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Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops. “Digital IDs make it tempting to leave your driver’s license at home – but that’s a dangerous risk.”

No matter what, teaching people they can add their IDs to their phones means some people will inevitably leave the house without physical ID, and that means creating the opportunity for cops to demand phones — which you should never, ever do. Technical details of your digital ID aside, handing your phone to a police officer grants law enforcement a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal data.

Jamie Zawinski: Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today:

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the “What’s Cool” button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca’s Smut Shack.)

What’s the best news portal? Apple News, Google News, Yahoo News, MSN Start, something else?

Rereading replies on Bluesky I now see that I was wrong to compare Florida’s extremist religious government to the Taliban, because it implies that what Florida is doing is un-American, rather than an official action by the third most populous state in the nation.

Harris faces new urgency to explain how her potential presidency would be different from Biden’s.

Bullshit. “Urgency” from whom?

This is an issue for the journalists in the Washington press corps who have been locked in a room smelling each other’s farts for 25 years.

For the rest of us, the choice is clear: One choice is someone who we can hope will be a transformative President — a Roosevelt or Lincoln — someone who can lead the rebirth of a declining nation.

Probably not.

She’ll probably govern as a conventional politician and avoid burning down the house for another four to eight years, at which time we get to do it again.

The other choice is a violent psychopath who smears poop in his hair, along with his couch-fucking sidekick.

So yeah nobody gives a shit if Harris is different from Biden.

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

— Dave Barnhart

The pulpy fun of Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children”

The book is about a group of long-lived people who have been living secretly pretending to be just like everyone else.

They reveal themselves, are persecuted, flee in a spaceship with a newly invented FTL drive, and have adventures out in the galaxy with aliens. The book is dedicated to E.E. “Doc” Smith, it’s the most pulpy thing Heinlein ever wrote, and it’s really surprising what outright fun it is to read. I never think of it as being one of my favourite Heinleins, but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of reading it.

— Pulp adventure and nothing wrong with that: Robert Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children. Jo Walton at Reactor.

Like Walton says, I don’t think of this as one of my favorite Heinleins, but it’s a great read. I haven’t read much super-science from the 1930s, but “Methuselah’s Children,” published in 1941, is a throwback to the era when sci-fi writers were tossing stars around like snowballs.