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Posted in News Roundup at 2:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Sustainability is an increasingly important problem when it comes to computing. Reduce, reuse, recycle is a popular motto for environmentally responsible consumption, but applying that to your computer hardware can be challenging.
Many proprietary operating systems essentially force a hardware upgrade upon you long before your old hardware is used up. If you own a computer with Windows, you’ve probably needed to purchase a new one to upgrade because your old one didn’t meet the hardware requirements of the latest OS. Apple doesn’t do any better, either. A MacBook Air I owned was essentially rendered obsolete by an upgrade to macOS Mojave in 2019.
By contrast, I run Linux on my three-and-a-half-year-old laptop, and it still runs like new. Because the Linux kernel is more efficient with resources than either Windows or macOS, it can run successfully on older hardware. I’ve never been forced to purchase new hardware in order to upgrade Linux.
The advantage of Linux is that it is free and open source. With a few notable exceptions, most Linux distributions are available free of charge, and they are not the product of a large technology company with profit in mind. Even businesses that offer Linux products know that profitability doesn’t lie in selling software and forcing updates but in stellar support of what their customers are trying to do with that software.
When writing about open source software, I prefer to show a few screenshots to help demonstrate what I’m talking about. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. If you can show a thing, that’s often better than merely trying to describe it.
There are a few ways you can take screenshots in Linux. Here are three methods I use to capture screenshots on Linux…
Want to take screenshots on your Chromebook efficiently? Luckily, the snipping tool in Chrome OS allows you to take a partial screenshot of your Chromebook’s screen, which saves the job of having to crop it later using an image editor.
In this guide on the snipping tool for Chrome, we’ll show you how you can take full-screen grabs on your Chromebook, along with a guide on taking partial screenshots and window snips as well. There’s everything you need to know for how to snip on a Chromebook.
Are you looking for an easy guide for Linux Mint 21 Installation?
The step-by-step guide on this page will show you how to install Linux Mint 21 Xfce Edition along with screenshots.
The much-awaited Linux Mint 21 operating system has been released, this is a LTS release (Long Term Support) and will get support and updates until 2027. Vanessa is the code name for Linux Mint 21, it is based on Ubuntu 22.04 and comes with three different desktop environments like Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Cacti Monitoring on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Cacti is an open-source web-based monitoring and graphing tool developed as a front-end application for the industry-standard open-source data logging tool RRDtool. Cacti uses the MariaDB database to save its settings and the Apache webserver for interactive configuration and display of the graphics.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Cacti Monitoring on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
In this article, you will be acquainted with different methods to manage aliases by inspecting the alias tool to override commands, along with the common ways to set/unset temporary and persistent aliases.
Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games. It’s a powerful game engine that provides high-fidelity graphics and realistic physics, is used by AAA game developers, and has been adopted by many independent developers.
Unreal Engine has been used to create some of the most popular games of all time, including Fortnite, Gears of War, and Borderlands.
As stated in their Linux Development Requirements, to develop on Linux you’ll need a computer running Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04, while their recommended system is 22.04.
In this tutorial, we’ll set up and run Unreal Engine 5 on Ubuntu 22.04. We’ll download the Unreal Engine 5 archive, extract it, run Unreal Engine, and try out one of the demo projects to make sure it works.
Postfix is an efficient Mail Transfer Agent used for routing and sending receiving emails which is available as OpenSource software. It is the most well-known email server used in different Linux distributions. This is actually the replacement of an old Sendmail MTA that is pre-installed on the latest Rocky Linux versions as well. You may need to install the postfix mail server on your system. Today, we will explain the installation process of the postfix server on the Rocky Linux 8 system using the Terminal.
All commands will run on the terminal application in this article. To access the terminal, click on the Activities option located at the top left corner of Rocky Linux 8 environment, and then click on the Terminal from the left pane of your desktop.
In PHP, $_GET is a super global variable that is an associative array of variables. This variable contains data that has been sent using the HTTP GET method. For example, a GET request is sent as a URL and can contain a query string that has name-value pairs.
As GET request data is available in the URL, using it for sensitive data is not recommended as it can be easily viewed, bookmarked, and cached. Instead, it is recommended that you use a POST request for data that is considered sensitive.
There are many uses for GET, but it works best when used as a query. For example, a search query, read operation, data lookup, or similar. Using the query string is also a popular way of defining tracking codes.
Learn the commands to install pgAdmin 4 – PostgreSQL tools on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa Linux to manage Databases using a web-based graphical user interface.
Just like popular phpMyAdmin to graphically manage MySQL or MariaDB databases, here we have pgAdmin. It is also a free and open source software to provide a graphical interface to develop and administrators of PostgreSQL databases. The open source license of pgAdmin is inherited from the PostgreSQL project. pgAdmin runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, and other Unix derivatives.
However, unlike Linux pgAdmin on Windows and macOS can easily be installed to manage remote or local running PostgreSQL.
In cloud computing, role-based access control (RBAC) connects a user to a specific role, where a role is a collection of permissions applied to either a project or to an entire cluster. To work with RBAC, you must recognize that different types of users exist, and each can be used with these roles.
Verbs such as get, list, watch, delete, deletecollection, create, update, and patch are used to manage permissions. They’re crucial parameters when defining roles, which are API resources that provide access to OpenShift resources.
OpenShift, Red Hat’s enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform, includes several cluster roles by default. In most cases, the default roles are all you need when setting up user permissions. However, understanding users and roles is an important part of managing a cluster with OpenShift.
The Vim editor is like an ocean – wonderful and joyful to be in, but there will always be things you don’t know.
While you cannot discover the ocean alone, you can always learn from others’ experiences.
I am sharing a few tips in this article that will help you use Vim like a pro.
