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.