Boing Boing

Whatever fond memories you might have of high school, Texas Instruments' TI-84 is an obsolete piece of crap: a 1980s design updated to 1990s technology made with 2000s penny parts and sold for more than $100 a pop to children all but forced to buy them. TI is a notorious lobbyist and has sought laws big and small to maintain this status quo, from mandatory Algebra courses with mandatory TI-84s to examination rules that allow its devices and no others. But the racket is falling apart under pressure from superior alternatives and growing resentment among teachers and students.While tutoring low-income students in 2011, a Yale math grad named Eli Luberoff began to notice a “horrible inequity” in the system.“A lot of families simply couldn’t afford to spend $100 on a calculator,” he says, “and it was creating a huge imbalance in access to math tools.”So, Luberoff created Desmos, a free graphing calculator application for desktop and mobile. He didn’t expect it to turn into a company — but today, more than 40m students and teachers use it.“Our business model is the exact opposite of TI’s,” says Luberoff: “Their model has always been to give [tech] away for free to textbook companies and force families to buy it at a premium price; our model is to give [tech] away for free to students, and charge textbook companies to integrate it.”In four years, TI's "other devices" sales have slumped from $2.2bn to $1.4bn, an indicator that it calculators are not selling well. Read the rest

The Advocate in Baton Rouge reports that a Florida woman crawled into a camel enclosure at a roadsize zoo, the camel sat on her, and that she bit the camel's testicles "to escape".The investigation found that the couple had provoked the camel before it sat on the woman. "The camel did nothing wrong," Hamilton said. "They (the couple) were aggressive. The camel was just doing its normal routine."The truck stop, located 20 minutes outside of Baton Rouge, keeps a camel named Caspar and for many years controversially kept a tiger for visitors to see on-site. The couple, who weren't identified, stopped at the truck stop to let the dog out.The couple were cited with a leash law violation (they also let their dog into the camel enclosure) and criminal trespassing. Read the rest

Today, Wired advises you to "Stop Renting E-Scooters Every Day and Just Buy One Already!", which may or may not be good advice in terms of your own safety and the safety of others, but if you like the idea, you don't need to spend $1000-$1600 to risk your neck and the necks of everyone else on your commute.Many cities have banned e-scooter short-hire vehicles and are impounding them, and in other cities, repo men have been busily seizing scooters left on private property, and the e-scooter companies, who already lose money on every scooter (they're making it up in volume!) just abandon their scooters to rust away in impound lots and turn into e-waste.Which means that you can pick up scooters for pocket-change in municipal auctions! There's only one problem: the control units of these scooters only take orders from companies like Bird and Lime, so even after you own one of these things, you can't ride it without paying an overcapitalized bezzle for the privilege.That is...not unless you swap out the control unit! For $30 or less, you can get a conversion kit that swaps in with just a few screws' worth of fiddling. Once you do that, that city impound scooter becomes your scooter, at a price so cheap you can buy two!This strategy is totally legal, and totally toxic to Bird and Lime's business model, and boy do they know it: last year, Bird threatened to sue me for writing about this in a bid to keep the news from spreading. Read the rest

The grand prize winner at the 2019 D23 Mousequerade, here's Tina Elliott's "Grim Grinning Gown" with moving ghosts and 3D-printed doom buggies:You can see the other prize winners here, including this homage to Disneyland's Indiana Jones Adventure by Emily and Nathan Mebust:(Via Cosplay in America.) Read the rest

I have an op-ed in today's Globe and Mail, "Why do people believe the Earth is flat?" wherein I connect the rise of conspiratorial thinking to the rise in actual conspiracies, in which increasingly concentrated industries are able to come up with collective lobbying positions that result in everything from crashing 737s to toxic baby-bottle liners to the opioid epidemic.In a world where official processes are understood to be corruptible and thus increasingly unreliable, we don't just have a difference in what we believe to be true, but in how we believe we know whether something is true or not. Without an official, neutral, legitimate procedure for rooting out truth -- the rule of law -- we're left just trusting experts who "sound right to us." Big Tech has a role to play here, but it's not in automated brainwashing through machine learning: rather, it's in the ability for conspiracy peddlers to find people who are ripe for their version of the truth, and in the ability of converts to find one another and create communities that make them resilient against social pressure to abandon their conspiracies.Fighting conspiracies, then, is ultimately about fighting the corruption that makes them plausible -- not merely correcting the beliefs of people who have come under their sway.They say that ad-driven companies such as Google and Facebook threw so much R&D at using data-mining to persuade people to buy refrigerators, subprime loans and fidget-spinners that they accidentally figured out how to rob us of our free will. Read the rest

Unmute this one.From Redditor @carolyn_collier_."Would you like to play a game?" Read the rest