I use them regularly and I have seen expert Vim users sharing them in various communities.
You should add them to your vimrc file, wherever applicable. You’ll have a better and smoother experience using the ever-versatile Vim editor. Trust me on this.
 Not able to access or open file because of white space in file name? Then you can remove the white space from the file name by following three different method.
When you look at your system directory structure, you’ll find that many files are stored in several ways, such as “somefilename.txt”, “some_file_name.txt”, “some-file-name.txt”, or “some file name.txt”.
A little while ago Valve showed the current top 10 most played games on Steam Deck and now we have an update on what people are currently playing.
Some huge news for the future of the Steam Deck, as Valve has announced a teaming up with Komodo for the release of the Steam Deck in Asia. This is absolutely massive considering the size of the potential playerbase there, and the continued expansion only continue to show how all-in Valve are with this device.
Good news web slingers, as Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered from Insomniac Games and Nixxes Software has been Steam Deck Verified ahead of the upcoming release. This is the upgraded version of the previously PlayStation exclusive, that launches on Steam on August 12th.
Love The Walking Dead? Now you can pick up a whole bunch of the games thanks to the Walking Dead 10th Anniversary Bundle. Going over each game I’ll list the Steam Deck Verified rating plus either Native Linux status or ProtonDB ranking so you’ve got the full picture.
Space Bandit is a new Native Linux top-down shooter where you’re running through cramped corridors on some space ship. It’s got a whole lot of style and some great tunes too. Honestly, it firmly gives off vibes similar to Hotline Miami, only with a sci-fi setting and it’s just as crazy at times.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is an absolutely fantastic beat ‘em up throwback and now perhaps even better, with a big stability update out now!
Enter the Panchaku is the latest big update to the rather great game Dead Cells, continuing to expand the game in a number of ways and tweak existing features. For those that don’t know somehow — Dead Cells is a rogue-lite, metroidvania inspired action-platformer.
Yet another event is happening now on Steam with the Survival Fest, giving you a showcase of various games that in some way force you to survive the elements. Not only is it highlighting various existing games with plenty discounted, there’s also a dedicated section for demos and upcoming games so you can try before you buy or before sticking on your wishlist.
Today we’re releasing the first release candidate for Krita 5.1!
For the full list, check out the work-in-progress full release notes!
Its new licence says that “CP/M and its derivatives” are free for anyone to modify and redistribute. But which derivatives?
The original Intel 8080 version of CP/M had a relatively brief reign: it appeared in 1974, just seven years before the IBM PC launched with PC DOS. The PC, and its many clones running MS-DOS, rapidly outsold and replaced CP/M.
But still, CP/M was, for a while, the industry-standard microcomputer OS, making Digital Research a powerful and important company. Wealthy companies that lose dominance over a market they formerly controlled don’t tend to just give up. Digital Research put a substantial R&D effort into expanding and enhancing CP/M, creating a large family of OSes. It had some significant wins and big sales. Some of those products are still in use. All those products are arguably “CP/M derivatives”, and as such, Bryan Sparks’ 2001 edict might have just open-sourced them all.
 While still an unofficial flavor, Ubuntu Unity 22.04 was released back in April 2022 as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu 22.04 LTS operating system series, providing fans of the good old Unity7 desktop environment with an up-to-date installation medium.
Today, Canonical will announce the first point release to its Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) long-term supported operating system series, so we can expect the unofficial flavors like Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Cinnamon to also publish new point releases.
Yesterday, NVIDIA released the 32GB Jetson AGX ORIN (JAO) production module. This device follows the introduction of the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit released early this year. The company also announced that the 64GB JAO version will be released sometime in November 2022.
As other Jetson products, the Jetson AGX ORIN was designed specifically for AI, robotics and other sophisticated embedded applications. According to the datasheet, this device delivers up to 200 Sparse TOPS of AI performance, an Ampere GPU with 1792 NVIDIA CUDA cores/56 Tensor cores and an 8-core Cortex-A78AE v8.2 64-bit CPU.
Back in March, NVIDIA introduced Jetson Orin, the next-generation of their ARM single-board computers intended for edge computing applications. The new platform promised to deliver “server-class AI performance” on a board small enough to install in a robot or IoT device, with even the lowest tier of Orin modules offering roughly double the performance of the previous Jetson Xavier modules. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a catch — at the time, Orin was only available in development kit form.
[extrowerk] tells us about a new hacker-friendly device – a $20 LTE modem stick with a quadcore CPU and WiFi, capable of running fully-featured Linux distributions. This discovery hinges on a mountain of work by a Chinese hacker [HandsomeYingYan], who’s figured out this stick runs Android, hacked its bootloader, tweaked a Linux kernel for it and created a Debian distribution for the stick – calling this the OpenStick project. [extrowerk]’s writeup translates the [HandsomeYingYan]’s tutorial for us and makes a few more useful notes. With this writeup in hand, we have unlocked a whole new SBC to use in our projects – at a surprisingly low price!
It’s been an incredible year for the European Astro Pi Challenge. We’ve sent new hardware into space, seen record numbers of young people participate in the Challenge, and received lots of fantastic programs. Before we say goodbye to the 2021/22 European Astro Pi Challenge, the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the European Space Agency are thrilled to announce this year’s winning and highly commended Mission Space Lab teams.
Are you still enjoying your Raspberry Pi 4? Well, there’s a graphics bump coming thanks to all the work in the drivers with it hitting Vulkan 1.2 conformance.
 Right after Microsoft acquired GitHub, many users migrated to GitLab and other GitHub alternatives.
Considering many popular open-source projects can be found on GitLab, it has a good reputation with developers and project maintainers.
