Kyle DeMarino
@KyleDeMarino
It’s inappropriate to copy and paste verbatim ‘guidance’ from a political organization; rather than CDC using science and their own methods to form guidance. It’s clear the AFT was leveraging their power to keep kids out of school, regardless of science.

Vox
@voxdotcom
"It is worth considering whether [Ma'Khia] Bryant might have still been alive today if a mental health expert — or someone else trained in nonviolent deescalation — had responded to the call," says Merushka Bisetty. https://trib.al/kPTwZ1o //

Ian Haworth
@ighaworth
It is worth considering whether Ma'Khia Bryant might have still been alive today if she HADN'T TRIED TO STAB SOMEONE.

Rethinking a maneuver in response to an emergency is one thing. Convincing the piloting world that they need to change a long-held practice is quite another. But Claude Vuichard did just that in developing a new escape from the vortex ring state.

Thirty years ago, Linus Torvalds was a 21 year old student at the University of Helsinki when he first released the Linux Kernel. His announcement started, “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional…)”. Three decades later, the top 500 supercomputers are all running Linux, as are over 70% of all smartphones. Linux is clearly both big and professional.

For three decades, Linus Torvalds has led Linux Kernel development, inspiring countless other developers and open source projects. In 2005, Linus also created Git to help manage the kernel development process, and it has since become the most popular version control system, trusted by countless open source and proprietary projects. //

Regarding creating Git and then handing it off to Junio Hamano to improve and maintain, Linus noted, "I don't want to claim that programming is an art, because it really is mostly just about 'good engineering'. I'm a big believer in Thomas Edison's 'one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration' mantra: it's almost all about the little details and the everyday grunt-work. But there is that occasional 'inspiration' part, that 'good taste' thing that is about more than just solving some problem - solving it cleanly and nicely and yes, even beautifully. And Junio had that 'good taste'." //

I very much don't regret the choice of license, because I really do think the GPLv2 is a huge part of why Linux has been successful.

Money really isn't that great of a motivator. It doesn't pull people together. Having a common project, and really feeling that you really can be a full partner in that project, that motivates people, I think. //

I write very little code these days, and haven't for a long time. And when I do write code, the most common situation is that there's some discussion about some particular problem, and I make changes and send them out as a patch mainly as an explanation of a suggested solution. //

Because all my real work is spent on reading and writing emails. It's mostly about communication, not coding. In fact, I consider this kind of communication with journalists and tech bloggers etc to literally be part of my workday - it may get lower priority than actual technical discussions, but I do spend a fair amount of time on things like this too.

The Flying Farmer act has been a staple of airshows for years. Kyle Franklin’s version is just as entertaining as an inebriated Ben Wabknoski takes over the controls of a Super Cub for a fun, low-altitude airshow experience. In this encore video, Franklin explains what’s involved. He makes it look easy, but it’s anything but.

Catturd ™
@catturd2
I can’t stop laughing at Mitt Romney getting booed and heckled - LOUDLY! 😂

Robby Starbuck
@robbystarbuck
Mitt Romney will remember this forever. I think he finally realized his corporatist Republican Party was dead + a record of backstabbing isn’t popular. Red meat lines with no action won’t get you applause. We’re a people’s party now.

Action earns applause.

“Low-cost storage is the key to enabling renewable electricity to compete with fossil fuel generated electricity on a cost basis,” says Yet-Ming Chiang, a materials science and engineering professor at MIT.

But exactly how low? Chiang, professor of energy studies Jessika Trancik, and others have determined that energy storage would have to cost roughly US $20 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for the grid to be 100 percent powered by a wind-solar mix. Their analysis is published in Joule.

That’s an intimidating stretch for lithium-ion batteries, which dipped to $175/kWh in 2018. But things look up if you loosen the constraints on renewable energy, the researchers say. Then, storage technologies that meet the cost target are within reach.

The team picked four locations—Arizona, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Texas—and gathered 20 years of data on those solar and wind resources there. Such resources can change considerably with the seasons and over the years, and their longer-term analysis—while previous studies had used data from just a year or two—captures the variations that may occur over the lifetime of a power plant, the researchers say. They modeled the costs of wind-solar-plus-storage systems that would reliably meet various grid demands, such as providing baseload energy 24/7 and meeting peak-hour spikes in demand for a few hours.

Energy storage would have to cost $10 to $20/kWh for a wind-solar mix with storage to be competitive with a nuclear power plant providing baseload electricity. And competing with a natural gas peaker plant would require energy storage costs to fall to $5/kWh.

But those figures are only for scenarios in which solar and wind meet power demand 100 percent of the time. If other sources meet demand just 5 percent of the time, storage could work at a price tag of $150/kWh. Which technologies could hit that target?

Tucked away in the USA Today story, they note there was a requirement in the bill Trump signed that called for a letter to go out notifying people of the payment. So that if there were any questions/concerns/mistakes, Americans would have that letter as a record to reference. So it wasn’t just an idle letter to promote Trump. There’s the same requirement in latest Act with which the Biden team has to comply, as CNN notes. But Biden’s letter wouldn’t get the same criticism. There was no criticism of Biden in the CNN story yesterday, reporting about the checks, indeed there was only criticism of Trump.

Now, first thing I’d say about the letter, I get that it’s an IRS payment, but seriously, IRS letters give people heart attacks, with people’s first thought that they’re in trouble.

But do you notice something else in there?

Here’s what Biden claims in his letter:

“A key part of the American Rescue Plan is direct payments of $1400 per person for most American households. With the Direct Payment from December, this brings the total relief payment up to $2000. This fulfills a promise I made to you, and will help get millions of Americans through this crisis.”

Oh, no, he just didn’t! He just took credit for money that passed under Trump.

Also prior to the election House Speaker Nancy Pelosi balked at the passage of a smaller bill that Republicans would have agreed to. She was then was cool with it after the election. Why? She admitted “that’s OK now because we have a new president.” So it takes some chutzpah to take credit for something that should have been passed before, under Trump.

A U.K. company behind digital addressing system What3Words has sent a legal threat to a security researcher for offering to share an open-source software project with other researchers, which What3Words claims violate its copyright.