Is It Wrong To Mock People Who’d Opposed Covid Vaccines and Then Died of Covid?

Slashdot reader DevNull127 shares a transcript from a recent segment on CNN:

CNN: Here’s a moral question peculiar to these days: Is it wrong to mock people who publicly crusade against the Covid vaccine, and then die of the disease?

Or does it drive home the message about saving lives?

There are entire web sites that are devoted to such mockery. Sorry Antivaxxer.com gleefully tales stories and photos of anti-vaccine advocates who end up in the ICU, intubated, or dead from the disease.

One recent case of this kind of tasteless taunting spurred two dueling opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times. Orange County Republican Kelly Ernby, a former assistant D.A. and state assembly candidate who had lobbied publicly against the Covid vaccines, passed away earlier this month at age 46 from Covid complications. She was unvaccinated. Ernby’s death unleashed a torrent of reaction on the internet. On her own Facebook page under a Christmas collage that she had posted, there are now more than 4,600 comments. Some are sympathy notes; many other are not.

In response to the piling on, Los Angeles Times columnist Nicholas Goldberg wrote, “I don’t understand how crowing over the death of others furthers useful debate — or increases vaccination rates.” But a few days later, Goldberg’s colleague Michael Hiltzik published a column expressing the exact opposite. “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ Covid deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary.” Michael Hiltzik joins me now, he’s the L.A. Times’ business columnist. He’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner. Michael let’s make clear at the outset: you are not talking about the everyday people who don’t get vaxxed, sadly contract Covid, and die. You’re talking about people with a platform, right?

Michael Hiltzik: That’s correct… In my column, I pointed out that the unvaccinated really fall into three categories. There are those who can’t get vaccinated for legitimate reasons — small children, people with genuine medical contra-indications of vaccination. Then there’s a fairly large group of people who I think have been duped into resisting the vaccine, duped by misinformation and disinformation about the vaccines, and sort of nonsense about preserving our freedoms in the face of this pandemic.

The real targets who are important here are those who spent the last few months or years of their lives crusading against sensible, safe policies such as vaccination and social distancing and what have you — and ended up paying the ultimate price for their own — basically, their own folly.

[CNN puts a pargraph on the screen, highlighting Hiltzik’s comment that “Mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-Covid measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled.”]

Michael Hiltzik: You know, we have sort of a cultural habit of not speaking ill of the dead, of treating the good deceased — looking at the good that they’ve done during their lives. I’m not sure that in this case that’s entirely appropriate, because so many of them actually have promoted reckless, dangerous policies.

And as I wrote there, they took innocent people along with them.

So is mockery the only response? Well, I don’t know — but as I wrote, every one of these deaths is a teachable moment. And unfortunately we haven’t been learning from the lesson that we should be hearing from them.

In his column, Hiltzik had argued that “[P]leas for ‘civility’ are a fraud.

“Their goal is to blunt and enfeeble criticism and distract from its truthfulness. Typically, they’re the work of hypocrites.”

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Walmart Appears to Be Planning Its Own Cryptocurrency and NFTs

“Walmart appears to be venturing into the metaverse with plans to create its own cryptocurrency and collection of NFTs,” reports CNBC.

“The big-box retailer filed several new trademarks late last month that indicate its intent to make and sell virtual goods. In a separate filing, the company said it would offer users a virtual currency, as well as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.”
According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Walmart filed the applications on Dec. 30. In total, seven separate applications have been submitted…. “They’re super intense,” said Josh Gerben, a trademark attorney. “There’s a lot of language in these, which shows that there’s a lot of planning going on behind the scenes about how they’re going to address cryptocurrency, how they’re going to address the metaverse and the virtual world that appears to be coming or that’s already here….”

[B]oth Under Armour’s and Adidas’ NFT debuts sold out last month. They’re now fetching sky-high prices on the NFT marketplace OpenSea. Gerben said that apparel retailers Urban Outfitters, Ralph Lauren and Abercrombie & Fitch have also filed trademarks in recent weeks detailing their intent to open some sort of virtual store…. According to Frank Chaparro, director at crypto information services firm The Block, many retailers are still reeling from being late to e-commerce, so they don’t want to miss out on any opportunities in the metaverse. “I think it’s a win-win for any company in retail,” Chaparro said. “And even if it just turns out to be a fad there’s not a lot of reputation damage in just trying something weird out like giving some customers an NFT in a sweepstake, for instance.”