Now, there has been an interesting development at GitLab, as reported by The Register
While sitting on a park bench, I was reading an article by Evan Osnos about yachts in a recent New Yorker. He notes that since 1990, the number of billionaires in the U.S. has jumped from 67 to 700. And he adds, “the number of truly giant yachts – those longer than 250 feet – has climbed from less than ten to more than 170.” He also reports, in 2021, the industry reportedly sold 887 superyachts worldwide – twice that for 2020 – with 1,000 on order. Each superyacht costs tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.
I wanted to scream.
On April 3, 1911, Edna St. Vincent Millay took her first lover. She was 19 years old, and she engaged herself to this man with a ring that “came to me in a fortune-cake” and was “the symbol of all earthly happiness.” Millay had just graduated from high school and had taken charge of running the household while her mother worked as a traveling nurse. She fixed her younger sisters dinner, washed and mended all their clothes, and entertained their guests. Her lover had no name and no body; he was a figment she’d conjured up to help her get through the stress and loneliness of being a teenage caretaker. This first lover, her “shadow,” is not often recounted among the many others she later had, but Millay had various ways of making these exhausting days of her early adulthood endlessly charming and alive. In one note to her lover, she describes the chafing dish she served her siblings’ dinner on, which she called James, and jokes, “Why don’t you come over some evening and have something on ‘James’—doesn’t that sound dreadful—‘have something on James’!”
Donát Fehérvári of Miskolc, Hungary has been playing with legos ever since he was a child. But assembling structures is not just a game for him – he designs functional, mobile systems that solve problems. He won the LEGO IDEAS contest with his design for a foosball table. LEGO is currently revising his idea and releasing it to the market – something that Donát also stands to gain from: not just in terms of money, he hopes, but recognition as well.
It’s a feature of summer for us, the round of hacker camps in which members of our community gather in fields and spend a few days relaxing and doing what we do best. This summer I’ll have been to four of them by September, one of which was unexpected because a last-minute ticket came my way. For Hackaday they’re a chance to connect with our readers and maybe see come of the coolest stuff in person.
Brass plaques are eye-catching because no one makes them on a whim. They are more costly than wood or plastic, and processing them is proportionally difficult. [Becky Stern] picked the medium to honor her brother, who enjoyed coffee, motorcycles, and making things by hand. She made some playing card-sized pieces to adorn his favorite brand of hot bean juice and a large one to hang at his memorial site.
But this time Russell was not just the star center, the defensive stalwart, the linchpin of pro basketball’s most extraordinary dynasty.
He was also the coach.
For years I have pondered writing about this weekend, but never found quite the right context for doing so. But the recent decision of the Supreme Court in the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen — declaring that the possession of pistols in public is a constitutional right — has pulled that weekend up from my memory (as well as from the pages of the journal entry I made afterwards, on May 2, 2011).
The ruling, as Karrie Jacobs has written, intensifies the danger we all face simply by being out in public, noting that in its wake “our sense of security in crowded places may be more permanently damaged than it was by the pandemic.”
Mechanizing the production of textiles was a major part of the industrial revolution, and with the convenience of many people are recreating the classic machines. A perfect example of this is [Fraens]’ 3D printed braiding machine, which was reverse engineered from old photos of the early machines.
Ampere Computing is giving ARM-based chips the kind of server breakthrough that has eluded other chip companies over the last decade.
The company’s chips in the last month were adopted by Google Cloud and HPE, whose backing provides a big boost to the entire ARM server ecosystem.
Ampere was founded by former Intel president Renee James, who departed Intel in 2016 after a management shakeup. She previously led Intel’s data center business and established Ampere after realizing Intel’s x86 chips wouldn’t cut it for cloud-centric workloads like web applications.
“Where we think the growth in the industry is going to come, from software, from workloads… you need to deliver linear scaling performance elastically. That’s how software that’s developed today consumes performance out of the CPU that is power efficient,” James said during a press briefing last month.
Ampere’s fastest Altra chip has 128 cores and is based on the company’s custom ARM architecture. That’s twice the core count of high-end AMD’s x86 server chip, and more than three times that of Intel’s x86 server chip, which has 40 cores.
When I was growing up in the Rust Belt, there was a phrase people would use to describe an unusually vicious or cold-blooded kid in the neighborhood (and there were a few). “He’d just as soon kill you as look at you,” they would say.
↺ Senate Votes to Help Vets Poisoned by Military “Burn Pits.” Why No Help for Sick Iraqis & Afghans?
The U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday night to expand healthcare and disability benefits to some 3.5 million former U.S. service members poisoned by toxic substances from waste burning pits on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. The PACT Act, which now heads to President Biden’s desk to be signed into law, is set to be the biggest expansion of health benefits to veterans in over 30 years but provides no aid to civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan who continue to bear the brunt of the health and economic impacts of the toxic burn pits. “The campaign for veteran healthcare could have been a joint struggle that included Iraqi [and Afghan] people,” says Purdue University professor Kali Rubaii, who is just back from Fallujah, Iraq, where she was speaking with residents about the impact of the burn pits. She explains how the profit-driven U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan fueled the massive scale of burn pits in the region. We also speak with the Quincy Institute’s Kelley Vlahos, who discusses the congressional lead-up to the bill, which she says put “veterans in the crosshairs.”
Even before the COVID-19 vaccine was authorized, there was a plan to discredit it.
Leaders in the anti-vaccination movement attended an online conference in October 2020 — two months before the first shot was administered — where one speaker presented on “The 5 Reasons You Might Want to Avoid a COVID-19 Vaccine” and another referred to the “untested, unproven, very toxic vaccines.”
Late one afternoon last October, Dr. Shelley Odronic sat in her office and, just as she had thousands of times before, slid a rectangular glass slide onto her microscope.