Do androids dream of electric sashimi? University of Virginia engineers and Harvard biologists built a robotic fish based on the high-performance swimming of tuna. Above, a visualization of the robot's motion data. Eventually, the Tunabot could be outfitted with a variety of sensors and wireless communication. From UVAToday:The aim of (mechanical engineering professor Hilary) Bart-Smith’s project is to better understand the physics of fish propulsion – research that could eventually inform development of the next generation of underwater vehicles, driven by fish-like systems better than propellers.Underwater robots also are useful in a range of applications, such as defense, marine resources exploration, infrastructure inspection and recreation...The eyeless, finless replica fish is roughly 10 inches long; the biological equivalent can get up to seven feet long. A fishing line tether keeps the robot steady, while a green laser light cuts across the midline of the plastic fish. The laser measures the fluid motion shed by the robot with each sweep of its fabricated tail. As the current of water in the flow tank speeds up, the Tunabot’s tail and whole body move in a rapid bending pattern, similar to the way a live yellowfin tuna swims."Tuna robotics: A high-frequency experimental platform exploring the performance space of swimming fishes" (Science Robotics) Read the rest

University of Cambridge lecturer Jason Scott-Warren was looking at an original 1623 folio copy of Shakespeare's plays, when thought he recognized the handwriting in the margins: John Milton. Was it possible that he'd identified Milton's personal copy of Shakespeare? It was jammed full of marginalia, and scholars for years had wondered who had written those scribblings. If it was Milton, then they had a record "of arguably the second-greatest 17th-century writer reading the first."So Scott-Warren went to his blog and wrote a post arguing his hypothesis, hit "publish" -- and the world of 17th-century English literary studies went faintly nuts. Turns out they agreed with him and now they're all flipping out with excitement.One of the best parts about Milton's notes is that he keeps on suggesting corrections and improvements to Shakespeare. As the Washington Post writes (my apologies if this is paywalled):Milton’s marginalia range from line-editing — crossing out an adjective and offering an alternative — to flagging preferred passages to fixing Shakespeare’s meter, ensuring it conforms perfectly to the rules of iambic pentameter. At one point, Milton rewrites the title of what may be Shakespeare’s most famous work: The play becomes “Juliet and Romeo,” not vice versa. [snip]Bourne came to cherish particular edits. For example, the time the commenter suggested “wicked tongue” instead of “idle tongue” in Hamlet. Or the time he proposed that Juliet was “past hope, past cure, past help” instead of “past hope, past care, past help” in “Romeo and Juliet.” [snip]It’s unclear why Milton may have made the marginalia and revisions. Read the rest

In a rural Nevada desert town, people who get all jazzed up about UFOs on the internet have begun to arrive for a UFO-themed meetup that locals would rather not be hosting.This area of the desert is home to a U.S. military installation long known as Area 51, which has been the focus of conspiracy theories involving alien life for some time.In June, Matty Roberts, a college student in California, posted a silly post on Facebook inviting all comers to run into Area 51 on foot to “see them aliens.”In early September, young mister Roberts disassociated himself from the event that is today descending on Rachel, Nevada, saying it was poorly organized, and that he was afraid it may turn into a public safety crisis.Hope that doesn't happen.Excerpt from today's Reuters filing from Rachel, Nevada, a remote desert town of 50 people about 12 miles outside that military base:When more than 1 million people expressed interest, the U.S. Air Force admonished curiosity seekers not to breach the gates at the military base, which it said is still used to test combat aircraft and train personnel.Roberts instead helped stage an alternative Alienstock set to take place Thursday night 150 miles (240 km) away, in Las Vegas. Beer brand Bud Light signed on as a sponsor and designed limited-edition, green beer cans featuring alien heads.About 40 miles (64 km) east of Rachel, another small town, Hiko, Nevada, planned a separate event called “Storm Area 51 Basecamp” at a gift shop dubbed the Alien Research Center. Read the rest

In 1969, visionary designers Charles and Ray Eames directed this cinematic ballet of more than 100 spinning tops from around the world. The score is by famed Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein (The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven, Airplane!, etc.). From the Eames Office:Tops had its genesis in an earlier film produced for the Stars of Jazz television program in 1957. The Eameses decided to make a longer, color version in 1966, which they worked on in spare moments between other projects.The film is a celebration of the ancient art and craft of top-making and spinning. One hundred and twenty-three tops spin to the accompaniment of a score by Elmer Bernstein. Using close-up, live-action photography, the film shows tops, old and new, from various countries, including China, Japan, India, the United States, France, and England. Charles’s fascination with spinning tops went back to his childhood; in this film he found a perfect vehicle for demonstrating their beauty in motion and for making visual points about the universality of tops, the physics of motion (MIT physics professor, Philip Morrison, often showed the film to students and colleagues), and the intimate relationship between toys and science. (via Aeon) Read the rest

A young gay Christian man in Oklahoma says his fellow church-goers tackled him, pinned him down, punched him in the face, and tried to ‘pray the gay away,’ because he and his boyfriend are “guilty of homosexuality, an “abomination of a sin.”Sean Cormie, who is 23 and still both queer and Christian despite the attack, says the Sunday service started out normally but got weird fast when the pastor started preaching about homosexuality as a “sin.”Sean was there on September 8 with his partner, Gary Gardner. Sean's mom and stepdad are youth pastors at the First Assembly of God in Blackwell, Oklahoma, where Sean says Pastor Bill McKissick was pacing around the room, fuming, and saying that someone present in the church at that moment was “guilty of homosexuality,” an “abomination of a sin,” Sean says.In a Facebook post, Sean wrote that the gay-condemning pastor then pointed his finger at Sean and Gary. At that point, congregation members all got up and rushed them, pinning the two guys to the ground and “praying the spirit of homosexuality out of us,” wrote Sean in the post.They were yelling and crying, trying to “pray the gay away,” he said.“I was so embarrassed,” Gardner told NBC affiliate TV station KFOR in Oklahoma City. “I felt about two inches tall when this started.”Sean Cormie, 23, came out as gay in the spring. Since then, he said his family has asked him to go to church and bring his partner, Gary Gardner. Read the rest

The WarnerMedia streaming platform HBO Max has ordered two "reimagined" seasons of the cult favorite 'The Boondocks,' so we're getting 24 episodes of a new Boondocks show. This is real. Aaron McGruder's animated series last aired in 2014 on Adult Swim.“It's set to premiere in fall 2020 with a 50-minute special,” per THR. “All 55 previous episodes of The Boondocks will be available on HBO Max when the service launches in the spring.”Hot damn!"There’s a unique opportunity to revisit the world of The Boondocks and do it over again for today," said creator Aaron McGruder. "It’s crazy how different the times we live in are now — both politically and culturally — more than a decade past the original series and two decades past the original newspaper comic. There’s a lot to say and it should be fun.”The press release that went out today offered this synopsis of the Boondocks reboot:The new Boondocks follows the adventures of self-proclaimed “Civil Rights Legend” Robert “Granddad” Freeman, and his two rambunctious grandsons Huey and Riley. The family has recently moved to an idyllic community in suburban Maryland only to see it taken over by the tyrannical Uncle Ruckus and his bizarre neo-fascist regime. Life under Ruckus turns out to be an everyday struggle to survive.🚨THE BOONDOCKS is returning with new material on #HBOMax. This is not a drill. 🚨 pic.twitter.com/GwoPnC9bjv— Brandon Katz (@Great_Katzby) September 18, 2019 View this post on Instagram Excited to announce we have found a new home at HBO Max! Read the rest

The largest universal quantum computer available for external use will delivered in October 2019, IBM announced today. Its latest 53-qubit quantum computer will be available to clients of its IBM Q Network.Will it run Minecraft, though?The big machine boi will be housed in Poughkeepsie, NY.The new machine will be part of IBM’s new Quantum Computation Center in New York State, which the company also announced today. The new center, which is essentially a data center for IBM’s quantum machines, will also feature five 20-qubit machines, but that number will grow to 14 within the next month. IBM promises a 95% service availability for its quantum machines.IBM notes that the new 53-qubit system introduces a number of new techniques that enable the company to launch larger, more reliable systems for cloud deployments. It features more compact custom electronics for improving scaling and lower error rates, as well as a new processor design.(...)The fact that IBM is now opening this Quantum Computation itself, of course, is a pretty good indication about how serious the company is about its quantum efforts. The company’s quantum program also now supports 80 partnerships with commercial clients, academic institutions and research laboratories. Some of these have started to use the available machines to work on real-world problems, though the current state of the art in quantum computing is still not quite ready for solving anything but toy problems and testing basic algorithms.And here's the obligatory IBM quantum brag quote from Dario Gil, director of IBM Research:Our global momentum has been extraordinary since we put the very first quantum computer on the cloud in 2016, with the goal of moving quantum computing beyond isolated lab experiments that only a handful organizations could do, into the hands of tens of thousands of users. Read the rest

Back in 1970, Max Peintner drew a picture -- "The Unending Attraction of Nature" -- showing a stadium full of people all watching a forest of trees down on the field. This year the Swiss curator Klaus Littman decided to make it a reality. He took 300 mature trees, some weighing up to six tons, and planted them in Austria's Wörthersee Stadium, turning it into a massive art project. Much like the original Peintner drawing, it's a haunting meditation on our relationship to nature, made additionally resonant given the today's depredations of climate change.Of course, because it's about climate change, the reactionary right is pitching a hissy fit about the art. As Artnet reports:Two hard right parties, the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ) and the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), have publicly criticized the project, which is the brainchild of Swiss curator Klaus Littmann. Among other things, they have falsely claimed that the installation, which fills a local soccer stadium with a grove of 300 trees, was taxpayer-funded.The resulting public controversy has taken on alarming dimensions. In a recent profile in Der Standard, Littmann claimed that he has not only faced verbal criticism for the project, but was also physically attacked on the street and pushed into traffic. According to the curator, his assailant shouted, “Go away and take your shitty forest!” (“Verschwind mit deinem Scheißwald!”)Before the September 8 opening, the BZÖ rallied supporters on social media, instructing them to gather in front of the stadium during Littmann’s opening and make a statement with “non-functional chainsaws.” In the end, the debut was a largely celebratory occasion, but as a result of the furor the stadium is now being guarded day and night, according to Deutsche Welle. Read the rest

Our friend Ariel Waldman (who has written for Boing Boing quite a bit) recently led an expedition to Antarctica to look for extremophiles. She made a great YouTube series chronicling her work there and recently uploaded the final video in the series. Above: Ep. 1 - How to get to Antarctica.Ep. 2 - Antarctica under the ice: Ep. 3 - Camping in Antarctica: Ep. 4 - Extremophiles of Antarctica: Ep. 5 - Antarctica robot road trip: Read the rest