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Library Intentionally Corrupted by Developer Relaunches as a Community-Driven Project

Last weekend a developer intentionally corrupted two of his libraries which collectively had more than 20 million weekly downloads and thousands of dependent projects.

Eight days later, one of those libraries has become a community controlled project.

Some highlights from the announcement at fakerjs.dev:

We’re a group of engineers who were using Faker in prod when the main package was deleted. We have eight maintainers currently….

What has the team done so far?

1. Created a GitHub org [repository] for the new Faker package under @faker-js/faker.
2. Put together a team of eight maintainers.
3. Released all previous versions of Faker at @faker-js/faker on npm.
4. Released the Version 6 Alpha
5. Almost completed migrating to TypeScript so that DefinitelyTyped no longer needs to maintain its external @types/faker package.
6. Created a public Twitter account for communicating with the community.
7. Released the first official Faker documentation website….

Faker has never had an official docs website and the awesome Jeff Beltran has been maintaining a project called “Un-Official faker.js Documentation” for the last 3 years.

He gave us permission to re-use his work to create fakerjs.dev

8. Cleaned up tooling like Prettier, CI, Netlify Deploy Previews, and GitHub Actions.

9. Done a TON of issue triage and many, many PR reviews.
10. We’ve gotten in contact with the Open Collective and discussed a transition plan for the project.

We fully intend to extend Faker, continuously develop it, and make it even better.

As such, we will work on a roadmap after we release 6.x and merge all of the TypeScript Pull Requests in the next week….

We’re now turning Faker into a community-controlled project currently maintained by eight engineers from various backgrounds and companies….

We’re excited to give new life to this idea and project.

This project can have a fresh start and it will become even cooler.

We felt we needed to do a public announcement because of all of the attention the project received in the media and from the community.

We believe that we have acted in the way that is best for the community.

According to the announcement, they’ve now also forked the funding so the project’s original sponsors can continue to support the community-driven development in the future, while the original developers Marak and Brian “were able to retain the $11,652.69 USD previously donated to the project.”

Friday the official Twitter account for the new community project announced “It’s been a week. We’ve merged all of the active forks. Currently at 1532 stars. Looks like everything is settling.” [It’s now up to over 1,800 stars.]

One of the new maintainers has posted on Twitter, “I’m just grateful to the faker community that willed itself into existence and stepped up.”

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The World Was Cooler In 2021 Than 2020. That’s Not Good News.

2021 was actually cooler than 2020, points out Wired science journalist Matt Simon. So is that good news?

No.
One reason for cooler temperatures in 2021 was likely La Niña, a band of cold water in the Pacific. It’s the product of strong trade winds that scour the ocean, pushing the top layer of water toward Asia, causing deeper, colder waters to rush to the surface to fill the void. This in turn influences the atmosphere, for instance changing the jet stream above the United States and leading to more hurricanes in the Atlantic. The sea itself cools things off by absorbing heat from the atmosphere.

The Covid-19 pandemic may have had an additional influence, but not in the way you might think. As the world locked down in 2020, fewer emissions went into the sky, including aerosols that typically reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space. “If you take them away, you make the air cleaner, then that’s a slight warming impact on the climate,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, during a Thursday press conference announcing the findings. But as economic activity ramped back up in 2021, so did aerosol pollution, contributing again to that cooling effect. The 2021 temperature drop “may be possibly due to a resumption of activity that produces aerosols in the atmosphere,” Schmidt said…

Today’s findings are all the more alarming precisely because 2021 managed to overcome these cooling effects and still tally the sixth-highest temperature. And while global temperatures were cooler in 2021 than the year before, last year 1.8 billion people lived in places that experienced their hottest temperatures ever recorded, according to a report released today by Berkeley Earth. This includes Asian countries like China and North and South Korea, African nations like Nigeria and Liberia, and in the Middle East places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. “We talk a lot about global average temperatures, but no one lives in the global average,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. “In fact most of the globe, two-thirds of it, is ocean, and no one lives in the ocean — or very few people at least. And land areas, on average, are warming much faster than the rest of the world….”