A pathologist who works in rural Ohio, Odronic leaned forward to examine tissue from the placenta of a woman who had recently given birth. She increased the magnification on the microscope. Never had she seen so many tiny, congealed reservoirs of blood or such severe inflammation of the tissue, a sign the placenta had been fighting an infection.
Cyanide M-44 bombs contain a powered capsule of cyanide that is in a spring-loaded device that typically has some kind of bait smeared on it. When a coyote, dog, or other animal tugs on the attractant, the cyanide is injected into the animal’s mouth, releasing hydrogen cyanide gas.
Oregon banned M-44s across the state and the livestock industry is surviving.
In the past few months, officials in at least 25 states have issued orders to divest public pension funds from Russian assets or examine Russian investments. While these states should be applauded, it is troubling—given that Russia’s seizure of Crimea dates back to 2014—that so many public pension funds were investing in Russia in the first place. At the end of 2021, state and local government pension funds held assets of approximately $5.85 trillion, and several of these pension funds have investments in entities complicit in gross human rights violations.
A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about how an anonymous user had put up for sale the data of an estimated one billion Chinese citizens, probably obtained from the Shanghai police. Back then, what exactly had happened was a little unclear — not least because the Chinese authorities were shutting down any discussion of the massive and embarrassing leak. The Wall Street Journal has written a follow-up piece on the incident that clarifies the situation and puts things in a wider context (paywall alert):
We’ve noted for years how U.S. consumer location data is routinely abused by a long list of bad actors, including wireless carriers, broadband providers, app makers, adtech companies, data brokers, police, people pretending to be police, governments, and more.
The language is far from reassuring.
Who hasn’t suffered the same fate – you lose your job, get drunk in the park and carry a knife just in case, so that you are quickly on the spot when you come across another German family man abusing his daughter? Apparently, the Berlin police officer who found the Moroccan in the park after the incident blindly believed in this do-gooder fairy tale, because there is no other way to explain what she did first according to the protocol: she “hugged and comforted” the bloodied perpetrator – assuming that he was the victim, while Tomas K. lay unconscious in the park next to her.
The documents were turned over after Jones’ attorney “did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protected in any way and as of two days ago it fell free and clear into my possession,” Bankston told Jones in court Wednesday. “That is how I know you lied to me.”
Three years ago today, a 21-year-old man drove nearly 700 miles from his hometown of Allen, Tex., to a Walmart in El Paso. The store, just a few miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, was a common destination for Mexican shoppers who drove across the international boundary to buy cheap goods—some locals called it the “Mexican Walmart.” Its clientele and proximity to Mexico is what made the man choose that particular Walmart. In a manifesto published on 8chan earlier that day, he wrote that he wanted to “shoot as many Mexicans as possible.” Using an AK-47-style rifle he ordered from Romania, he killed 23 people and injured dozens more.
Have we forgotten that there is no safe place to hide in a nuclear war?
Employees of state-owned enterprises in Russia’s Leningrad region have begun receiving orders to report “for military retraining.” According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, men ages 18-60 are being served summons at their workplaces either directly or through their superiors. The day after the summons is served, the men are required to go to their local enlistment offices and are sent from there to military bases.
West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran and retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich discusses his new book, a collection of essays by combat veterans who excoriate the myths of war.
His inspiration to act – he destroyed fossil fuel infrastructure – was his love of the natural world, wild places, wild flora and fauna. My reply to Saboteur, who turned 62 this year, was an attempt to cheer him up:
I’m sorry I missed your last few calls. I was out taking my 10-yr-old daughter backpacking. And since she asks questions about you often enough (as I talk about you so often), I told her that you spent a good part (the best part?) of your 40s and 50s taking nieces and nephews into the wild with backpack, on foot and free and easy. To assuage your loneliness, forthwith some random notes on my trip with Josie up Plateau Mountain in the Catskill range.
Scientists have long clamored that human activity on Earth has led to the calamitous weather changes we are witnessing today. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has confirmed that climate change makes heatwaves hotter and more frequent. According to the research, greenhouse gas emissions have heated the planet by an estimated 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.16 degrees Fahrenheit) over the last two centuries.
The Nature journal published an article this month detailing what its authors say is proof that heatwaves in Europe have increased three-to-four times faster than in other northern mid-latitude areas such as the United States. The reason for this, according to the article, is due to the fast west-to-east air stream, or atmospheric circulation, which is carrying hot air across the northern atmosphere.
The crimes of the oil, gas, and coal companies
First of all, the fossil-fuel industry is responsible for setting the Earth on fire. It has been causing climate change for a century-and-a-half. Moreover, this industry has been undermining the country’s and the world’s green energy efforts for decades. It has the audacity to deny climate change.
Several U.S. veterans and their allies were arrested outside the nation’s Capitol building on Wednesday as they protested the military’s role in driving the climate crisis, from its massive greenhouse gas emissions to its large-scale release of toxic chemicals overseas and at home.
“The U.S. military is responsible for an unprecedented amount of climate disasters.”
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres unveiled a new report Wednesday about the global effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and took aim at the fossil fuel sector that’s been widely accused of war profiteering.
“We are already seeing the warning signs of a wave of economic, social, and political upheaval that would leave no country untouched.”
Christopher Bonasia reports that a group of researchers are pointing to the risks of climate change that climate science has left out.
MPs with a history of casting doubt on climate science and opposing green policies are poised for cabinet positions under Tory leadership favourite Liz Truss, prompting fears over the UK’s climate ambitions.
They include former Margaret Thatcher adviser, John Redwood, who has accused the BBC of “peddling climate alarmism” and Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has downplayed humans’ impact on the climate.
A coalition of African NGOs released a statement on Wednesday denouncing African leaders’ plan to develop new dirty energy projects, saying it would have drastic consequences for the continent and lock the region into a fossil fuel-based future.
