News & Views from an Embedded Systems Designer
What does the existence of these new subvariants mean for the pandemic? First, basically – we blew it. Our COVID response was not a complete failure, but the initial response was, and later compliance was simply not enough to really knock down the virus. Lackluster vaccination rates are what has allowed these subvariants to multiply.
Go read the rest, The Subvariants Are Coming | Science-Based Medicine, then go get vaccinated/boosted,
The Washington Post has put together a web page with a list of election deniers running for office in 2022. This makes finding your local politicians position on this, already decided by the courts, issue easy. Any person who is on that list obviously does not respect the COTUS and the basic rule of law.
Elon Musk does not understand how the USA legal system works. Take a look at the basic fundamental error in this quote from him.
Musk suggested earlier this year that companies should align policies with laws like the First Amendment, because he says it’s what users want.
“If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect,” Musk tweeted in April this year. “Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”
Source: Musk’s one-on-one with Kanye signals naïveté moderating Twitter hate speech | Ars Technica
That’s not how it works Elon. If US citizen’s want less free speech they can ask the congress to write a law and if the president signs it then it’s law, but only temporarily. That’s because of the First Amendment, something he clearly does not grasp at even an elementary school level. A lawsuit would promptly follow the law’s signing, probably from the ACLU or a similar org. If need be it will be appealed all the way to the SCOTUS who will promptly overturn the law based on the First Amendment.
See Elon you’ve got it exactly backwards, the 1st restricts what speech laws can be enforced by government, it doesn’t permit the government to restrict speech (with a miniscule number of exceptions).
The real way this is supposed to work:
If people do not want to listen to speech they find offensive they can NOT get help from the government, PERIOD. Instead they use capitalism to avoid the problem. Since the 1st Amendment only applies to governments in the USA, and a tiny subset of business functions (e.g. telephone wire providers), nearly all businesses and all individuals can restrict speech in any way they want.
Elon, you claim to support free speech but you actually don’t want to allow the inseparable part of free speech, the right not to speak or publish speech you don’t like. No right to do something is valid unless there is the right to not do that thing. Freedom of religion or speech is non-existent if they do not include the right to not have a religion and the right to not speak or promote speech with which you disagree. Businesses have these rights and your wanting to take those rights away makes you anti-First Amendment, you typical rich white authoritarian asshole.
I slowly lost some of my email functionality over the past year and just didn’t have time to fix the problems until now.
The first problem was no longer being able to use Thunderbird for updating my offline Mbox format email archives for my job. I handle all current email, work and personal, via web clients. But for long term storage and future readability nothing beats Mbox, my archive goes back to 1997. My client of choice for my Mbox archives is Thunderbird.
Over time as the security for Office 365 tightened I stopped being able to connect and move current mail to the archives. I’d searched a bit for solutions but all I found either didn’t work or was too insecure for me. Today I looked again and found these great instructions. Configure Thunderbird for Modern Authentication and MFA
The other problem was with my first custom IoT device, a monitor for the basement dehumidifier. My cable ISP provided an IP secured SMTP server since the beginning but over the last year it slowly has been changed. This meant the daily status, and water collection tray full, emails were no longer working.
I’ve settled on the App Password solution for my custom Python code as described here: G-Mail and less secure sign-in technology – Raspberry Pi Forums. I would like a more secure solution but so far I haven’t found one that’s free.
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