Apollo 17 launched from the moon to return to earth 51 years, 7 months and 6 days ago, and no one's been back since. I'm 50, and no one's been to the moon — or even outside low earth orbit — in my lifetime. The (manned) space age finished before I was born!
The idea that we should now attempt to colonise a planet or moon within the time it takes us to trash the earth into unlivability is fanciful, to say the least.
55 years ago today, Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface, cementing U.S. victory in the Space Race.
The crew named their landing site "Tranquillity Base".
Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin were on the surface for just over 21 hours before returning to Michael Collins in a rendezvous with the Command Module, Columbia, in lunar orbit.
21.5 kg of lunar material was collected and returned to Earth for study.
55 years ago today, Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface, cementing U.S. victory in the Space Race.
The crew named their landing site "Tranquillity Base".
Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin were on the surface for just over 21 hours before returning to Michael Collins in a rendezvous with the Command Module, Columbia, in lunar orbit.
21.5 kg of lunar material was collected and returned to Earth for study.
"For a year and a half, #GOP lawmakers have been stealthily adding amendements to government appropriations bills, which are key to funding major government departments, to ban any federal money being used for gender transition procedures. This will dramatically curtail trans people’s access to medical care — just like the Hyde Amendment restricted abortion access"
For a year and a half, GOP lawmakers have been stealthily adding amendements to government appropriations bills, which are key to funding major government departments, to ban any federal money being used for gender transition procedures.
A factory belonging to a Polish snack company Aksam burned down last weekend, restricting its production capacity to only about 35%.
However, the CEO announced that no employee will be fired.
"Employees will be employed in a two-week system. Then there will be a crew exchange. I want everyone to have a job. However, a two-week job does not mean a reduction in salary. It will be full. In our company, we always put the human being in the first place and this will not change" - said the president Adam Klęczar
W poprzedni weekend spłonęła fabryka produkująca m.in. "Paluszki Beskidzkie". W związku z tym właściciel wprowadził rotacyjny system pracy. Zwolnień jednak nie będzie.
‘In this area of healthcare, like no other I know of, the professionals with the requisite expertise are positioned by their critics as having been “captured by ideology” and therefore lacking in credibility. Meanwhile, those without the expertise are positioned as “independent”, which critics argue makes them better able to evaluate the evidence – despite having never worked in the field and having no understanding of its complexities’
Decisions around the tiny minority for whom the option could be helpful should be made by clinicians, not Wes Streeting, says clinical psychologist Aidan Kelly
Mastodon is the world's biggest community of people who deeply love computers and also think that the world would probably be better off without computers
They apparently do in England. Meanwhile their rivers are polluted, the sea around he. country is filthy (and all of their neighbours get the benefits!) At the same time, polluters are allowed to take their dividends and slip off to parts tax avoidable.
These protesters are shouting ‘fire’ while the world burns. A society that locks them up cannot be called democratic, say campaigners Chris Packham and Dale Vince
"To deter long-distance travel, the band offered an initial presale of tickets for local postal codes only.
#MassiveAttack are giving train travellers special privileges: access to a VIP bar with separate toilets, extra pre-sale tickets and free transfers to and from the train station via electric bus. They are also working with the local train network, Great Western Railway, to lay on five extra trains for travelling fans."
Massive Attack have been campaigning on environmental issues for years – and are now fixing their gaze on the music industry itself with a groundbreaking Bristol show next month.
Haroon Siddique sums up the problem with the Just Stop Oil sentencing:
'Individual comparisons, while also imperfect, can also pose questions. Can it be right that protesters who forced closure of a motorway will be locked away for so long, when in March a woman was given a six-month suspended sentence for causing death by careless/inconsiderate driving?'
And if you think this is just 'whataboutism' then you've missed the point about property & life in law!
So managers are starting to spew the whole "well I didn't do anything wrong, it affected everyone else, so we're not liable" bullshit.
Did you allow a third party vendor to have the highest privilege access to all of your systems AND let them run Remote Code Execution on your systems whenever they want?
You didn't have a test environment set up to test each update or patch that is applied to your systems before you push them to prod? No? Just let it auto-update?
Yeah, that "Risk Transference" didn't work so well as your GRC policy seemed to think it would, huh? I know they're a security company and they SHOULD have tested it, but they didn't, did they?
I know everyone else does it, but if everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?
Just because everyone else fucked up, doesn't mean you didn't fuck up.
There's gonna be a lot of deep discussions in this post-mortem and hopefully orgs will change. Those that don't will just be hit again... and again... and again.
That’s because their entire operation is run from a bank of half a million BBC Micros all linked together in an enormous basement under Broadcasting House.
The whole of greater London takes its heating from that basement.
If a hacker had done this, we would be trying to put them in prison forever. If this were a company making a physical device that happened to kill people, the settlement numbers would be astronomical.
I predict that *at best,* there will be some kind of "hearing" along the lines of the Boeing inquisition, but I doubt even that will happen.
Which makes me wonder (among other things) why we have allowed software bugs and errors to occupy their own special moral category.
Something I love bringing up again from time to time: a little more than five years ago a friend and I found a functional microphone in a smart kitchen appliance that wasn't advertised to have one. The product in question was being promoted hard by Lidl because they sold it at a fraction of the price of similar devices.
It made national & european news and I was interviewed by the biggest TV news show at prime time.