“Africa needs to wake up and stop behaving like Europe’s petrol stations and always looking at resolving their energy problems, it is now time to think collectively on what’s best for the continent and its people.”
“Loliondo is bleeding”: an SMS message woke me up in the morning of 10th of June. Dozens of terrifying images of Maasai men and women, with wounds on their legs, on their backs, on their heads, started filling my phone. A lot of blood. And then videos of Maasai running away from the Tanzanian police who were shooting at them. They looked like war images. I, like so many other people in the Global North, was shocked. How could the peaceful images of zebras, giraffes and lions that the Serengeti ecosystem conjures up in Western minds be transformed into this theatre of brutal violence?
The government said that drinking water supplies are not threatened and said new measures are not yet necessary, but could be “in coming weeks.”
“We’ve always relied on imported drinking water in our region and have invested a lot of resources to reuse and store it locally. SMWD recently achieved its longtime strategic goal to recycle 100% of its wastewater. With the completion of OC’s largest recycled water reservoir, Trampas Canyon, in 2020, we can now store all of our recycled water rather than send some to the ocean.”
The long-term goal is to have 30% of the water supply be local by 2030. With limited access to groundwater – like much of Southern California – the South Orange County provider said recycling and desalination will be key to reaching the goal.
The effects of over-population are easily seen; The population explosion may wreck havoc and cause famine as we witnessed in history. Recall the 1943 Bengal famine which engulfed up to three million people for their over-population. Winston Churchill has been quoted as blaming the famine on the fact Indians were “breeding like rabbits’ ‘.
The rise in population leads to higher demand for water for domestic, industrial, agricultural and municipal needs and also evacuation for waste materials. According to reports of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), Pakistan ranks 14 out of 17 “extremely high water risk” countries in the world, as the country wastes one-third of water available. More than 80 percent of the country’s population faces “severe water scarcity.” Around 40 percent of water in Pakistan is lost due to spillage, seepage, side leakage, and bank cuttings along with irregular profiling of alignment of banks. Saving water through different techniques would be the panacea of the water crisis.
[...] The health minister said that if couples want to have more children, then they should go to another country where Muslims are in a minority so that the Muslim population can also increase around the world. [...]
Addressing the root causes of the climate crisis is essential to solving the worsening problem of water shortages in the Colorado River Basin, said a top environmental expert at the United Nations on Tuesday, emphasizing that the aridification of the region is part of a larger global trend.
The two largest reservoirs in the U.S., Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are part of the Colorado River watershed, and are both on the precipice of reaching dangerous “dead pool” status, according to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), with water levels dropping so low that water no longer flows downstream from the reservoirs.
The embezzlement case against multiple university administrators appears to be entering a new, lighter phase, as a Moscow district court released 68-year-old Sergey Zuev (the rector of the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences) from pretrial detention. Since his arrest in October 2021, Zuev has been in and out of the hospital with heart problems. Investigators say he was transferred to house arrest in exchange for pleading guilty, “naming his accomplices,” and repaying more than 15 million rubles ($247,425) in damages. Zuev’s lawyer says, however, that his client did not confess to embezzling any money. (Last December, President Putin said Zuev didn’t belong behind bars.)
The Italian authorities have seized 141 million euros’ ($143 million) worth of assets from Lanfranco Cirillo, the architect behind “Putin’s palace” on the Black Sea, according to a government press release. The seized property includes multiple homes, a helicopter, bank holdings, cash, jewelry, and works of art, including paintings by Picasso, Cézanne, and Kandinsky. Cirillo, who stands accused of violating Italian tax law and laundering money, was not named in the press release.
“The Invention of Capitalism,” a new original cartoon by the inimitable Mr. Fish, goes back to the beginning to explain the end of civil society.
This year’s budget reconciliation bill—the recently announced Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA)—debunks some popular nostrums on the Left, namely the idea that it doesn’t matter if Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is on the side of Democrats or Republicans in the U.S. Senate. This delusion is reflected in wishes to see Manchin disciplined for his egregious behavior, which has indeed been egregious, by being thrown out of the Democratic caucus, or by being deprived of his committee leadership positions. In either case, his vote would likely belong to Sen. Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the Senate, and by that stroke, the new majority leader.
The following are the prepared remarks delivered by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2022 regarding the Inflation Reduction Act calling for an amendment process ahead of an expected.
Sen. Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to offer a sweeping critique of the Democratic Party’s new reconciliation package, applying particularly close scrutiny to the legislation’s massive and destructive handouts to the fossil fuel industry.
While Sanders (I-Vt.) applauded the Inflation Reduction Act’s “serious funding for wind, solar, batteries, heat pumps, electric vehicles, energy-efficient appliances, and low-income communities that have borne the brunt of climate change,” he raised concerns about the “billions of dollars in new tax breaks and subsidies” that the oil and gas industry will receive under the measure, which could get a Senate vote as soon as this week.
↺ Opinion | How Public Real Estate Investment Trusts Extract Wealth from Nursing Homes and Hospitals
Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are important financial actors that control over $3.5 trillion in gross assets and over 500,000 properties in the U.S. Yet they have been largely ignored because tax rules define them as ‘passive investors.’ They exist as tax “pass through” entities and pay no corporate taxes if they invest at least 75 percent of their assets in real estate, derive 75 percent of their gross income from real property, and pay out at least 90 percent of taxable income (excluding capital gains) as shareholder dividends each year.
When real estate giant Redfin issued its monthly rental report in June, it noted that, for the first time in history, the median monthly rent in the U.S. had surpassed $2,000, a 15 percent bump from the previous year.
