner is trying to gaslight the staff and the public about what he demanded the paper do and that the editorial board refused to do what he asked and chose to not say anyhting on their own.
Not to be outdone, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, spiked the paper's planned endorsement of Kamala Harris and said the paper would not be endorsing any candidate in the future. The paper's columnists, former columnists, and political cartoonists all slammed the decision and the clear interference from the owner in the editorial decisions of the paper.
A Boeing strike continues after the union workers rejected an offer for a new contract from the company, one that did not have pension elements and a sufficient wage increase for the skilled work of the machinists.
Seattle Public Library is once again the site of anti-trans folk choosing to have their meetings there, and they explain the part where they can't discriminate based on viewpoint about who gets to use their meeting rooms, and that they've tried to make the meeting happen in a way that will cause the least disruption to the library and the surrounding community. I get the part where their options are limited by the law, but I don't see much for "this happened, and in response, we will be doing this" or "and in response, we have solicited counterprogramming from our community to happen at the same time" or anything else that suggests this is anything more than the library folk going "you don't understand, our sacred neutrality is supposed to be a virtue, stop expecting us to actually expend effort to refute this message in ways that we can do."
After faculty members and students took part in a study-in protest in the main Harvard campus library, the faculty were banned from the library they had protested in for two weeks. The protest itself consisted of reading books and having signs visible for passers-by to read as to why they were there, which related to the suspension of students who did a similar study-in protest in favor of better treatment for Palestinians. Rather than fiercely defend the rights of the students and the faculty to protest and to do so in the library space, because of a commitment to intellectual freedom and the need to have all points of view available in the library's collection and its spaces, the head of the library banning the faculty members for their protest complained that protests are disruptive and attention-seeking, turning the private reading room into a public forum, and really, those faculty members and the students before them should have chosen somewhere else to do their protest, or some other method, instead of letting the library believe that having a robust collection and allowing everyone to access it is all they will ever need to do to fulfill the mission of being a library that welcomes all points of view. You can feel the vocational awe radiating off of that page, and especially the idea of the library reading room as a sanctuary, a place where you supposedly don't have to encounter politics outside of the books you choose. The sacred neutrality has been violated by the study-in protestors, we are told, and so the library has decided to punish the violators by barring them from accessing the place where they violated the sacred neutrality for a little while.
So, on the one hand, the sacred neutrality demands that no action be taken against people who would disrupt the public space with their community-damaging speech, because partisan or doctrinal disapproval is wrong and censorship and intellectual freedom demands all points of view have access to library spaces. On the other hand, the sacred neutrality demands the removal of people who disrupted the public space with silent reading and signage indicating their reading was a protest action, because intellectual freedom demands that library spaces be kept scrupulously clean of any partisan or dictrinal opinions except those officially approved of through their inclusion in the library's collections. It's a very flexible ideal that can encompass anything it needs so long as everyone understands that the library has none/all of the power to decide what it wants to do.
Even as they frustrated efforts to create a registry that could track who owned what firearms, gun manufacturers were turning over sensitive data about gun owners to lobbying organizations so those lobbyists could influence politicians, likely in violation of laws and the privacy policies of those companies governing data usage and sharing. So, as with so many things, privacy was being touted as supreme, but it was subordinated to profit and the accumulation of political power.
Sending out a group of volunteers to clean up Grizzly Peak, and then turning your attention to the more difficult task of getting the local jurisdictions to stop being so lax about letting the littering and dumping happen in the area.
Egypt receives a malaria-free designation as the culmination of 100 years of effort, and as the beginning of new efforts to maintain that designation. Elsewhere, while still extremely rare, scurvy cases are increasing in specific populations that have the most difficulty obtaining fruits and vegetables in sustained times and quantities. And An e. coli outbreak that seems to be related to the onions put on the McDonalds Quarter Pounder with Cheese, on the heels of several different listeria outbreaks in frozen meats from BrucePAC, Boar's Head meats, and frozen waffles, pancakes, and other toaster products. (At least some supporters of the Republican Presidential candidate believe the outbreak was engineered by his opponent to make him look foolish after he engaged in a photo shoot at a McDonalds before open hours, shuffling fries and serving carefully selected "customers." Many of these people are also the kind that believe the Democrats can control and summon hurricanes and other extreme weather patterns to destroy their political opponents.)
