Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) continues to be the member of Congress who best demonstrates the qualities of leadership so badly needed by her party. She will not succeed in impeaching these Supreme Court justices, but she will shine a light on their corruption and lay down a marker for voters.
@TechConnectify I wonder if they got some 'certification' thing going, along the lines of 'you use light bulbs in your system, so you can use these without having to do new certification'.
(Either that or a desperate use for the growingly redundant vacuum tube line)
Literary sub-genre: Novel or play retells a classic from the perspective of a secondary character or characters. The new story tracks the the original but shifts some of its action offstage. The two versions intertwine, each now commenting on the other.
Examples:
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard).
James (Percival Everett).
@JamesGleick There are tons! The Wind Done Gone, for example, retells Gone with the Wind from the slaves' point of view. The Last Ringbearer is an alternative take on The Lord of the Rings from the Mordor viewpoint. And so on.
Did you ever wonder why there are 90 degrees in a right angle instead of 100, and 24 hours a day instead of 10?
Perhaps you can blame Napoleon.
In 1795, as part of the French Revolution, the French passed a law requiring that clocks have 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 seconds per minute. They also brought in a system of angles with 400 degrees in a full turn, or 100 degrees in a right angle. Now the earth would rotate 40 degrees in an hour - and thanks to how the meter was defined, each degree of latitude would be 100 kilometers long.
Of course, changing to the new system would require a lot of work. The economist Condorcet proposed that teams of unemployed wig makers be used to calculate mathematical tables with the new units. Why wig makers? Because after the revolution, aristocrats no longer needed them! (You don't need a wig if you don't have a head.)
The mathematical physicist Laplace was enthusiastic and had his watch converted to the new time. His great five-volume work Traité de Mécanique Céleste, was written using the new units of time and angle! But in general the metric system for time and angle did not catch on at all. And in 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte decreed that the French calendar should revert to the old style.
#SCOTUS is supposed to rule this morning on #Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election.
The decision will determine whether & how special counsel #JackSmith’s case against Trump can proceed — although it’s unlikely a trial would happen before #Election Day. But the ruling could also set an important #precedent for how to prosecute presidents for their actions in office.
Some justices suggested during oral arguments that they were taking a sweeping approach to the case. “We are writing a rule for the ages,” Justice #Gorsuch said. #Trump is facing 4 charges stemming from his attempts to overturn #Biden’s victory in the #2020election, the most serious of which carries a max of 20 yrs in #prison. The case has been on hold while #SCOTUSconsiders Trump’s argument that presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts they take while in office.
“Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be #immune from #criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal #law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such #immunity.
…if the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our #democracy, I dissent."
Could our technology serve us better if we start centering the most impacted and at-risk members of society in the tech design process?
In this 2022 report, the “Design from the Margins” framework offers an alternative that reduces harms caused by blindspots and makes technology better, safer, and more resilient for everyone.
Today, the good people of the world commemorate the passing of Google Reader eleven short years ago on July 1, 2013.
To honor their memory (and in leiu of flowers) please add an RSS, Atom, JSON or equivalent feed to your web site and keep building towards a web that connects people in meaningful and positive ways.
I really by and large have mostly lost faith that anything short of a miracle will get #ActivityPub to where I would like it to be, and the forces working against success here are just hard to even look at
I support the groups that are trying to define a way forward, and I suspect in many, many ways the battle is lost until and unless one of those efforts succeeds well enough to define a better way forward, and there's no way to know what that would look like or if it is even possible.
There are several people doing very good work in this field still and they may get us there either in part or in whole... eventually, dragging everyone kicking and screaming into a better model of development and of thinking. #Letterbook comes to mind as an example.
But as a vision or as a community I don't have much hope unless something dramatic changes.
That makes me sad and I've lost more and more hope the more I've dealt with it or the more I've seen.
fair interpretation, but i wasn't referring to "the FOSS community", which i agree isn't really a cohesive entity.
i think the potential of the fediverse comes from the ability for affinity groups to create interoperable platforms and possibly cross-community solidarity. i'm excited for the possibility of new paradigms of social organization to bloom in the chaos of the fediverse. i appreciate the potential contributions of the distributed systems people that are on the network now, but mastodon didn't make the network blow up through any kind of technical prowess or vision. they had a marketing budget.
(i would add, i'm not trying to have an argument with anyone. if you think that's what's happening i'm sorry, but i'm not going to have a conversation in that format. i'm just sharing some thoughts.)
🚌🚟Kinderen van 4 tot en met 11 jaar kunnen vanaf zaterdag 20 juli weer 6 maanden gratis reizen met bus, tram en metro, onder begeleiding van een volwassene.
Lees hier hoe je dit regelt voor jouw kind. ⤵️
The "Pay or Consent" advertising model of Meta fails to comply with the Digital Markets Act.
Our preliminary findings show that this choice forces users to consent to the combination of their personal data and fails to provide them a less personalised but equivalent version of Meta’s social networks.
If you live or work in Amsterdam then I recommend that you fill out this survey being done by the gemeente about making space for walking, cycling, public transit, taxis, and driving:
@notjustbikes I just wonder why it is in English. Maybe surprisingly but a lot of people who live in Amsterdam do speak Dutch.
I'm afraid only tourists and expats will fill in this survey...
The Internet is successful and valuable to society because it is decentralised. I've signed an open letter to the United Nations that explains how some proposals for the Global Digital Compact endanger it. #OpenInternet
@mnot much appreciated, though as a casual observer of this development I would greatly appreciate some concrete examples of the proposals which have been deemed to be maligned with the open web.