Chileans will vote in September on whether to approve a new constitution that promises to address inequality and lack of democracy (Reuters, 7/4/22). It would replace the pr…
Multiple potential candidates for the GOP’s 2024 presidential primary race support former President Donald Trump’s plot to make it easier to purge civil servants deemed disloyal to their prospective administrations, Axios revealed Wednesday.
“These impartial civil servants… deserve protection from political interference from a president who would place preserving his power above following the law.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s sizable investments in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District paid off Tuesday when Rep. Haley Stevens defeated fellow Democratic Rep. Andy Levin, a Jewish progressive who has criticized Israel’s illegal and brutal occupation of Palestinian territory.
Stevens and Levin were forced into a primary contest by Michigan’s redistricting process, which provided an opportunity for AIPAC’s super PAC and other special interest groups to pour millions into the race to oust Levin, who has been described as the most progressive Jewish member of the House.
Democratic challenger Mandela Barnes slammed Sen. Ron Johnson as a “self-serving, multimillionaire” on Tuesday after the sitting Republican from Wisconsin called for making both Social Security and Medicare discretionary programs—a reform that would pave the way for the GOP to realize its half-century-long dream of dismantling two of the nation’s most essential and popular social programs.
Speaking on a right-wing radio show earlier in the day, Johnson criticized the “mandatory” spending demanded by Social Security and Medicare, guaranteed benefit programs available to all Americans and overwhelmingly popular.
The landslide defeat in Kansas of a constitutional amendment to revoke abortion rights is energizing reproductive freedom fighters, who on Wednesday expressed hopes that congressional Republicans will pay dearly in this November’s midterm elections for flouting the will of the majority of Americans.
“The right-wing extremists who plotted to overturn Roe had no idea of the level of anger—and determination—they’d unleash.”
Kansans have overwhelmingly voted to protect abortion rights in their state. This is a huge rejection of the anti-democratic Dobbs decision by the tyrannical Supreme Court.
Kansans voted by a decisive margin on Tuesday to reject a proposed amendment that would have removed the right to abortion from the state’s constitution and empowered the Republican legislature to advance a total ban.
With almost all precincts reporting, the count was 59% against the amendment and 41% in favor, a strong win over GOP lawmakers’ attempt to overturn a 2019 Kansas Supreme Court ruling that deemed abortion a protected right under the state constitution.
Republican Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana blocked Democrats’ attempt Wednesday to pass legislation that would protect doctors who provide legal abortion care from right-wing threats and attacks.
“First they attacked women. Now they’re coming for doctors too. It’s unbelievable.”
Journalist and celebrity Ksenia Sobchak shared two photos on Wednesday showing former Rusnano CEO Anatoly Chubais recovering in a hospital bed after being diagnosed with a rare immune-system disorder called Guillain–Barré syndrome. According to Sobchak, Chubais is still dealing with partial facial paralysis and difficulty moving his arms and legs and closing one eye.
The AvtoVAZ automobile manufacturing company is offering severance packages and help finding permanent jobs at other nearby enterprises to furloughed plant workers in Izhevsk. Employees who agree to resign voluntarily would receive as much as 183,000 rubles ($3,000). Additional payments will be available to older workers who wish to retire altogether.
In Arizona Tuesday night, state Rep. Mark Finchem became the sixth Republican who denies the legitimacy of the 2020 election results to win a state secretary of state primary race, bringing him a step closer to overseeing Arizona’s elections—and posing “a danger to our democracy,” as one critic said.
“To protect our elections and freedom to vote, we must defeat them up and down the ballot, from county clerk to secretary of state.”
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has left Taiwan after a series of high-profile meetings with Taiwan’s pro-democracy president and other lawmakers. Pelosi’s visit made her the most senior U.S. official to visit Taiwan in 25 year and stoked tensions with China, prompting the nation to announce it would carry out new air and naval drills and long-range live-fire exercises in six areas around Taiwan beginning Thursday. The Quincy Institute’s Michael Swaine says President Biden should have done more to prevent the visit and uphold the One China policy, calling the move a “basic violation of the understanding that the United States and China reached at the time of normalization.” Taiwanese American journalist Brian Hioe rebukes Swaine’s claims, saying progressives should focus more on the desires of the Taiwanese than trying to cater to the whims of the two imperial powers of the U.S. and China, adding that the Taiwanese are not threatened by China’s retaliatory military escalation. “We cannot act as progressives or leftists seeing things in a bipolar world, seeing no other agency from any other force,” says Hioe.
Nearly 60% of Kansas voters struck down a ballot measure Tuesday night that would have removed the state’s right to abortion and cleared the way for Republican state lawmakers to ban the procedure. It was the first vote on abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. “Voters in Kansas have just proven that the will of the people can be a powerful tool to overrule the will of a Republican-dominated Legislature,” says reproductive health reporter Amy Littlefield, who calls the vote a “landslide.”
Abortion rights advocates on Wednesday applauded an executive action announced by President Joe Biden aimed at helping women in states that have banned and restricted abortions to travel across state lines to receive care, calling the order an “important step” to ensure access is protected.
The action included several orders directed at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), headed by Secretary Xavier Becerra.
Donald Trump won Kansas by a 15-point margin in 2020, sweeping 100 of the state’s 105 counties as the presidential candidate of a Republican Party that has for decades pledged to overturn the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that protected abortion rights. So a lot of folks just presumed, prior to Tuesday’s Kansas vote on whether to remove protections for abortion access from their state Constitution, that the anti-choice position would prevail.