All we wanted was run Doom on the thing. We installed Discord on it and hopped into a call because we thought it would be funny and fell off our chairs when it turned out the person on the other side could hear us just fine
Le tout nouveau robot-cuiseur connecté de Lidl fait un carton en France depuis début juin 2019. En voulant s'amuser à détourner son écran tactile, deux Français ont découvert plusieurs éléments curieux dans le fonctionnement de l'appareil.
"Please allow me a moment to clean this up. Rest assured, I will let no harm come to you."
I've been swooning over Von Lycaon for a while now, and @gearwurk surprised me with this awesome art of Von TK! I guess Mr. Von Lycaon decided it was time for a new recruit. ^^
"Linux would have prevented this!" literally true because my former colleague KP Singh wrote a kernel security module that lets EDR implementations load ebpf into the kernel to monitor and act on security hooks and Crowdstrike now uses that rather than requiring its own kernel module that would otherwise absolutely have allowed this to happen, so everyone please say thank you to him
Former President Donald Trump's political hopes may be in danger in a solidly Republican state with a significant haul of Electoral College votes if current polling trends stay consistent.
I don't know why people are so obsessed with ChatGPT and #AI. I know a lot of people who can spout absolute bullshit with a much lower carbon footprint. Funnily most of them seemed to be in the sales and marketing fields, but I'm sure that's a coincidence.
The AI art is so weird - it’s so easy to spot it from a mile away, and I’m not sure if it can get better by just throwing more computational power at it. (But it does get clicks on Facebook.)
the saddest part of today? lots of lawyers are getting contacted for lawsuits against ClownStrike, but they can't take the cases because their computers aren't working either ;_;
"Five Just Stop Oil activists receive record sentences for planning to block M25"
"Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin were found guilty last week of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance for coordinating direct action protests on the M25 over four days in November 2022.
Hallam received a five-year sentence on Thursday, while the other four were each sentenced to four years.
The sentences are thought to be the longest sentences even given in the UK for non-violent protest, exceeding those given to the Just Stop Oil protesters Morgan Trowland (three years) and Marcus Decker (two years and seven months) for scaling the Dartford Crossing.
All five had spoken on a Zoom call trying to recruit potential volunteers for the actions, which involved activists climbing gantries at strategic points on the London orbital motorway."
Okay so first up here is the fact that these folks just caught 4 and 5 year raps for, organizing a protest on a zoom call. Not actually protesting mind you, but "conspiring to protest." The second issue of course is that the protest in question wasn't some kind of violent terrorism or anything - they were planning to block traffic, to protest fossil fuel companies and the governments that serve them in boiling us all like soup for a few extra points per share. This is of course bonkers, but also completely indicative of the fascist police state the UK has become after the Tories greatly enhanced police powers to prosecute protestors in response to student, BLM, anti-Tory, and anti-genocide in Gaza demonstrations over the past few years.
Please of course keep in mind that there is no jail time coming for fossil fuel executives who are knowingly driving us all towards a mass extinction event for profit. Conspiring to kill billions? Not a crime. Conspiring to block traffic? Well, read for yourself:
"judge Christopher Hehir said: “The offending of all five of you is very serious indeed and lengthy custodial sentences must follow.”
Unbelievably the judge also chose to frame the existence of fossil fuel caused climate catastrophe as a matter of opinion, while acknowledging the near unanimous scientific evidence it is not:
"Hehir admitted there was a scientific and social consensus that human-made climate breakdown was happening and action should be taken to avert it. “I acknowledge that at least some of the concerns motivating you are, at least to some extent, shared by many,” he said."
He then put down protesting actions that are killing people, and will kill billions, as grandstanding:
“But the plain fact is that each of you has some time ago crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic. You have appointed yourselves as the sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change, bound neither by the principles of democracy nor the rule of law.
“And your fanaticism makes you entirely heedless of the rights of your fellow citizens. You have taken it upon yourselves to decide that your fellow citizens must suffer disruption and harm, and how much disruption and harm they must suffer, simply so that you may parade your views.”
Which of course brings me to the extremely fucked up reason this trial is even happening at all. Because the zoom call was infiltrated by Sun (a UK news rag) reporters who literally RECORDED it and CONTACTED police. This is a private newspaper. Journalists are supposed to PROTECT their sources, they're not supposed to function as unofficial secret police on behalf of a capitalist state that acts wholly in the service of billionaires trying to kill you for money.
Finally of course, we have the fact that the trial ITSELF appears to have been a complete sham with the verdict largely already decided by a hostile judge who denied the defendants the right to make reasonable legal arguments and told the jury they weren't allowed to consider the idea that climate catastrophe is real and caused by fossil fuel production and consumption:
"Supporters of the defendants expressed outrage at the sentences, which came after a two-week trial in which the judge denied them any of the defences in law for causing a public nuisance.
Hehir ruled that the jury should not take into account evidence about climate breakdown, which the defendants wanted to point to as the key motivation behind their actions, and which they said provided them with a reasonable excuse for them."
Folks, this too is fascism; and it's fascism in service of some of the largest, most murderous corporations on Earth. The new Labour government in the UK needs to intervene IMMEDIATELY or they're proving to you they're no better than the Tories and serve the same masters.
“the ban is not supported by the Cass review or the wider evidence, and the exceptional approach to transgender youth is discriminatory and unfair.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/19/transgender-children-ban-puberty-blockers-wes-streeting
I treat transgender children – banning puberty blockers is not a decision for politicians to make
Aidan Kelly (The Guardian)