Most Americans may not realize popular tech hasn't been hit by China tariffs—yet.

Microsoft brings two new opt-in trial features to some users of its Copilot AI-assistant.

Copilot key becomes a "whatever" key in latest Windows Insider Preview build.

AI-powered search engines are surfacing deeply racist, debunked research.

Cloud provider allegedly approached by Google ratted out shady group to Microsoft.

A recent study conducted by Apple's artificial intelligence (AI) researchers has raised significant concerns about the reliability of large language models (LLMs) in mathematical reasoning tasks. Despite the impressive advancements made by models like OpenAI's GPT and Meta's LLaMA, the study reveals fundamental flaws in their ability to handle even basic arithmetic when faced with slight variations in the wording of questions.

Just a couple more gadgets and USB-C might really feel universal.

In this video, I share how to avoid burnout as a solo Managed Service Provider.

Source: How to Avoid Burnout as a Solo MSP - Technibble.com

The right MSP tools are crucial for doing a job the right way. As an IT technician, your clients will be keen to observe how fast and efficient you are. But as a managed service provider, there are essential tools you need aside from the ones you use for troubleshooting, maintenance, and repair. These tools […]

Source: MSP Tools: 4 Must Have Software for a Managed Service Provider - Technibble.com

This is the digital age, and no matter your industry, it’s safe to say there has been digital transformation. Yet there’s still a need for printers and paper copies, and it might be time for you to partner with a managed print services (MPS) provider. An MPS provider is a third party that handles document […]

Source: 5 Reasons to Partner with Managed Print Services - Technibble.com

So you’ve gone out on your own and currently working as a one-person MSP? It sounds scary, especially if you have already left a regular job somewhere else. But there are fantastic marketing opportunities everywhere. Read on. Leaving a Previous Job By simply working at your previous job, you likely made several connections. These connections […]

Source: 4 Ways to Market Your Solo MSP - Technibble.com

There are many Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) solutions on the market, but none of them are perfect. Some have become complex and bloated as feature after feature is added, but there is a new kid on the block. A free, simple, and open-source RMM focused on the basics. What is TacticalRMM? Tactical RMM is […]

Source: TacticalRMM – A Free & Open-source RMM - Technibble.com

Timing is super important in MSP marketing. Right now, we have a unique opportunity to make sure our clients and prospects understand just how costly a lack of proper IT security can be. Keep reading for a free resource on how to take advantage of this opportunity. If there’s ever been a wake-up call for […]

Source: The Marriott Hack Can Drive New Clients to Your MSP—Here’s How to Use It [Free Resource] - Technibble.com

NASA's Mars helicopter is about to take space travel where it has never gone before.

May's incredible displays may have been among the strongest in 500 years. Now, the responsible sunspot region is rotating back toward us.

The remote sensing imagery below, metaphorically akin to an ultrasound, show La Niña in the womb. The climate phenomenon's due date is fast arriving.

You might have heard of sun poisoning, but you may not know what it exactly entails. Find out more about this condition and how to avoid it.

Allergies may not have existed before the Industrial Age, but records of these health issues are rare from ancient times.

From boosting bone strength to balancing hormones, weight lifting offers powerful benefits that support our overall health and wellness.

Most animals with monstrous appearances are relatively harmless to humans. Here's the truth behind creepy creatures like the werewolf cat and goblin shark.

When it comes to mental illness, we’ve come a long way since the days of superstition and sorcery. But we still have work to do.

A controlled scary experience can leave you exhilarated and relaxed afterward.

Get Solitaire Grand Harvest free coins now, new links added daily. Only tested and working links, complete with a guide on how to redeem the links.

It's a packed week, with Earth Day, Arbor Day, The City Nature Challenge and more!

Protect bird migrations in honor of Global Big Day.

Collision avoidance technologies need beefing up to cope with solar storms, says astronomers.

Quantum physicists have developed an algorithm that uses a single qubit to solve a problem that had previously needed thousands of them.

Can food technology really change society? Yes, just consider the seismic impact of the microwave oven.

CubeSats make it affordable for universities and private companies to launch a satellite into space.

People often contract schistosomiasis through water contaminated with infected snails and feces.