Here's a pretty incredible vintage computer restoration project from IMGURian and classic computing aficionado Skottyboy. The finished product is amazing, so's the crusty old “before” snapshot!You could say it was this guy's “PET Project.”“PETs are not super common as they were an early personal computer mostly used by schools,” says Skottyboy.“Thing spent a decade or so in a garage on its side getting crapped on. It also had wasps in it. Back in the day when you could really open up the hood on your computer!”A PET Project[ALL photos by Skottyboy] Read the rest

Well, pretty much everyone saw this lawsuit coming.The United States government is suing Edward Snowden, whose new book Permanent Record was released today, September 17, 2019. The Justice Department says Snowden's book contents are “in violation of the non-disclosure agreements he signed with both CIA and NSA.”Read DOJ's full statement today from the The United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia:Department of JusticeU.S. Attorney’s OfficeEastern District of VirginiaFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASETuesday, September 17, 2019United States Files Civil Lawsuit Against Edward SnowdenALEXANDRIA, Va. – The United States today filed a lawsuit against Edward Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), who published a book entitled Permanent Record in violation of the non-disclosure agreements he signed with both CIA and NSA.The lawsuit alleges that Snowden published his book without submitting it to the agencies for pre-publication review, in violation of his express obligations under the agreements he signed. Additionally, the lawsuit alleges that Snowden has given public speeches on intelligence-related matters, also in violation of his non-disclosure agreements.The United States’ lawsuit does not seek to stop or restrict the publication or distribution of Permanent Record. Rather, under well-established Supreme Court precedent, Snepp v. United States, the government seeks to recover all proceeds earned by Snowden because of his failure to submit his publication for pre-publication review in violation of his alleged contractual and fiduciary obligations. The lawsuit also names as nominal defendants the corporate entities involved in publishing Snowden’s book. Read the rest

Esme Pearl has a shitty life: she's seventeen, has only one real friend in the world, lives in a small Kansas town (and hates it), goes to high school, and is being raised by her traumatized father who can't bring himself to talk about the mental illness that has landed her mother in a locked psych ward since Esme was a little girl. That's the setup for The Babysitters Coven, the debut YA novel from Kate M Williams, a veteran writer for glossy magazines and fashion-brand marketing, who has clearly built up a lot of snark for the verse-verse-chorus idealized teen life that she's been paid to market. Esme is a delightful character, thanks mostly to her intense nerding out on her two hobbies: thrifted high fashion and babysitting, passions she shares with her only and best friend, Janis, who is also the sole remaining member of the babysitters' club the two of them formed when they were still in middle-school. When Esme turns 17, she starts to manifest telekinetic powers, though she isn't certain at first that she can believe the evidence of her own eyes.That changes when Cassandra -- impossibly beautiful, shabbily dressed -- transfers to her high school. The new kid is weird, and maybe in a good way, but as Esme gets to know her, she discovers that Cassandra, too, has powers -- the ability to manifest fire ("pyrokinesis"), and that Cassandra is an orphan whose parents hailed from Esme's town. Cassandra's mother seems to have known Esme's mother, and what's more, before she died, Cassandra's mother left her a note, telling her to "find the babysitters."You can see where this is going, I trust (if not, I refer you to the title). Read the rest

Breaking into the big leagues as a project manager isn't done overnight, but there are principles that anyone can learn, and they're applicable to nearly any business. No matter what your field, if there are multiple teams working toward a common goal, you're going to need a roadmap.The Project Management Professional Certification Training Suite is designed to let you draw it up quickly and confidently - even if you have little or no prior management experience.This series of courses isn't just a parade of empty motivational speeches. The Project Management Institute's ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner) certification is a jewel in any resume, and these classes will help you ace that exam - and other relevant certifications - the first time out.Here's the breakdown of what you get:Project Management Fundamentals: Run Projects Effectively - An overview of the role of a project manager, and the steps involved in taking an idea from pitch to product.Deeply Practical Project Management - A nuts-and-bolts look at best practices for PMI (Project Management Institute) ventures, including cost projections and software tools.Project Management Professional 6th Edition Training - An in-depth look at the Project Management Book of Knowledge, version 6. After taking it, you'll have PMBOKprinciples down pat, and be eligible and ready for the PMP exam.PMI-ACP Certification Training Course - A walk through all the Agile concepts and "soft skills" you'll need to lead a team, control your metrics and ace the PMI-ACP exam.Learn PMP Project Management - A five-hour breakdown of all the essential concepts in the PMBOK, leading towards a successful run at both the PMP (Project Management Professional) and CAPM (Certified Associate in Project Management) exams. Read the rest

PixelDanc3r (also on Instagram) made this adorable and intricate map of the USA in a pixel-art style similar to the overworld maps from 16-bit era games.USA PIXELART MAP!!Thank you very much to @neomammalian for the support and give me this opportunity!! 😃FULL HD MAP 👉https://t.co/7HQZmtYkYj 👈#pixelart #pixelanimation #pixelworld #usa #unitedstates #country #art #map #cartography pic.twitter.com/EZRWfpUcVq— Danc3r (@PixelDanc3r) March 8, 2019 Read the rest

A superearth 111 light years away shows evidence of water vapor in its stratosphere, reports National Geographic. Water on another world.The discovery, announced this week in two independent studies, comes from years of observations of the exoplanet K2-18b, a super-Earth that’s about 111 light-years from our solar system. Discovered in 2015 by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, K2-18b is very unlike our home world: It’s more than eight times the mass of Earth, which means it’s either an icy giant like Neptune or a rocky world with a thick, hydrogen-rich atmosphere.Even at a tenth of the speed of light, that's a thousand-year trip. The illustration is by ESA artist Martin Kornmesser. Read the rest

If you're in the market for a stable, durable camera fully suited for first-person video, there's a good chance that you're the adventurous type. So why settle on a familiar name like GoPro? The DJI Osmo Action 4K HDR Camera checks off all the same boxes on the action cam checklist as the GoPro 4K - and maybe a few more.For starters, you can easily flip back and forth between the front and back cameras on the Osmo. And unlike other cams, you might actually want to use them both. The front screen sports crystal clear video for vanity shots, and on either one, you can take advantage of up to 120 seconds of exposure with custom settings.In action, it's as smooth as you could wish for. You can record 4K/60fps video at 100Mbps, clear as day in a variety of lighting conditions. And smooth as a studio shot, too, thanks to the algorithms of its RockSteady tech. Tweak the action after your ride with timelapse, 8x slow motion and a range of effects. And with 11-meter waterproofing, it's even up to the challenge underwater.Pick up the DJI Osmo Action 4K HDR Camera right now for a special $299 price, saving $50. Read the rest

Johnny Cash died September 12, 2003, age 71.

If this holds out (we have not seen the actual indictment, just a reporter's tweet), The U.S. Department of Justice just took a sharp turn down a dark, winding road that leads the country right off a cliff.Katie Benner, NYT Justice Department reporter:Today Deputy AG Jeff Rosen told ex-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe that he rejected his appeal to avoid criminal charges related to his lack of candor with federal agents.Today Deputy AG Jeff Rosen told ex-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe that he rejected his appeal to avoid criminal charges related to his lack of candor with federal agents.— Katie Benner (@ktbenner) September 12, 2019Lack of candor apparently now a crime.DOJ is going down an ugly and deeply disturbing path here. https://t.co/x8UGi2HpM9— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) September 12, 2019Of course he did. The pressure for this indictment has come from the president through his political appointees at Main Justice from day one. https://t.co/TvCoH0IWyi— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) September 12, 2019PHOTO: Andrew McCabe arrives to testify before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Capitol Hill in Washington. [REUTERS] Read the rest

The Verge reports that top YouTuber Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg is rescinding a $50,000 pledge to the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish group that opposes antisemitism and supports Israel. The donation, made in the wake of Kjellberg's giggling use of antisemitic imagery and racial slurs on his game streams, did not go down well with his followers.I made the mistake of picking a charity that I was advised to instead of picking a charity that I’m personally passionate about,” Kjellberg said in the video. “Which is 100 percent my fault.”Kjellberg previously addressed the criticism against his donation on Twitter, acknowledging that “making a donation to the ADL doesn’t make sense to everyone, especially since they’ve outright spoken against me.” A spokesperson for the ADL told The Verge at the time that they learned about the “potential donation when everyone else did: when he made the announcement on his channel yesterday.” Regarding people who say bigoted things as a "joke", Ken White invented the Rule of Goats: "even if you say you're only fucking goats ironically, you're still a goatfucker."To which I now add a corollary: "And the goats are now your fans." Read the rest

AB5 is about to pass the California legislature: it forces companies like Lyft and Uber to comply with the longstanding Dynamex decision and treat their employees as employees.Uber and Lyft hate this. It's an existential threat to them (that is, it serves to hasten their inevitable collapse) and in California, when you hate a law, you get to propose a ballot initiative to overturn it. This doesn't always lead to bad outcomes -- the threat of a ballot initiative (funded by a wealthy activist) was the major factor in the passage of the state's excellent privacy legislation.But ballot initiatives are funny beasts: they are nominally democratic (in that the people get to vote on them) but because they are incredibly expensive to run, they become a way for plutocrats to democracy-launder their pet projects, turning cash infusions into policy while maintaining that really, the will of the people is being done. So the plan to institute rent controls gets defeated by the largest-ever political spend in ballot initiative history, and the plan to reinstate progressive property taxes is likely to hit similar headwinds.Enter Uber's general counsel, Tony West, who has demanded that Governor Gavin Newsom (D) modify the bill so that Uber can go on with business-as-usual, treating its drivers as contractors. West has put Newsom on notice that: "Uber and Lyft together have already transferred $60 million into a campaign committee account, and we are open to investing more to put us in the strongest position possible to run a winning campaign."Matt Stoller calls this a money veto, and he's not wrong. Read the rest

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office denied Ohio State University's trademark filing on the word "The." The AP reports:OSU submitted the trademark application last month.The patent office cited the trademark appears to be used for “merely decorative manner” and as an “ornamental feature” that doesn’t appear to function as a trademark that would differentiate the items from others.Previously: Ohio State University files for a trademark on "THE" Read the rest

The market for web developers is wide open these days. If only we could say the same about the pathway to that career.If you're not already an experienced coder, it can be difficult to get things rolling. A four-year college degree or technical school? Sure, if you've got the money. What about web tutorials? A cheaper option for sure, but the internet being the internet, there's a good reason for you - and prospective employers - to be skeptical about most of the training you'll find out there.Still, there are trustworthy learning options out there. The Complete Web & Mobile Developer Bundle Ft. Rob Percival is one of them, combining the rigor of a college course with the easy pace of online teaching.If you haven't heard the name Rob Percival, he's an old hand at teaching for online audiences - specifically, teaching code. His many courses on web development are among the highest-rated on the online learning hub Udemy, and this bundle distills a lot off that knowledge into a mammoth 6-class package. You'll get:The Complete iOS SDK Development Course, which tells you how to integrate Facebook, Amazon and other popular software development kits into your apps.The Android Developer's Journey, a walk through the app-building process from basic programming to the nuts and bolts of Android Studio.The Complete Guide to Designing a Mobile App, a hands-on course that lets you use Sketch and other design tools to build three fully functioning applications. Read the rest

Amazon offers this selection of delightful penis-shaped gummies, but critics claim that the tasty treats in fact resemble lighthouses, a perverse symbol of the shipping industry, long-associated with press-ganging, slavery, shipwrecks and other atrocities on the high seas.[via The Worst Things For Sale] Read the rest

Judge Aaron Persky, who sentenced Stanford rapist Brock Turner to a mere six months in jail (for which he served only three), is now coaching a girls tennis team at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California. This is the same man who said that Turner, who raped an unconscious young woman with a foreign object and left her undressed behind a dumpster, "will not be a danger to others.” Of course, the residents of Santa Clara County, who had the judge recalled last year, are not happy. According to HuffPost:A petition to remove Persky from his coaching position at Lynbrook has already been created. “We as a community should be so disappointed in my alma maters the decision to hire recalled Judge Aaron Persky as their new Tennis Coach for the girls’ JV team,” the petition reads. “Survivors deserve better. Our community deserves better. We can, should, and ought to do better. Fire Persky from Lynbrook High, now.”Image: YouTube/CBS Read the rest

Juul is the cash-flush e-cigarette company whose billions (invested by Marlboro's parent company) have allowed it to create a massive market of addicted children, wiping out decades of progress in weaning children off of nicotine.Now, the FDA has demanded that Juul answer claims that the company sent marketing representatives to schools to present during "mental health/addiction" seminars, where children were exposed to marketing messages promoting Juul products, told they were "totally safe" and "the Iphone of e-cigarettes." A Juul rep told a child who asked for advice for a friend who was addicted to nicotine to steer the friend towards using Juul products (the friend was already addicted to Juul products).Juul's US-based products are stronger than those sold in other countries, with much higher levels of addictive nicotine. Berkman’s son, Caleb Mintz, and a friend—who also testified at the hearing—said that the presentation was given during one of the school’s “mental health slash addiction” seminars, which are held at the school three times a year. The teens, who were in 9th grade at the time, said that to make the seminars a “safe space” where kids could speak openly, teachers are asked to leave the room.Alone with the students, a Juul representative allegedly presented a “mixed message” by saying Juul products were “totally safe” and then “following up every ‘totally safe’ with ‘but we don’t want you as customers.’” The representative also took out a Juul device, called it the “iPhone of vapes,” and showed the students how it worked. Read the rest

For two decades, the Phoenix police union has had a secret deal with the police department that required that the disciplinary records of cops would be "purged," so that no one, not even their supervisors, would be able to retrieve them.As a result, Phoenix cops who repeatedly committed violent, corrupt acts -- including acts that resulted in severe injuries -- were allowed to serve on the force, even collecting commendations for their "good behavior."The Arizona Republic undertook a deep investigation into the practice and uncovered more than 600 acts of wrongdoing committed by 525 cops (out of 3,000 PD employees) in just the past five years, with 90% of all "serious misconduct" incidents being purges from cops' records.And as bad as this policy is, the Republic revealed that it was routinely abused, allowing cops to purge their records more quickly, and for graver offenses, than were officially permitted. Scholarly work has found that serving alongside corrupt officers makes otherwise honorable officers corrupt, too, with a few bad apples actually spoiling the barrel. Allowing violent, corrupt cops to continue to serve, and to reoffend, compromises the whole force. Officer Kevin McGowan, for example, earned top marks in his 2015 evaluation despite being disciplined for serious misconduct during the previous year.An internal investigation concluded McGowan used excessive force when he stomped on an 18-year-old man’s neck, driving his face into the tile floor of a convenience store and knocking out three of the man's teeth.The incident was captured in surveillance footage taken from the store. Read the rest

A well-funded startup called Hims, which sells subscriptions to generic viagra and cialis, launched a digital doctor's visit service so people can get a prescription without having to visit a doctor. Weirdly, it looks like they lifted almost everything from the website of a competitor, called Roman. Check out the Medium article that's loaded with examples of the swipes here, which was written by the cofounder of Roman. Read the rest

