Tag: current events

While I’ve seen quite a bit of coverage of the Dakota Access pipeline project, none of the reports provided any specifics about the pipeline. So I decided to satisfy my curiosity with a little research. After sifting through the multitudes of non-substantive news articles and even more thinkpieces, I eventually landed on some primary materials. Along the way I also found out the alternatives that were considered and discarded. What became clear is that this pipeline and others like it are needed as long as crude oil production continues.

In March, for the first time in a long time, Arizona mattered in a presidential primary. The 2016 campaigns descended on the state with all the candidates but John Kasich making an appearance. The Trump rally in Fountain Hills made the national news because of the protesters that closed the roads into the small suburb. I passed a few of them on the way in. The road was still open at the time.

The one constant about indoor events is the poor lighting. It’s not usually bad lighting. The people that set up the stage want the event to look good. There’s usually plenty of light from the audience’s perspective. What the camera sees is a different story. When Hillary Clinton campaigned in Phoenix the event was held in a high school gym. I’ll wait while you finish shaking your head. So you can imagine the base lighting.

Today protesters in Minneapolis shut down the airport and the largest mall in America. Of all the protests so far, I think these two events are the most high profile yet. I also don’t know if they are as effective as they were a year ago. City governments don’t seem to be any more responsive than they were before the protests started. In reading today’s news I had to wonder, will the protests ever get so big that the city decides clearing the streets is more important than not hurting people while they do so?

The NFL owners spent an hour talking about extra points today. The current rules make the PAT boring. Most of the time the TV broadcast doesn’t even show it. The discussion was just that, talk. But there are plans for the Competition Committee to come back with a proposal for a May vote. The general consensus seems to be the extra point should be made into a football play. This will be interesting on how it shakes out for the kickers.

Google Code is to join the long list of Google projects that have been consigned to the dustbin of history. The open source project hosting service will no longer be accepting new project submissions as of today, will no longer be accepting updates to existing projects from August 24, and will be closed entirely on January 25, 2016. § Killed by spam. But not just closing, everything will be deleted.

Stanford University researchers were stunned when they awoke Tuesday to find that 11,000 people had signed up for a cardiovascular study using Apple Inc.’s ResearchKit, less than 24 hours after the iPhone tool was introduced. “To get 10,000 people enrolled in a medical study normally, it would take a year and 50 medical centers around the country,” said Alan Yeung, medical director of Stanford Cardiovascular Health. “That’s the power of the phone.

The security researchers also claimed they had created a modified version of Apple’s proprietary software development tool, Xcode, which could sneak surveillance backdoors into any apps or programs created using the tool. Xcode, which is distributed by Apple to hundreds of thousands of developers, is used to create apps that are sold through Apple’s App Store. § The article goes onto say, “It remains unclear how intelligence agencies would get developers to use the poisoned version of Xcode.

I’m not sure what happened to the world. https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod/status/562416681260027904

Is a BSOD without a sceen still a crash? I’ve been thinking about this for the last day or so. Is having Windows on an embedded board something the world needs? We’re excited to announce that we are expanding our Windows Developer Program for IoT by delivering a version of Windows 10 that supports Raspberry Pi 2. This release of Windows 10 will be free for the Maker community through the Windows Developer Program for IoT.