AI language models are getting pretty good at writing – but not so much at creative storytelling.

Find some of our favorite resources for the April 8, 2024, solar eclipse, including apps, video explainers, children's activities, and books.

The post Eclipse Apps, Books, Videos: Resources for the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Conviértase en un experto en eclipses para familiares y amigos en un par de minutos

The post Cómos y Porqués De Los Eclipses Solares appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Los fenómenos astronómicos y terrestres que no se debe perder durante el eclipse solar total del 8 de abril de 2024.

The post Qué Buscar y Cuándo Durante un Eclipse Solar Total appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Location: Special Collections Hevelin Collection- PS3513.A575N6 1961

Location: Special Collections Hevelin Collection- PS3560.O4864S65 1952

Location: Special Collections x-Collection- QB501.N38 2003

Location: Special Collections Hevelin Collection- BD511.Y6 1928

An updated forecast predicts observers across the northern and central U.S. may see the aurora two nights in a row — on Oct. 4th and 5th — in the wake of one of the Sun's most powerful flares this solar cycle.

The post Second Chance: Solar Flare Might Spark Aurora Friday and Saturday Night appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Take a flight through Grus, one of the famous “southern birds” constellations.

The post Get to Know the Southern Constellation Grus, the Crane appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Bridgetown (Barbados) - Puerto Plata (Dominican Republic)

[Finish line of The Amazing Race 36, Episode 9, at the Anfiteatro La Puntilla in Puerto Plata, with the Taino Bay cruise port in the background. Screenshot from CBS television broadcast.]

It's a sign of the times that The Amazing Race made its first visit to the Dominican Republic this season. The DR has had the fastest-growing economy in the Caribbean or Central America for the last twenty years, and is now the region's largest economy. A substantial part of that economic growth, and a deliberate target of the government's efforts to attract investment, has been tourism.

Until a decade ago, more money came into the DR through remittances from Dominicans living and working abroad, mainly in the USA, than from any other source. Since then, boosted by government policies to promote tourism development, revenues from international tourism to the DR have doubled, passing remittances as the country's largest source of foreign exchange.

The DR is the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola; Haiti is the the western third of the island. If the DR doesn't get as much notice abroad, that's partly because it's a relatively stable, middle-income country, not notable for poverty, wealth, or war. "If it bleeds, it leads", and the DR hasn't had the crises that have brought so much attention (although little understanding or empathy) to its closest neighbor.

To put the situation in perspective, per capita income in the DR is half what it is in Barbados, the last previous destination visited by The Amazing Race 36, but five times that of Haiti. A major issue in the DR is immigration from Haiti and ongoing discrimination in the DR against a racially stigmatized underclass of Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian ancestry.

International tourism rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic much more quickly in the DR than in most other countries. There were more foreign visitors to the DR in 2022 than there had been in 2019, the last year before the pandemic. As they started travelling again after the worst of the pandemic, some visitors from the USA probably chose the DR as a destination closer and a shorter flight away than other places they might otherwise have gone.

Other visitors come to the DR -- especially to the area around Puerto Plata where this episode of The Amazing Race took place -- on a growing number of cruise ships. The main challenge for the racers took place at the Damajagua waterfalls, which are promoted primarily as a shore excursion for cruise ship passengers. I had hoped that the pandemic might kill off the cruise industry as we know it, or at least reduce demand for cruises enough that some cruise ships might be repurposed for transportation. I was wrong. Cruising is back with a vengeance.

Puerto Plata has only a tenth of the population of the country's capital city and main cargo port, Santo Domingo, but Puerto Plata is overwhelmingly and increasingly the dominant cruise ship port of call in the DR. There are two cruise ports in the Puerto Playa area, one purpose-built and operated exclusively for Carnival Cruise Lines at Amber Cove, and the Taino Bay Cruise Port in the center of the city that was visible in the background at the finish line of this episode of The Amazing Race 36.

Next week The Amazing Race 36 returns to the USA. For the season finale, two episodes have apparently been edited down to a total of an hour and a half of broadcast time to suit the demands of CBS television schedulers. Stay tuned!

