Notices by Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social)

Every 3.5" USB floppy drive I can find looks like sketchy garbage. I buy a new one every 5 years, and it works for, like, 10 disks, and then it does. Can anybody recommend one that isn't trash?

Browsers should refuse to respect paste-disabling. This is not something that any user wants.

I'm trying to pay my Virginia income taxes online, and they have disabled paste in any field of consequence. Paste in a password? Nope. Your bank's routing number? You're gonna have to hand-key that. Your bank account number? You better believe you're typing that in.

If you wanted to force people to create crappy passwords and cause them to accidentally siphon money out of strangers' bank accounts, this is how you'd do it. And somebody went to extra effort to make it be like this!

Oklahoma’s governor refuses to let kids in his state access the federal government’s new summer EBT program, to ensure that kids can have meals when school is out. In response, five tribal nations have teamed up to provide the benefits to any eligible kids who happen to live on tribal land (which is a lot of Oklahoma). https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/us/politics/school-meals-summer-ebt.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jE0.NZAi.mehkrnKm8xuN&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=u&sgrp=c-cb

If you were wondering if maybe the Republican Party can be salvaged, three-quarters of Republicans say that it would be good for Trump to follow through on his promise to be a dictator "only for a day.”

A functioning democracy requires that a supermajority of its citizens actually believe in and uphold democracy. https://polsci.umass.edu/sites/default/files/January2024TrumpandGOPToplines.pdf

CNN blocking the default configuration of Safari is a bold move.

@foone You're going to love the complimentary DNA Monitoring Service that they offer you, too. If anybody who lives nearby you is also a catgirl, you'll receive an alert.

If you have a 23andMe profile, it is possible that you have been affected by their latest data breach. Just to be safe, you should take a minute now to change your DNA.

Midwestern droughts have reduced the flow of the Mississippi. Groundwater depletion has caused coastal land to sink below sea level. Sea-temperature increases raised the sea level in the Gulf. The result: rising ocean waters are out-competing the Mississippi flow, pushing up the riverbed, and will reach New Orleans’ water treatment plant. The city’s water supply will be undrinkable, while the salt leaches poisons out of lead pipes. They have one month.

We did this. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/29/climate/new-orleans-saltwater-map.html?unlocked_article_code=YY1Ts4O8PDO2TJgPZYi6Tldxm_uNeKHVvgkg4EgPZmqT4AIKqK7EMYfP3LFe8RlVhSfU8mpQK75rHcnO2Ox59Lh05bgzthiJxc73KZqvQ9bJmSIMPEWOxFuAtwqukSYV0BfzL9JQrhrd6XcwQTCudtCWFwvxKfcjU1ZqEaNS9S_71QVaQ1zkdCsp7W5wZgXlJs-fyw_ZrF8HZUbLGsUL_bV8eWANJDBKOhZu4adbPjbyrVfrF91XtjEPjBABQPHd4eQGKOm-l5i2jam7pF6XnLOGPKcq3Pr7dA81OEbDs-L4o533ERGdU2XtTXAKVqULiIxb2gm94xFRCud-sCrTwfRtD6OmhBWVyHYvvoRTBWmtUA&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

I’m at an event celebrating the build-out of a cooperatively owned fiber optic broadband network here in central Virginia. One of the speakers is Rep. Bob Good, who voted against every bill that funded the work done here. But he’s taking the credit just the same.

Please, please, stop using "foo" and "bar” in code documentation. Give us real examples that mean something. Not "if (foo > bar)," but “if (height > limit)." Not “foo++” but “counter++”. Give us a logical hook to hang our hat on, not nonsense words.

If you think it’s trouble for Twitter to be hostage to the whims of Elon Musk, I encourage you to apply that thinking to Starlink.

Broadband, but rather than fiber in the ground that can be seized or resold or rerouted or regulated, instead thousands of satellites that are controlled only by Musk! To Musk this is a huge positive, but to the other 8 billion of us, it’s a huge negative.

We must not let broadband be Musked.