2020
My Facebook profile recently got upgraded to support formatting text: Bold, italic, blockquotes and hyperlinks. I haven’t seen an announcement or news on this. Dave Winer has been — rightly — insisting on the importance of this for years. Makes Facebook ever so slightly more usable and less Internet-hostile.
Today (and yesterday) on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic –
Armed Michigan voters are escorting their state reps to work to protect them from swastika-brandishing white terrorists.
A good-guy hacker wrote a script to flood Ohio’s snitchline where employers are supposed to report workers who refused to come in over coronavirus fears, so those workers can be denied unemployment benefits. Ohio doesn’t have vaccines. effective therapeutics, sufficient ventilators, or adequate PPE/disinfectant, but it has a snitchline.
In a real incident very similar to Lord of the Flies, the kids were very nice to each other and built a lovely little village in the 15 months they were stranded.
By the time we arrived, the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination."
The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer.
Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits.
US public health officials are unenthusiastic about contact-tracing apps. Contact-tracing is extremely effective, but it requires an army of people and lots of shoe leather.
“Re-opening” isn’t about saving ordinary workers and earners. You can’t save someone by infecting them with a deadly disease. In a world without contact-tracing, therapeutics, tests, PPE, santizing products, etc, more contact means more risk of illness and death.
“Re-opening” is about saving investors: the 1% who constitute the major shareholders in large firms whose calculus goes like this: “30% unemployment means that for every worker who dies on the job, ten more will apply to take their place.”
I think I will suggest to Julie that we should watch “The Andromeda Strain” tonight.
Not the 2008 remake. I hear that was fine. But it lacks the glorious microfilm-and-mainframe futurism of the 1971 original.
Wilford Brimley was only 48 when he appeared in “The Thing” and 51 in “Cocoon.”
I learned about Brimley’s age in “The Thing” when I myself was 48. That freaked me out a bit. “I’m as old as Wilford Brimley?!”
As Restaurants and Stores Reopen, What’s Safe? – Are haircuts, going back to work, eating in restaurants, and visiting friends and relatives OK? Experts lay out the options.
Microsoft and AWS exchange poisoned pen blog posts in latest Pentagon JEDI contract spat – Microsoft and Amazon’s fight over the $10B DoD JEDI contract enters the pissing contest stage.
Roaming ‘robodog’ politely tells Singapore park goers to keep apart – A roaming robot dog built by Boston Dynamics is politely telling people in Singapore parks to enforce social distancing.
“Let’s keep Singapore healthy,” the yellow and black robodog named SPOT said in English as it roamed around. “For your own safety and for those around you, please stand at least one metre apart.
“Thank you,” it added, in a softly-spoken female voice.
Google unifies all of its messaging and communication apps into a single team – A good move. Google has multiple redundant messaging apps. I don’t use any of them because (1) I don’t have time to sit down and figure out what’s what and (2) I’m not going to invest in yet another Google service that Google will then turn around and kill.
I was burned by Google+ and Google Reader, and I saw what happened to Buzz and Wave. So, not going to try to kick that football again.
House GOP urge Trump against supporting additional funding for state and local governments – Republicans see coronavirus as an opportunity to overthrow elections in states like California and Illinois, by forcing those states to go bankrupt and appointing Republican judges to run them.
James Carville Warns Trump: Your ‘Grifter’ Campaign Aides Are Lying To You — “Trump is getting fleeced by members of his own campaign who know he’s going to lose reelection but won’t tell him for one simple reason: they’re trying to make money off the campaign.”
Now I’m curious which book it was and what was the so-called virtue signaling?
It's true: I am contractually obliged to offer at least three instances of virtue signalling in the first chapter of any book I write. If I don't I'm in violation of my contract. Also, two instances of political correctness and at least one subliminal tract on the virtues of soy. pic.twitter.com/MEYSSHnr6M
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) May 7, 2020
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic
The TSA is being sued for hoarding 1.3 million N95 masks: The agency isn’t even using them, while other federal agencies. like the VA, “go begging for PPE for high-risk workers….
Use of America’s airports have fallen by 95% and the TSA has asked most of its screeners to stay home. Those screeners that are working are wearing surgical masks, as they have not been trained to fit N95 masks.
One Minnesota TSA manager tried to donate his mask to that state’s department of health but was unable to do so.
America is united in favor of keeping quarantines going: “The tiny minority who’d benefit from the premature re-opening of businesses (large shareholders in large corporations that might survive such a blunder) want the rest of us to throw ourselves in the volcano to appease the economy gods.”
Strong antitrust enforcement begat Unix, which is the basis for “almost every computer you use today.”
Wechat spies on non-Chinese users.
Hidden doors disguised as bookshelves I thought about doing that for my home office and one day I just might. I’d make it look like the entrance to the Batcave in the 1966 Batman, complete with the door-opening switch hidden in the bust of Shakespeare.
Supreme Court throws out convictions of New Jersey officials in Bridgegate scandal – Political corruption is legal. That’s literally what the Supreme Court said. Unanimous ruling. Even the liberals went along with this bullshit.
The first Google account you sign in to is set as the default account. This was driving me nuts until I figured it out.