Puerto Plata (Dominican Republic) - Philadelphia, PA (USA)

What you're not realizing is, if you want to go to another state, nobody's gonna' stop you. Like, you can get in the car, and you go!

[Juan, at the finish line of The Amazing Race 36 in Philadelphia, PA.]

En route to the finish line of The Amazing Race 36 in Philadelphia, Juan and his partner Shane mistakenly drove across the Delaware River from Pennsylvania to New Jersey and back. Despite numerous historical allusions in this episode of the reality-TV travel show, the racers weren't supposed to reenact Washington's crossing of the Delaware: they were supposed to go to a famous Philly cheesesteak house. But they borrowed a bystander's phone and got directions to a similarly named Jersey pizza joint. Their third-place finish on the race was due not to getting lost, but to relying blindly on the first response to a Google search.

How is it, though, that it seems so natural to Juan, as perhaps to most of us, that we can cross state lines so easily, but it seems equally natural that we have to request and obtain permission (visas), show passports, and submit to inspection to cross international borders?

Should international travel everywhere be as easy as crossing between US states or between member states of the European Union?

Can we have borders without border controls, as these examples might suggest?

These are important questions for all travellers, but perhaps especially for those of us whose passports privilege us to cross many borders with only minor inconvenience and without having to worry too much, or too often, about whether or not the border guards or the authorities at the airport or seaport will permit us to enter, will detain us, or will turn us back.

Last week I attended a fascinating discussion on this subject with John Washington, a reporter for Arizona Luminaria and the author of The Case for Open Borders (Haymarket Books, 2024) at the wonderful Medicine for Nightmares bookstore in San Francisco, co-sponsored by the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

The conversation was even more thought-provoking than a mere summary of the book would suggest.

Washington's goal, as he describes it, is not so much to provide a comprehensive treatise on the rationale for open borders as to introduce and inject the idea -- today invoked most often as a bogey-man like "Communism" to be automatically dismissed -- into the realm of possibility and serious debate. Closed or controlled borders are not things that have always existed, that exist everywhere even today, or that should be taken for granted. The Case for Open Borders is only a starting point for the debate we need to have.

I was particular pleased that Washington mentioned, both in his book and in his presentation, several other books and authors that have influenced my thinking and that I think deserve more attention. So rather than restate Washington's argument (open borders would be good for almost everyone, and are a realistic possibility which can and should be adopted without delay), which you can read for yourself, let me highlight some key topics related to travel across borders, and some of these sources of additional insight.

In his talk, Washington acknowledged How Migration Really Works by Hein de Haas as a source of quantitative data about migration, even though de Haas criticizes some of the specific arguments Washington makes for open borders. You don't have to agree with all of de Haas's conclusions to value his marshalling of migration data and his interpretations of what it says about who crosses borders and why.

We think of borders as being between states (i.e. countries, not all of which are "nation states"). But that hasn't always been the case. Until recently, "states" were the exception, not the rule. Borders and walls -- the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall at the northern border of the Roman Empire, and so forth -- were what separated the territory of "civilized" states and peoples from the stateless territories inhabited by nomads, shifting agriculturists, hunter-gatherers, and other "barbarians". The Art of Not Being Governed, by the political theoretican and anthropologist James C. Scott, is a detailed historical case study of how the borders between states (mostly in the easily controlled flatlands) and stateless regions (mostly in the hills) have shaped the movements of people.

Why is the fundamental right of movement lagging, even backsliding, throughout the world? Why do states decry and prosecute impingements on the right to free speech, the free press, or the right to freedom from government oppression... and yet so enthusiastically impinge on the right to free movement? Is the right to free movement somehow different from the right to free speech, or the right to liberty? Why is the fundamental right to leave your country enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, but not the right to enter another country? In a world (almost) completely carved into nation states, the right to leave is only half a right without the right to enter.

[John Washington, The Case for Open Borders, p. 182.]

As Washington notes, international human rights law distinguished between right to leave any country and the right to enter "your own" country (but not to enter any other country). Who is allowed to cross which borders thus depends on which country or countries is/are defined to be "your own". Citizenship is typically defined by birth: where you were born ("jus soli", right of the soil) and/or who your parent were ("jus sanguinis", right of blood). But should we take either or both of these principles of citizenship for granted?