Last summer in western Canada and the US Pacific Northwest, absurd temperatures of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit killed hundreds of people. According to Hausfather, the heat wave in Portland, Oregon, would have been effectively impossible without climate change, something like a once-every-150,000-year event.
It’s a fascinating article, that looks at trouble spots like Antarctica’s sea level-threatening “Doomsday Glacier” and a warming Gulf of Mexico, mapping the intensity of 2021’s temperature anomalies along with trend graphs for both global temperatures and land-vs-ocean averages. It touches on how climate change is impacting weather — everything from rain and floods to wildfires and locusts — as Bridget Seegers, an oceanographer at NASA, points out that “Extremes are getting worse. People are losing their homes and their lives and air quality, because the wildfires are bad.”
But Seegers somehow arrives at a positive thought. “There’s just a lot going on, and I want people to also feel empowered that we understand the problem. It’s just this other issue of deciding to take collective action….

“There’s a lot of reasons for optimism. We’re in charge. This would be a lot worse if we’re like, ‘Oh, it’s warming because we’re heading toward the sun, and we can’t stop it.'”

(Thanks to Slashdot reader Sanja Pantic for sharing the article!)

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Are We Getting Closer to the Year of the Linux Desktop?

Earlier this year TechRepublic argued that while 2021 wasn’t the year of the Linux desktop, “there was no denying the continued dominance of Linux in the enterprise space and the very slow (and subtle) growth of Linux on the desktop. And in just about every space (minus the smartphone arena), Linux made some serious gains.”

So would 2022 be the year of the Linux desktop? “Probably not.”

But developer Tim Wells honestly believes we’re getting closer:

The idea of the year of the Linux desktop is that there would come a year that the free and open source operating system would reach a stage that the average user could install and use it on their pc without running into problems. Linus Sebastian from Linus Tech Tips recently did an experiment where he installed Linux on his home PC for one month to see if he could use it not only for everyday tasks, but for gaming and also streaming. Ultimately he concluded (in a video just released) that this year will not be the year of the Linux desktop and that while doing everyday stuff was reasonably okay, the state of gaming on Linux (despite Valves lofty goals) is to put it simply, a shit-show. (That’s my word, not his)… The experiment done by Linus seems to show that while some games do indeed run well using [Valve’s Windows compatibility layer] Proton, there are just as many that run with issues. Some of those issues can be game breaking. Such as the game running, but its multiplayer functionality not working at all. Some games just plain don’t work at all due to dependencies on services such as Easy Anti Cheat…

In his video Linus mentions that the main problem preventing the “year of the Linux desktop” is the fragmentation. By fragmentation, he means the range of available distributions and the fact that each distribution has (potentially) different versions of libraries and drivers and software that makes the behind the scenes operate…. Flatpak and Snap as well as AppImage are making progress towards fixing this fragmentation issue, but those are not yet perfect either. Flatpak works by ensuring that the expected versions of libraries required for that software are installed along side it and independent of the existing library the distro may provide…

Valve have said that the Steamdeck will also use an immutable core operating system for the same reasons.

So while Linus is sure that 2022 isn’t yet the year of the Linux desktop and that fragmentation is the biggest problem. I think maybe, just maybe, we’re closer to solving those problems and closer perhaps to the year of the Linux desktop that some might realise.

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GitHub Restores Account of Developer Who Intentionally Corrupted His Libraries

What happened after a developer intentionally corrupted two of their libraries which collectively had more than 20 million weekly downloads and thousands of dependent projects?

Mike Melanson’s “This Week in Programming” column reports:

In response to the corrupted libraries, Microsoft quickly suspended his GitHub access and reverted the projects on npm…. While this might seem like an open and shut case to some — the developer committed malicious code and GitHub and npm did what it had to do to protect its users — a debate broke out around a developer’s rights to do what they wish with their code, no matter how many projects and dependencies it may have.

“GitHub suspending someone’s account for modifying their own code in a project they own however they want spooks me a lot more than NPM reverting a package,” [tweeted one company’s Director of Engineering & Technology]. “I kind of love what Marak did to make a point and protest to be honest.”

An article on iProgrammer further outlines the dilemma present in what might otherwise seem like a clear-cut case…. “Yes, it is open source in that you can fork it and can contribute to it but does this mean that GitHub is justified in denying you the right to change or even destroy your own code?”

