'We believe that life begins at conception, and so we believe that each of those little frozen lives is a human being that deserves an opportunity to be born.'
remember laplink ? A parallel port to parallel port wire used to transfer data before ethernet.
I wrote a popular post about serial ports once, and serial ports are something I think about, worry about, and dream about with some regularity. Yet I have never really devoted that much attention to the serial port’s awkward sibling, always assuming that it was a fundamentally similar design employing either 8 data pins each way or 8 bidirectional data pins. It turns out that the truth is a lot more complicated. And it all starts with printers. You see, I have written here before that parallel ports are popular with printers because they avoid the need to buffer bits to assemble bytes, allowing the printer to operate on entire characters at a time in a fashion similar to the electromechanical Baudot teleprinters that early computer printers were based on. This isn’t wrong, it’s actually more correct than I had realized—the computer parallel port as we know it today was in fact designed entirely for printers, at least if you take the most straightforward historical lineage.
Let’s start back at the beginning of the modern parallel port: the dot matrix printer.
The serial port still sees tons of use today, but the parallel port seems to have vanished entirely.
i have a tracker following glass to the recycling plant. 'To prove that Memphis doesn't recycle glass as they brag.
Specialist search equipment picked up radiation emitting from the widget, which went missing last month, apparently while being moved from a Rio Tinto iron ore mine.
A witness argued that Elon Musk’s 2018 tweet claiming to have secured funding to take Tesla private cost investors US$12 billion, a figure that does not just apply to those part of the lawsuit.
Boeing bid farewell to an icon on Tuesday, delivering its final 747 jumbo jet as thousands of workers who helped build the planes over the past 55 years looked on.Since its first flight in 1969, the giant yet graceful 747 has served as a cargo plane, a commercial aircraft...
Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI claim the lawsuit doesn’t hold up. | Photo: Jens Büttner/dpa-Zentralbild/ZB (Photo by Jens Büttner/picture alliance via Getty Images
Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI want the court to dismiss a proposed class action complaint that accuses the companies of scraping licensed code to build GitHub’s AI-powered Copilot tool, as reported earlier by Reuters. In a pair offilings submitted to a San Francisco federal court on Thursday, the Microsoft-owned GitHub and OpenAI say the claims outlined in the suit don’t hold up.
The space agency decided back in 2017 that humankind would benefit from a closer look at 16 Psyche. The Psyche mission was initially slated to take place at the end of 2022 but was delayed due to “development problems.” NASA is now planning to launch the Psyche spacecraft this October. The vessel should reach the ultra-valuable asteroid in August 2029.
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The metal-rich asteroid is about the size of Massachusetts and shaped somewhat like a potato, according to astronomers. Its average diameter is about 140 miles—or roughly the distance between Los Angeles and San Diego. The asteroid orbits between Mars and Jupiter at a distance ranging from 235 million to 309 million miles from the Sun.
A study published by The Planetary Science Journal in 2020 suggests that Psyche is made almost entirely of iron and nickel.
If Psyche turns out to be as metals-rich as we think, it might not be too outlandish to say that whoever controls Psyche will control the solar system.
The timepiece, a symbol of the perils facing humanity, moved forward to 90 seconds from midnight amid the Ukraine war, nuclear tensions and the climate crisis.
Nearly a thousand Americans have been charged for things like putting their feet on Nancy Pelosi's desk two years ago on January 6th. But not Ray Epps, the man filmed everywhere inciting open violence near and at the Capitol.
FASTER, PLEASE: The US certifies the first small modular nuclear reactor design. “The NRC’s certification is a significant stamp of approval for a potential climate solution that’s still controversial among environmental advocates. Essentially, it’s a green light for an entirely new generation of nuclear reactors.”
Environmental advocates who aren’t advocating for nuclear are advocating for something other than the environment.
They're making their lists, checking them twice, trying to decide who's in and who's not. Once again, it's admissions season, and tensions are running high as university leaders wrestle with challenging decisions that will affect the future of their schools. Chief among those tensions, in the past few years, has been the question of whether standardized tests should be central to the process.
i got my liberal wife to at least "know" what "the twitter files are", how you say? By subscribing to Epoc-Times sunday paper delivery, so she can "SEE" it in print. It worked!
Mural of Vladimir Lenin (Getty Images)
“The vast majority of commercial and industrial establishments are now working not for the free market but for the government.” V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution; 1917
This Lenin quote leapt to mind amid the recent revelations coming from the “Twitter files” and exposed over the past several weeks. Among other disclosures, the files revealed direct lines of communication between government agencies, including the FBI and Department of Defense, and the social media company.
Twitter was found to not only be a landing spot for many agents in the government intelligence community, but also doing the bidding of agencies to suppress information deemed to be antithetical to the agencies’ goals and preferred narratives. Indeed, journalist Matt Taibbi went so far as to describe Twitter as an “FBI subsidiary.”