Jacqueline Stevens, in Reproducing the State, presents a feminist critique of the idea of "birthright" citizenship, especially as the basis for distinctions between who does, and who does not, have certain rights. If some people have more rights, especially rights of place, and some have fewer, depending on who their parents are or where they were born, doesn't that amount to -- as Stevens and Washington both name it -- apartheid?

Mahmood Mamdani, in Neither Settler nor Native, argues that the very idea of the "nation-state" defined by citizenship is a settler-colonial invention that reifies discriminatory distinctions. And in States Without Nations, Stevens envisions a world without birthright citizenship or citizenship-based border controls.

That's not the world we live in today, though. On the ways in which borders are becoming less and less open, Washington cites Todd Miller's Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World. For a global perspective on this issue, I would add David Scott FitzGerald's Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers -- and, of course, my own writing for the Identity Project.

Control of cross-border movement based on who we are depends on documents (passports) and/or biometric databases that identify who we are and link us with attributes that form the basis for deciding which borders we can and can't cross. Washington cites John Torpey's The Invention of the Passport as one version of the history of passports and travel documents. Another is provided by Mark B. Salter in Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations.

Finally, to Washington's moving stories about life and death in the USA-Mexico borderlands, I would add Sally Hayden's tour de force of witness from another border region, My Fourth Tine, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route. Trigger warning: This is both the easiest and, in other ways, the hardest of the books on this list. But it's also the one I most strongly recommend.

On another note, there was an unfortunate omission earlier in this episode of The Amazing Race 36. The racers were sent to the Arch Street Meeting House, but nothing was said to explain this building or its historical significance to viewers of The Amazing Race. I'll be generous to the TV producers and assume that this context was left on the cutting-floor when what had been planned and filmed as the final two hour-long episodes of The Amazing Race 36 were edited down to a single ninety-minutes episode to suit the CBS-TV broadcast schedule. It's too bad that TV viewers missed out on that lesson, though, because Quakers have had an influence -- not just in the founding of Pennsylvania, but in the structure of American society at large -- far out of proportion to their small numbers and extending far beyond the membership of the Religious Society of Friends, but often overlooked in history texts and classes.

Quakers have had key roles in every period of American history, especially in times of social struggle and social change: in the abolitionist movement of the 1860s, in the civil rights movement of the 1960s (Bayard Rustin, a queer African-American Quaker who had been imprisoned for resisting the draft during World War II, was a key tactical and strategic advisor to the Rev. M. L. King, Jr., and one of the main organizers of the 1963 March on Washington), and in the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s and subsequent campaigns of nonviolent direct action that have used consensus-based structures of organizing derived from Quaker decision-making and articulated and taught by, among others, George Lakey.

You can't fully understand American history without some understanding of Quaker thought and action. If you go to Independence Hall to see the Liberty Bell, it's worth a small detour to check out the modest exhibits at the Arch Street Meeting House on the next block.

[First published on Antiwar.com]

Fantasies underlying push for conscription are delusional and dangerous.

Doubling down on their recent war-game exercises and report on the (un)readiness of the U.S. to activate a military draft, Taren Sylvester and Katherine Kuzminski of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) have a new article in War on the Rocks, “Preparing for the Possibility of a Draft Without Panic,” laying out why they think the U.S. needs to prepare for a draft in order to be able to win an all-out war with China over Taiwan.

CNAS and War on the Rocks like to describe themselves as “realists”. But their arguments for stepped-up planning and preparation for a draft are strikingly unrealistic, in at least four respects:

Library - Art Library, Location - LIB, Call number - NA7348.P2 C44 2017

Library - Art Library, Location - LIB, Call number - N7397.6.M6 P47 2011

Library - Art Library, Location - LIB, Call number - RC455 .E45 2017

Library - Art Library, Location - OSIZ, Call number - FOLIO N6853.P5 A4 2016b

Library - Art Library, Location - LIB, Call number - N7153.T33 A4 2016

Library - Art Library, Location - OSIZ, Call number - FOLIO N6537.D447 A4 2016b

Location: Electronic Resource-