I would say 94,504 bitcoins is real folding money, buy you can't fold bitcoins. In any case, someone moved $1,018,147,900 worth of bitcoin between wallets and no one knows for sure who it was. The Token Analyst tweeted, "We took a look and saw that a large percentage of it could be traced to @HuobiGlobal addresses."Huobi Global is a Singapore based cryptocurrency exchange.$1 Billion+ $BTC was transferred in one transaction yesterday. Where did that come from? 🤔We took a look and saw that a large percentage of it could be traced to @HuobiGlobal addresses pic.twitter.com/4jdeYMgyNG— TokenAnalyst (@thetokenanalyst) September 6, 2019 Image: Token Analyst/Twitter Read the rest

Apple will announce the iPhone 11 at 10am PT today. Here's the live stream. Read the rest

President Trump this morning fired John Bolton, his national security mustache. Trump cited various disagreements with him over policy. I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore. ... I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service. I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week.After his firing, Bolton immediately tweeted that he had tried to resign last night, but Trump fobbed him off. Enjoy this a rapid-fire entry in the annals of Trump collaborators haplessly trying to get back in front of him after he publicly humiliates them on Twitter. Read the rest

A company scraped information from public profiles on LinkedIn and LinkedIn sued it under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. LinkedIn lost, and now it loses again. Moreover, the court's opinion takes aim at the company's efforts to stop people from accessing information its users post publicly. The panel affirmed the district court’s preliminary injunction forbidding the professional networking website LinkedIn Corp. from denying plaintiff hiQ, a data analytics company, access to publicly available LinkedIn member profiles. Using automated bots, hiQ scrapes information that LinkedIn users have included on public LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn sent hiQ a cause-and-desist letter, demanding that hiQ stop accessing and copying data from LinkedIn’s server. HiQ filed suit, seeking injunctive relief based on California law and a declaratory judgment that LinkedIn could not lawfully invoke the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, California Penal Code § 502(c), or the common law of trespass against it.Note that this wasn't a copyright infringement claim, as is easy to assume; LinkedIn wasn't claiming ownership of the material being scraped. So the moral of the story is not "finders keepers" but "if you don't want something to be publicly published, don't let your users publish it publicly on your website". Other ways of putting it may be "If you don't want people to hear what your customers are saying, don't be a pub." Or maybe "If you're the sleazest, spammiest, data-suckingest social network on the planet, get in the sea." Read the rest

The attorneys general of 48 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia have opened a joint antitrust investigation into Google, stepping in where the defanged, irrelevant DoJ (gripped by a Reaganite cultlike doctrine that worships monopolies) refused to go for decades.The investigation is co-chaired by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and DX Attorney General Karl Racine (D), and is focused on Google's dominance of both advertising and search markets.The action follows last week's announcement of a smaller antitrust investigation into Facebook."We have 50 attorneys general from across the nation who are involved in this investigation that we're leading from Texas," said Paxton. "This is a company that dominates all aspects of advertising on the internet and searching on the internet as they dominate the buyers' side, the sellers' side, the auction side and even the video side with YouTube," he said of Google.50 attorneys general launch antitrust investigation into Google [Harper Neidig/The Hill] Read the rest

They've ruined democracy, now they're ready to ruin your love life.

A Glendora, California woman is about to blow a gasket because she spots a man in the Walmart parking lot who "looks illegal." That's the reason she tells police that they have to come and arrest him. "There's a guy illegal here," she insists. "The other guy behind him might snap my neck." She babbles on, irate as hell, and even gets into a heated argument with another guy, in his car, who calls her a racist. The only thing askew is that it's a sunny day and she's not wearing her MAGA cap. Read the rest

A Brooklyn company is supposedly offering at-home "metoo"-branded rape kits, complete with official-looking "EVIDENCE" tape. Such kits would be legally useless, according to experts.The kits are not yet available for purchase, but the idea has already sparked criticism. In a cease-and-desist letter to the company, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel argued that “an at-home evidence kit does not address the health care needs of many sexual assault survivors,” and that any evidence collected might not be admissible in court.“We are advocates for all options for survivors” as long as those options are not dangerous or harmful, Morgan Dewey, communications director for the group End Rape on Campus, told Vox. “This is in fact harmful.”Company co-founder Madison Campbell told Vox that the kit was in its early stages and that she wanted to work with experts on making sure the evidence gathered by users could be admissible in court. She said the idea for the kit was rooted in her personal experience as a survivor of campus sexual assault. Poe's law may be defined as "without a signifier of humor, it is impossible to tell extremism from parody." As the only company by the name Metoo in New York's public records appears to be a Chinese restaurant, I propose a corollary: "without an LLC or trademark registration, it is impossible to tell a bad joke from a grift." Read the rest

Howard Shultz is ending his bid to become President of the United States of America—or at least blackmail Dems into supporting a billionaire-friendly centrist over more popular left-leaning candidates. To his credit, he haltingly admits that a second Trump term would be worse than a lefty, though he's still whining about them. Unfortunately, election rules in each state and the way this Democratic nomination process has unfolded pose another challenge: It has become more likely that the Democratic nominee will not be known before the deadlines to submit the required number of signatures for an independent to get on the ballot. If I went forward, there is a risk that my name would appear on ballots even if a moderate Democrat wins the nomination, and that is not a risk I am willing to take.A good illustration of Howard Schultz's staggering arrogance is him thinking he'd still win a significant percent of the vote, even without campaigning at all, if someone like Joe Biden got the nomination.Shultz's independent run is mirrored by similarly flagging efforts within the bosom of the party. But it's not just that the rich can't buy the Democratic nomination. They can't even buy 2%:One of the Democrats in the race, Tom Steyer, is a billionaire like Mr. Schultz. Despite spending millions of dollars of his own money on advertising, he failed to qualify for next week’s debate because of low support in polls. The bottom line: very few Americans are convinced that "medicare for all" is far-left extremism in the same way that "cage migrant children" is far-right extremism. Read the rest

