The shell is an odd beast. Although it goes against every current
trend in software engineering (strong typing, compile checks over
runtime checks, …), shell scripts are here to stay, and still
constitute an important part of every developer’s life.
The weird thing about shell scripts is that even strong advocates of
good practices gladly forget all they know when it comes to shell
scripting.
With Obama’s federal government reducing the role of private prisons in the incarceration of Americans, companies like Corrections Corporation of America (now known as Corecivic) and GAO aggressively moved into providing detention facilities for people awaiting deportation, like the 2,000,000+ people deported under the Obama administrations.
These detention facilities were, if anything, even more cruel and inhumane than the private prisons that warehoused so many Americans. The Verge made FOIA requests to ICE for information on conditions in their privately contracted detention centers, and these documents reveal that under Obama, “life inside the facilities can be so dangerous and hostile that numerous detainees have voluntarily admitted themselves to solitary confinement just to seek refuge from the general population,” and the remaining solitary confinement cells were routinely used to punish inmates for minor infractions like “horseplay” and talking back to guards, a punishment visited indiscriminately against detainees with severe mental illness.
Solitary confinement is classed as a form of torture by the UN.
Donald Trump has reversed the Obama policy of preventing private companies from providing federal prisons. The share prices of GAO and Corecivic have increased significantly since the inauguration.
When Planned Parenthood was founded a century ago, it was illegal to even hand out information about birth control. Thanks to generations of brave women and men who formed secret societies, challenged unjust laws, and started Planned Parenthood health centers in their own towns, we’ve come a long way since. Millions of people, regardless of income or insurance coverage, now have access to birth control, cancer screenings, and STI testing and treatment. Each year, Planned Parenthood proudly provides health information to nearly 70 million people online and 1 million people in classrooms and communities across the country. Today, America is at a 30-year low in unintended pregnancy and a historic low in teen pregnancy.
But all of that progress is a reminder of how much women and men in America now stand to lose. Extreme politicians at every level of government are doing everything they can to block millions of people from coming to Planned Parenthood, deny access to affordable health care, and roll back women’s rights over their own bodies. We are facing a national health disaster, especially in our most vulnerable communities.
That’s why we’re calling on the tech industry to join Tumblr in standing with Planned Parenthood and standing up for access to health care.
A 100-year-old health care provider and the platform powering 335 million blogs may seem like an unlikely pair. But over the last few years, Tumblr and Planned Parenthood have teamed up to provide information and organize communities in support of reproductive rights. We’re proud of all we’ve accomplished together and with overwhelming support from the Tumblr community.
Technology has become instrumental in the fight for fairness and equality across a range of issues. It has the power to influence public debate, mobilize communities, and — most importantly — offer creative solutions to help people receive better care, no matter where they live or who they are. Finally, the tech industry owes its success to the brilliant people it employs and the communities it serves — and we cannot take their health for granted.
It won’t be easy, but doing nothing isn’t an option when lives are at stake. We need to work together to break down barriers to care and information for the millions of people desperate to take ownership of their sexual and reproductive health, and tackle disparities in health care access and outcomes.
Now is the time to be vocal, visible, and active in your support of Planned Parenthood — starting with the #TechStandsWithPP hashtag to share stories about how Planned Parenthood has touched your life, or the life of anyone you know. Call on your co-workers and peers to do the same.
In health care, education, and nearly every industry, we’re doing things that would have been unthinkable a century ago. Think of all we can achieve together in the decades to come if we combine the creativity, innovation, and energy of the tech community with Planned Parenthood’s commitment to helping people everywhere — no matter what.
Unbelievably, after being held for hours at the Ft Lauderdale-Hollywood airport and questioned about his religion two weeks ago, Muhammad Ali Jr was detained at another airport today. This time, it was at Reagan National Airport, boarding a domestic flight on his way to Fort Lauderdale.