And it wasn’t just Twitter that the government targeted. Late last month Elon Musk tweeted “*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government,” illustrating his point by saying, “Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.”
Such revelations undercut many defenders of tech giants, who insist “they’re private companies, they can do what they want.” Instead, we must ask: are these truly ‘private companies’ in any meaningful sense?
Indeed, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrup Grumman are all nominally “private companies.” But they are private in name only because they are in reality appendages of the state, relying on defense contracts (not market transactions) for their success.
We should treat big tech companies with the same skepticism we apply to tools of the military industrial complex. Certainly so after the “Twitter file” revelations.
In his quote above, Lenin was, of course, bragging about the progress made toward complete nationalization of industry in the Soviet Union of the time.
But we can also consider his statement as descriptive. When your main mission is to do the bidding of the state, rather than serving consumers in the voluntary marketplace, you are not really a private company in the true sense of the term. Your company is not a market phenomenon.
It’s no longer possible to defend social media corporations on the basis of private property rights, because big tech are what Michael Rectenwald would describe as “governmentalities,” not private companies.
Michael Rectenwald, former professor of liberal studies at New York University and author of the book “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” provided context for how he believes tech goliaths like Google and Twitter come to do the state’s bidding in a November 2020 lecture.
“In a series of lectures entitled Security, Territory, Population, the postmodern theorist Michel Foucault introduced the term ‘governmentality’ to refer to the distribution of state power to the population, or the transmission of governance to the governed,” Rectenwald noted.
“Foucault referred to the means by which the populace comes to govern itself as it adopts and personalizes the imperatives of the state, or how the governed adopt the mentality desired by the government—govern-mentality,” he added.
Rectenwald, however, went even further than Foucault. “I adopt and amend the term to include the distribution of state power to extragovernmental agents—in particular to the extension and transfer of state power to supposedly private enterprises.”
What transpires, then, is a form of ‘governmentalization’ of nominally private enterprises, rather than the privatization of government functions that free market advocates prefer.
How intertwined with the government are the tech giants? The relationship predates the more recent phenomena revealed by Elon Musk’s divulgences.
“First, both Google and Facebook received start-up capital—both directly and indirectly—from US intelligence agencies,” Rectenwald informs us. In their early days, Google in particular was heavily reliant on CIA contracts and deals with other U.S. intelligence agencies.
As Lenin boasted, “The vast majority of commercial and industrial establishments are now working not for the free market but for the government.” And work for the government, including shutting down dissident voices, is what big tech has indeed been doing for years.
As a result, they can no longer be defended with cries of “but they’re private companies,” and instead be called out for what they really are: tools of state oppression.
how does schneier get all this endless info that others dont?
From an article about Zheng Xiaoqing, an American convicted of spying for China:
According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) indictment, the US citizen hid confidential files stolen from his employers in the binary code of a digital photograph of a sunset, which Mr Zheng then mailed to himself.
so they must have b-b guns firing on birds. Can we use that tech on the upcoming drone events?
Australian Mike Cannon-Brookes’s Grok Ventures will provide the funding after Sun Cable entered administration – the US$21 billion project aims to construct the world’s biggest solar farm.
“I am totally immersed in the metaverse, have a big headset on, and then I need to take off the Oculus, look on my phone for the two-factor authentication code that’s been sent to my phone, then memorize the number, put my headset back on, and try to key it in,” an employee at the tech-consulting firm Accenture, a major Meta funder that’s attempting to implement Oculus into the workspace, griped to Slate. “But when you take off the Oculus it automatically goes to sleep mode, and I was trying to navigate the back-and-forth.”
Also speaking to Slate, other workers attempting to get the job done in metaverse workspaces experienced similar woes.
“Between forgetting to charge headsets, operating system updates, new app installation/updates, logging into accounts, screensharing between desktop and headset,” David Stern, founder and CEO of the Slate Group’s Supporting Cast podcast platform, told Slate, “there’s just a lot that can go wrong.”
Workers also told Slate that there are some glaring accessibility issues, particularly for those with disabilities like motion sickness. And once someone actually gets into their digital workspace, the problems don’t end — even just figuring out basic social cues and conventions is apparently pretty difficult, and most of Slate’s sources seemed to agree that any merits of current VR work fail to outweigh the many reported downsides.
Facebook is spending up to $10 billion a year on this effort.
The Swedish climate activist said the annual gathering in the Swiss resort was dominated by people who are at the core of the crisis, investing in fossil fuels.
School choice operates under a single premise: Parents know their child’s unique needs, desires, and interests better than anyone else.
'We believe that life begins at conception, and so we believe that each of those little frozen lives is a human being that deserves an opportunity to be born.'
Texas should increase funding in 2023 to accommodate the expanding needs of moms and their babies in post-Roe America.
My incoming Christmas cards are a low-risk piece of mail. But if the USPS can't handle those, why should it be trusted with my ballot?