Following Walmart yesterday, retailer Walgreens is prohibiting customers from openly carrying guns in its stores. It posted a succinct press release, quoted here in full:We are joining other retailers in asking our customers to no longer openly carry firearms into our stores other than authorized law enforcement officials.Remember that above all things, the right hates free markets. https://t.co/bl0XoeNEsE— Rob Beschizza (@Beschizza) September 5, 2019 Read the rest

I once found myself staying in a small hotel with a "State Department" family whose members clearly all worked for some kind of three letter agency (the family patriarch had been with USAID with the tanks rolled into Budapest) and I had some of the weirdest discussions of my life with them.The big one was about "cyberweapons" and whether the US should be developing them and what could go wrong from such a program. It was clear to me that these folks knew a lot about classic Cold War deterrence theory, and deep experience with how the military-industrial complex functioned (and didn't function) but that they knew virtually nothing about computers, and this deficit meant that they were terribly, awfully misled in their thinking on the matter.It was clear that for them, a "cyberweapon" was just another R&D project: just as with the Manhattan project or the labs where they make better cruise missile guidance systems, cyberweapons were an invention that turned on discovering some property of physics and then using engineering to weaponize that property in order to project force over your adversary.But that's not what a cyberweapon is at all. While it's exciting to read 40-year-old cyberpunk novels where console cowboys wield "ice breakers" to pierce their enemies' electronic defenses, the reality is a lot weirder and more mundane at the same time.A cyberweapon begins with the discovery of a defect in a piece of software, preferably a widely used piece of software, like the Windows operating system. Read the rest

This 64GB flash drive is going for the bargain price of on Amazon. You can use SanDisk's encryption software for Windows and Mac to keep a password-protected secure folder on the flash drive. Read the rest

"Emily Doe" no more, Chanel Miller, the woman who survived Brock Turner's attacks will be appearing on 60 Minutes. Turner was convicted of three felony sexual assault charges and his mere 6-month prison sentence set him up as a poster boy for white male privilege in America.CBS:Miller read her victim impact statement in court to her assailant, the former Stanford swimming standout Brock Turner, who was convicted of three felony sexual assault charges supported by two eyewitnesses who stopped and subdued him. Her story became a cause célèbre when the statement was published online after Turner was sentenced to six months jail time. In the statement, "Emily" recounts her inability to control her own narrative in a justice system she says is brutal and dehumanizing for victims. Read the rest

I like to write letters. Theselokta notecards are my favorite.I usually keep a few styles of lokta paper notecards around. The butterflies are particularly lovely and encourage me to find green ink.Usually, I write with Noodler's Heart of Darkness, and ink that is designed to stand the test of time. Lokta paper is known for its durability and is resistant to mold, rot and bugs. The paper has a wonderful texture and simply looks beautiful, showing the pulped fibers it is made of. There are claims in the packaging of how eco-friendly, local economy-friendly and indigenous peoples-friendly the makers of this paper are. These are all great things.Writing on this paper takes a Medium nib or a very, very careful hand with a Fine and you must use ink that will flow. The paper accepts the ink, does not feather very much but even quick-drying ink will take a moment or two.Beware the smudge!The messages you send to loved ones will last forever on notecards that look lovely enough to keep!Now you have to write things that are worth standing the test of time. It is fun tho, I treat writing letters on these a lot like I do taking photos with 120 roll film, every shot costs a few dollars, make it worthwhile!I am sure folks toss my works of art into the trash.Nepal Greeting Card and Envelope Set: Butterfly Notecards, Handmade Lokta Paper via Amazon Read the rest

After two shootings in their El Paso, Texas and Southaven, Mississippi stores, the CEO of Walmart has announced major changes to the chain's gun sale policies, including no longer selling ammunition for assault-style weapons and discontinuing the sale of handgun ammunition.CEO Doug McMillion revealed the changes in a company-wide email sent this morning. Today, we’re sharing the decisions we’ve made that go further:• After selling through our current inventory commitments, we will discontinue sales of short-barrel rifle ammunition such as the .223 caliber and 5.56 caliber that, while commonly used in some hunting rifles, can also be used in large capacity clips on military-style weapons;• We will sell through and discontinue handgun ammunition; and• We will discontinue handgun sales in Alaska, marking our complete exit from handguns.We know these decisions will inconvenience some of our customers, and we hope they will understand. As a company, we experienced two horrific events in one week, and we will never be the same. The store will also request that customers no longer carry firearms in the open while shopping. As it relates to safety in our stores, there have been multiple incidents since El Paso where individuals attempting to make a statement and test our response have entered our stores carrying weapons in a way that frightened or concerned our associates and customers. We have also had well-intentioned customers acting lawfully that have inadvertently caused a store to be evacuated and local law enforcement to be called to respond. Read the rest