Spurred by the first ludicrous detainment he endured, Ali had spent yesterday testifying in front of congress about “putting a stop to such blatant discrimination,” according to Miami New Times.
Ali was then turned away from his flight today after being questioned about his date-of-birth, social security number and mother’s name. It wasn’t until he pulled out his passport – which one isn’t supposed to need for a domestic flight – that they allowed him to board his plane.
An artist calling himself “Saint Hoax” is removing the headlines from 1950s and 1960s advertisements, and applying quotes from Donald Trump. (Thanks, Matthew!)
In 2009, the Library of Congress commissioned a research report into the degradation ofCD-ROMs in storage as a way of assessing the integrity of the media in its collection: the news isn’t pretty.
The standards for certifying a CD-ROM did not “place any requirement on the chemical or physical stability of the disc,” so depending on the manufacturer and process, the discs you’ve put away on shelves may have wildly different material properties.
The study involved taking a trove of discarded/duplicate CD-ROMs from the LoC’s collection and subjecting them to “accelerated aging” processes to see how many errors emerged as the media aged. Keeping discs dry and cool helped reduce error rates, but even so there’s a lot of bitrot there.
One thing that’s happened since this study is an acceleration in the plunging costs of online storage – HDDs and SSDs – and cloud services, which are all “live” media, regulated by microcontrollers that continuously poll their storage media for degradation, marking off sectors as bad when they turn and copying their data to still-good sectors before it becomes unreadable.
This is a major difference between today’s state of affairs and the long, awkward adolescence of mass storage, when keeping all your data online was prohibitively expensive, which meant that some fraction of your archives would end up on offline/nearline media, from tapes to CDs to Zip and Jazz and floppy discs. All media is subject to entropy, but offline/nearline media is not easily hedged against the Second Law of Thermodynamics with measures like continuous scheduled offsite backups and continuous defect-scanning.
Jesse Bright is a lawyer who also drives Uber; when Wilmington, North Carolina police Sgt. Kenneth Becker stopped him and insisted that he stop recording the stop because of a “new law,” Bright kept on recording and kept on insisting that he was allowed to do so.
The resulting video went viral, and resulted in Becker being censured by his chief, who published a Facebook post affirming that citizens have the right to record officers on duty, and inviting them to do so.
If you think your genetics are your own personal beeswax, think again. Amidst all the hoopla surrounding the Affordable Care Act this week, the House GOP quietly pushed forward a bill – HR 1313 – that would make it legal for employers to demand genetic testing from workers. Workers who refuse could be penalized for thousands of dollars.
On Wednesday, a House committee approved the bill with “all 22 Republicans supporting it and all 17 Democrats opposed,” according to Business Insider.
Donald Trump has been slow to fill administrative positions that require Senate confirmation (and thus public scrutiny), but he’s quietly hired 400 “beachhead team” members “to serve as his eyes and ears at every major federal agency, from the Pentagon to the Department of Interior” – a rats’ nest of ex-lobbyists running agencies they used to lobby, campaign staffers being given cushy jobs, neo-nutjobs from the Breitbart depths who endorse birtherism and other, more exotic conspiracy theories, and a whole Mos Eisley Cantina’s worth of scum and villainy.
This motley crew was hired in secret with their identities kept under wraps until Pro Publica used public records requests to reveal their identities, down to little Danny Tiso, who just graduated from high school in 2015, but is now a senior manager at the Department of Labor, having filled the intervening time campaigning for one Donald J Trump (who campaigned on a pledge of “draining the swamp”).
Also included are the likes of Alexandra Campau, a healthcare lobbyist now fronting for the department of Health and Human Services; Justin Mikolay, former Palantir lobbyist, now installed at the DoD; and Chad Wolf, a former defense lobbyist now an official “advisor” to the TSA – they are part of a cohort of 36 registered lobbyists that are among the crop of gators that Trump brought to the swamp with him. That’s a big undercount of lobbyists, too: most lobbyists exploit loopholes that let them get away without registering.