Civil asset forfeiture has shown us the government has a weird way of instigating lawsuits. In rem forfeiture cases allow government agencies to file suits against objects, rather than the people they’ve been seized from. This leads to some very amusing case names (even if the underlying process verges on legalized theft), like South Dakota v. 15 Impounded Cats and, um… UNITED STATES of America v. AN ARTICLE of hazardous substance CONSISTING OF 50,000 cardboard BOXES more or less, each containing one pair OF CLACKER BALLS, labeled in part: (Box) “* * * Kbonger * * It’s Fun Test Your Skill It Bounces It Flips Count The Hits * * * Specialty Mfg. Co., Seattle, Wash. * *.
The anticipated announcement, on July 21, of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidential run as the Workers’ Party candidate for the October elections in Brazil foretells a key return to the global chessboard. Lula, who currently leads incumbent Jair Bolsonaro by more than 20 points in opinion polls, consolidated the first wave of the Latin American Pink Tide after a watershed electoral win in 2003. His comeback in 2022 promises to set off a second surge on a whole new scale, with the momentum to reaffirm past gains and expand in new directions.
While it’s still called the Forward Party, Yang’s vehicle is merging with two other (also previously unsuccessful) “third party” efforts, the “Renew America Movement” (co-founded by Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican governor of New Jersey, who will co-chair “new” Forward) and the “Serve America Movement” (chaired by former Republican congressman David Jolly of Florida).
The merger, Yang tweeted, creates “the biggest 3rd party by resources in the United States.”
Kansas overwhelmingly votes Republican, but there is currently a Democratic governor. The truth of it is that she would be at home in the Country Club Republican party which dominated before the Trump wing took over. It took incredible fiscal mismanagement from ex-governor Sam Brownback to make her election possible. He pushed the discredited theories of one Arthur Laffer, that among other idiocy, gave LLCs in the state no income tax. Suddenly your neighborhood lemonade stand was an LLC to avoid taxes. This actually did piss off a lot of Kansans as the typical LLCs would be enormous agri-business (not the yeoman farmer Thomas Jefferson masturbated to) or dentists, physicians…..you get the picture. But the CNA, the fast food worker–you can bet they had some state income tax to pay. The lack of incoming funds created a paradise. For potholes, that is. And any number of failing infrastructure items. So that’s what it took to get Governor Laura Kelly voted in….. who again, is no bastion of leftist ideology. She is the current equivalent of a Nancy Landon Kassebaum type–a former Republican Senator in the state. It’s just in these parts, if you aren’t in the MAGA sector, there’s not much of a home in the current Republican party. We don’t have a functioning, vibrant left party. The current Democrats are all what would be termed moderate Republicans of the past (pre MAGA, pre Tea Party). So this is to say, that it takes a gross over-shoot to wrest power from the radical right, but it does happen.
Anyway, that is the recent background of the state–common sense will pop out periodically. The general reticent politeness common here has given the radical right the notion that everyone agrees with them. They took it for granted. But they got a huge surprise on August 2nd when their fellow citizens came out in impressive numbers to say “No” to removing protections guaranteeing abortion rights in the state. It was the first test of the population’s tolerance for the Supreme Court’s march to theocratic rule. When a state as conservative as Kansas says no, you have to realize that the Court grossly miscalculated.
On top of the normal sort of illegal content, service providers were supposed to proactively monitor user content to remove “prohibited information,” a catch-all term that includes such uber-vague things like content that “creates community anxiety” and blasphemy of the government’s preferred god(s). Providers are also supposed to monitor [Internet] traffic to detect circumvention efforts, like VPN usage.
The law survived a legal challenge later that year. Indonesia’s apparently misnamed “Constitutional Court” said the law was constitutional. And it gave the government the power to pull the plug on platforms and services that did not comply with its draconian demands.
But there is concern about the automatic use of these warnings within academia, with the University of Kent’s Prof Frank Furedi saying: “They are an invitation to infirmity.
“Young people are invited to feel like patients rather than students. People are now issuing this warning automatically, but they fundamentally change the perception of reading and learning.
“Instead of something that is done to entertain or illuminate, they are seen as something traumatising and damaging to mental health.”
Pervin Chakar, one of the few Kurdish opera singers to be awarded various international prizes, has been barred from taking the stage at Turkey’s Mardin Artuklu University for including Kurdish songs in her repertoire.
Chakar made the announcement on Twitter on July 31. “In May, we wrote a petition to Mardin Artuklu University’s concert hall to give a concert. The rector’s attitude was quite positive. They have later asked for my repertoire. They have not allowed me to give a concert since I have Kurdish songs in my repertoire. I am grieving for not being able to give a concert in my city,” said Chakar, who is originally from Turkey’s southeastern province of Mardin.
As you’ll recall, the defining moment that lead to Donald Trump creating his Truth Social Twitter clone was his being banned from Twitter for potentially egging on further violence on January 6th. Even before Truth Social was started, Trump’s most vocal and loyal… well, let’s just call them “fans,” kept insisting that what was needed was a social media site that didn’t do any moderation at all — or, at the very least, did no moderation based on viewpoint.
The Senate majority leader pushed through a funding bill that now supports a structure under which U.S. citizens and politicians — including a challenger for his own seat — are being targeted as “information terrorists.”
Like many Muscovites, I am spending this summer at the dacha. In 2022, there are many more people than in years past vacationing in our village, located close to the former Obiralovka Junction, where Lev Tolstoy tossed Anna Karenina under a train (women leave bouquets at the memorial plaque at the station, thinking that Anna was a real victim of unhappy love and not a fictional character). One reason there are more people is the development of the Internet; many continue working remotely, which they began doing during the pandemic. Besides, almost everyone who usually vacations abroad is spending the summer of 2022 in Russia because of the international sanctions.
“Dozens of women have been arrested since [the] July 12 day of action against forced hijab,” Alinejad said on Twitter. “But these acts of terror haven’t deterred women. Our campaign against forced hijab continues.”