As of last night, however, it would appear that the entire affair is merely one for intellectual debate, as GitHub has indeed lived up to what some might view as its end of the bargain: the developer’s account is active, he has been allowed to remove his faker.js library on GitHub (depended upon as it might be), and has since offered an update that he does “not have Donkey Brains”.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FedEx Asks FAA To Let It Install Anti-Missile Lasers On Its Cargo Planes

With the right military equipment, a single person can target a plane from three miles away using a heat-seeking missile. While such a nightmare is a rare occurrence, FedEx has applied to the FAA seeking approval to install a laser-based, anti-missile defense system on its cargo planes as an added safety measure. Gizmodo reports: FedEx’s request to the Federal Aviation Administration, filed on Jan. 4, didn’t come completely out of left field, however. In 2008, the company worked with Northrop Grumman to test its anti-missile laser-based defense systems on 12 of the shipping company’s cargo planes for over a year. At the time, Northrop Grumman announced that its “system is ready to be deployed on civilian aircraft,” although no commercial orders had been placed at the time, according to a company spokesperson. That may have changed, however.

FedEx’s application to the FAA (PDF) to allow it to install and use anti-missile systems on its Airbus Model A321-200 cargo planes doesn’t specifically mention Northrop Grumman’s hardware, so the shipping company could now be working with another company, but the proposed hardware is basically the same as what was tested back in 2008. In the application document (PDF), which is “scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on Jan. 18,” FedEx cites “several incidents abroad” where “civilian aircraft were fired upon by man-portable air defense systems” which are nearly impossible to detect given their range of operation, but undoubtedly a serious threat when operating aircraft in some parts of the world.

The biggest problem with FedEx’s application seems to be that the FAA’s “design standards for transport category airplanes did not envisage that a design feature could project infrared laser energy outside the airplane” and that the “FAA’s design standards are inadequate to address this capability.” As a result, the defense system is being considered a “novel or unusual design feature” and as such will be subjected to several special safety regulations given how dangerous intense infrared light can be to the skin and eyes of “persons on the aircraft, on the ground, and on other aircraft.” These regulations will include the ability to completely disable the system while the airplane is on the ground to prevent “inadvertent operation,” a design that prevents inflight use from ever damaging the aircraft itself or risking the safety of the crew and passengers, even in the event of a system failure or accidental operation. They also require extensive markings, labels, warnings, and documentation for everyone from maintenance staff to ground crew, to pilots, warning them of the laser’s class and risks, including an addendum to the flight manual explaining the complete use of the system.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Germany’s Security Watchdog Finds No Evidence of Censorship In Xiaomi Phones

Germany To Dedicate 2% Of Its Land To Wind Power Development

The new German government is proposing a bold new initiative to dramatically increase onshore wind power in the country by 2030. “If successful, the plan would add up to 10 gigawatts of new onshore wind capacity every year for the rest of the decade,” reports CleanTechnica. “In total, 2% of Germany’s land area will be set aside for wind energy generation. [T]he German government also plans to increase its offshore wind target to 30 GW by 2030.” From the report: During a press conference, [the nation’s new Green Minister for Economics and Climate, Robert Habeck] made it clear that wind energy, particularly onshore wind, will remain the most important source of electricity in Germany and is the key to further emission reductions, according to WindEurope. “The Energiewende is roaring again. Germany wants a huge expansion of onshore wind. And the Government fully understands that that requires faster permitting of new wind farms — and they intend to deliver this ASAP with a dedicated new ‘Onshore Wind Law.’ Today’s announcements mark the comeback of German leadership on renewables — fantastisch!” says WindEurope CEO Giles Dickson.

Habeck intends to remove restraints on onshore wind development caused by concerns about radar installations for civilian and military aviation. He estimates the government plan could free up 4 to 5 GW of new wind projects currently blocked by aviation radar, and an additional 4 GW currently blocked by the military. Support for renewable energies will be paid from the state budget, reducing the burden on low income households and small businesses. The package is also said to define the energy transition as a ‘matter of public interest’ in order to prioritize wind energy projects over other forms of land use — an important precondition to streamlining the permit process and finding new sites for wind energy projects.

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