Polar bears in the United Kingdom, but in places that want most of the effort to be about conserving their habitat in the wild, and that are taking the bears because there's always someone that needs help. Hedgehogs are now on a "near threatened" designation and could use some numbers boosting. The National Park Service in the US is offering pumpkin-carving templates, including one where a curious tourist gets launched into the air by an aggressive bison.
In technology, both Google and Apple have made overtures to reduce the number of days any given security (SSL/TLS) certificate is valid down to one to three months maximum. They want this to reduce the number of possible vulnerabilities and time that exploits are available, but they still have to consider how many items cannot automatically renew or update their certificates.
Libraries that preserve video and computer games were told they could not share emulated versions of games to researchers who would have trouble physically trekking to their library collections. The Copyright Office choose an extremely flimsy argument about possible "market harm" and the thought that having emulated collections available online might mean, gasp, that people play those games, over the very real needs of researchers and the libraries themselves, whose hardware collections are also beginning to fail with age, even with their best efforts to ensure their systems stay functional. Yet another encouragement of keeping files circulating, and for a need of reforming the copyright law so that things are more quickly moved into the public domain and can be built upon or more effectively preserved.(And it's possible the Register of Copyrights didn't engage with the question well or consider even the statements of some of the industry professionals saying that scholarly access to out-of-print works wouldn't harm a nonexistent market.)
The Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress granted an exemption to DMCA 1201 for things like McDonalds franchisees to engage in non-manufacturer diagnostics and repair of their ice cream machines, but they did not grant exemptions to non-manufacturer devices that would help with obtaining and interpreting diagnostic codes to facilitate those repairs, because that would mean admitting that DMCA 1201 is mostly used as a way of preventing people from doing their own cheap repairs and gaining understanding of their machines, or sharing the things they have purchased with others, rather than actually protecting any kind of proprietary or trade secret information that would allow for someone to create a similar product. I would prefer it if Dr. Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, made suggestions to the Register of Copyrights that they should come down more on the side of openness, research, and sharing, and less on the side of industry making flimsy excuses as to why they should be allowed to continue to operate with impunity and to use digital locks as legal barriers rather than anything more useful.
A startup claims that it can screen embryos for their IQ, based on genetics, and therefore select the smartest possible child to be implanted, even though their methods are suspect in efficacy and a giant red flag about eugenics on principle.
A Boeing telecom satellite experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly after what was described as an "anomaly."
Microsoft is delaying the rollout of the Recall feature again, claiming it needs to be the very best, and reassuring us that it will be opt-in and fully removable. I think that's what we'll get told, and then we'll find out that opting-out means opting-out of other essential features, or that removing it means that things are significantly degraded in the experience, or other such things that aren't obvious punishment, but are clearly punishment.
A key understanding about people and computers - Linux may be usable by people who are not computer enthusiasts, but they will almost certainly need someone who will handle the awful business of updates and mitigating the changes that happen with updates. Which, paradoxically, means that non-enthusiasts might do better running less beginner-friendly systems, because they're supported by someone who knows how to use those systems and customize them to the desires of the non-enthusiast.
Last for tonight, taking a look at where campaigns spend their money on food, and what the preferences of the parties are.
And also, teenagers find a new way to prove the Pythagorean theorem, using trigonometry and calculus.
(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.)
no subject
Date: 2024-11-02 02:22 pm (UTC)(My thoughts on most of the other items are... not so much "comment" as "inarticulate keysmash of rage")
no subject
Date: 2024-11-02 04:18 pm (UTC)Much of the other is the keysmash of rage.