While Rashno was arrested by the security forces days after the video of her argument went viral, the woman with whom she fought was not arrested.
Iran’s hijab laws are enforced by the morality police, which often patrols busy areas of the cities and arrests women on the streets for not being compliant with the traditional Islamic dress code.
And keep this in mind: attacks on street protests are just the most recent development in fossil-fuelized aggression. Especially in the red states of America, MAGA motorists have been driving our quality of life into the ground for years. My spouse Priti Gulati Cox and I live half a block south of Crawford Street, the central east-west artery in Salina, Kansas. Starting in the early Trump years, and ever more regularly during the pandemic, we’ve been plagued by the brain-rattling roar of diesel-powered pickup trucks as they peel out of side streets onto Crawford, spewing black exhaust and aiming to go from zero to sixty before reaching the traffic light at Broadway. By 2020, many of these drivers were regularly festooning their pickups, ISIS-style, with giant flags bearing slogans like “Trump 2020” and “Don’t Tread on Me,” as well as Confederate battle flags. Some still display them, often with “F*** Biden” flags as well.
If you live in flyover country as we do, you come to expect such performances. And don’t think that I’m just expressing my own personal annoyance about an aesthetic affront either. Fueled by diesel or gasoline, and supercharged by what political scientist Cara Daggett has labeled “petro-masculinity,” those men in big, loud vehicles serve as the shock troops for a white-right authoritarian movement that threatens to seize control of our political system. Recall the “Trump caravan” that tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas just before Election Day 2020. Or the “Trump Trains” of pickups carrying men with paintball guns, one of which attacked Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon.
The Maasai are a semi-nomadic pastoralist community that proudly practice an Indigenous way of life closely tied to their land and cattle. Their ancestral lands border the East African Rift Valley, the Serengeti National Park and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. The government aims to expand the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in northern Tanzania and plans to turn it into a game reserve.
“Every activity depends on the land,” says Rosa Olokwani-Mundarara, who—along with Leyian-Naisinyai—fights for the rights of the Maasai people to have greater control over their lives. The Maasai community, like other pastoralists, find themselves being marginalized by the capture of their lands for mining, tourism and conservation. According to the Legal Resources Centre and Oxfam, the globally recognized principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) can be extended to African human rights law and customary law, providing a legal basis to resist displacement. Joyce Ndakaru, who works at the nonprofit HakiMadini (or Right to Minerals), tells me that while FPIC offers important legal protection, the precarious situation of the Maasai land tenure—in particular women’s land tenure—rights poses challenges for women like Olokwani-Mundarara and Leyian-Naisinyai.
When a golfer hits an errant shot that might bonk an unsuspecting spectator on the head, the proper cry of warning is: “Fore!” But what do they shout when they hit a bad shot that boomerangs right back and bonks the golfer on the noggin?
This week we noted how the Democratic party had introduced a new two-page bill that would simply give the FCC even clearer authority to restore net neutrality. Of course the bill won’t pass this corrupt Congress, was barely noticed in the summer heat, and couldn’t be implemented anyway because the telecom industry and GOP have successfully blocked the appointment of Gigi Sohn, gridlocking the agency.
As Moderna reported higher-than-expected revenue driven entirely by sales of its publicly funded Covid-19 vaccine, health equity campaigners on Wednesday renewed calls for pharmaceutical companies to waive patent protections in order to share their lifesaving technology with developing countries.
“The company has been allowed to make huge profits while doing next to nothing to ensure equitable access for people in lower-income countries.”
Charter Communications and several major record labels have settled their lawsuits over the ISP’s handling of repeat copyright infringers. The deal was signed around the same time that the ISP’s daughter company Bright House settled its case. No further details are available but with hundreds of millions of dollars in damages at stake, negotiations must have been tough.
Twitch has flagged Project Zomboid’s in-game police siren sound effect as copyright infringement. The platform muted a stream of a popular Spanish streamer who participated in a high-profile event. The game’s indie developers believe that there’s a copyright troll at work and advise gamers to stay away from emergency vehicles while they try to find a fix.
Following in the footsteps of football leagues and boxing promotions, Canal+ has obtained a court order compelling local ISPs to block dozens of sites accused of illegally streaming Formula 1 events. The order is the latest in a long line of anti-piracy actions in France, where fledgling regulatory body Arcom has added hundreds of domains to the country’s official blacklist in just a few months.
Just a few weeks we noted that this was inevitable, but Facebook has now made it official that it’s no longer interested in dumping money on news publishers.
On Star Trek, if you want to go from one deck to another, you enter a “turbolift” and tell it where you want to go. However, many people have speculated that one day you’ll ride an elevator to orbit instead of using a relatively crude rocket. The idea is simple. If you had a tether anchored on the Earth with the other end connected to a satellite, you could simply move up and down the tether. Sound simple, so what’s the problem? The tether has to withstand enormous forces, and we don’t know how to make anything practical that could survive it. However, a team at the International Space Elevator Consortium could have the answer: graphene ribbons.
I’m releasing Offpunk 1.5 which mainly fixes a couple of bugs and add the “redirect” features (which was existing but hidden). Redirect allows you to block http domains or to redirect them to a privacy-friendly frontend. By default, facebook.com is blocked and twitter, medium, youtube and reddit are redirected to some frontends. 1.5 also adds the “open url” command which open current page in your browser.
Started reading “The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management”, by W.M.P. van der Aalst last friday and finished today. You need paid access to download the PDF but I can send it to you in case you’re interested, just contact me.
As the title suggests the paper is not about programming but workflow management. Specifically, it’s about how the processes executed in a company’s context can be modeled by Petri nets, and reasons why that is a good thing. A recurrent example was that of an insurance/complaints company, where customers may submit complaints and the company processes them to decide whether the customer is right or not.
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