Events

Posting has been slow because I've been in a place that looks like this: Tomorrow I've got some photos of my recent trip to Minneapolis and an unexpected project that some friends completed at Ravinia Park.

A University of Texas at Austin student found a pointed protest against concealed-carry on campus: As she recalls, the pundits on the radio were talking about how there is no conceivable solution to gun violence, that mass shootings are just something that we’re going to have to learn to live with in America. “I felt like, you know, what a bunch of dildos,” [student Jessica] Jin says. “They were taking the safe route and not wanting to say anything that would piss anybody off or be too divisive. They...

Ravinia Park on Sunday, work and other things on Saturday...no time to blog. There will be photos and more description soon.

Day two of Certified Scrum Master training starts in just a few minutes (more on that later), so I've queued up a bunch of articles to read this weekend: The climate prediction center forecasts a warm, dry fall for Illinois followed by a normal winter. Reactions to Trump dumping Russian stooge Paul Manfort in favor of right-wing nutjob Steve Bannon are pretty consistent: here's Fallows and Bloomberg, for starters, plus analysis from the Times and Marshall on how Trump's support is declining even among...

The Justice Department announced today that it's ending private prisons because, it turns out, they suck: In making the decision, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates cited new findings by the Justice Department's inspector general, who concluded earlier this month that a pool of 14 privately contracted prisons reported more incidents of inmate contraband, higher rates of assaults and more uses of force than facilities run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. "They simply do not provide the same level of...

Courtesy of Scott Hanselman. I actually learned a few things.

Via Bruce Schneier, the NSA lost control of a crap-ton of hacking tools sometime before 2013, and managed to stop the bleeding only after discovering Edward Snowden's leak: The exploits themselves appear to target Fortinet, Cisco, Shaanxi Networkcloud Information Technology (sxnc.com.cn) Firewalls, and similar network security systems. I will leave it to others to analyze the reliability, versions supported, and other details. But nothing I've found in either the exploits or elsewhere is newer than...

So says New Republic writer Bill McKibben: We’re used to war as metaphor: the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on cancer. Usually this is just a rhetorical device, a way of saying, “We need to focus our attention and marshal our forces to fix something we don’t like.” But this is no metaphor. By most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal: Carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing governments....

Via Babylon 5 actress Patricia Tallman's Facebook feed: