Pasta News Network - New Zealand

In the wake of the covid pandemic lockdowns and mandates, many western nations and states in the US witnessed a new eye opening level of government intrusion into the daily lives of citizens.Some, however, dealt with worse scenarios than others.

New Zealand in particular has popped up time and time again over the past couple of years with some of the most draconian restrictions on the public, and sadly the trend has not stopped just because the pandemic lockdowns stopped.The island nation seems to be intent on setting the standard for authoritarian policies and government micromanagement, and a series of recent laws are driving home the reality that they do not intend to relent.

Ticks all the boxes, worth reading in full.

As bombing and shelling ripped through Ukraine’s towns and cities in the first week of the invasion, the Ukrainian government still made a scheduled interest payment to its private lenders on time. The lenders — mostly international finance institutions, banks, and hedge funds — are all queuing up to collect their debts, with no sign of respite.

The people of Ukraine are fighting for their survival while dealing with huge humanitarian needs, mass displacement, and the horrific siege conditions in Mariupol. And yet they are seeing urgently needed resources flow out of the country to foreign creditors.

They will cancel the debt, in return for farmland and other resources (conveniently). But, it certainly is an interesting and fair point.

Since the 1890s, electricity networks and devices all around the globe have used alternating current (AC) systems, which means that the flow of electricity in the system is repeatedly changing direction.

Supplying electricity at a consistent frequency is very important because appliances and electronics on the network are designed for a specific frequency/voltage input. Therefore, they can be damaged by the wrong electricity supply.

As a rule, networks would rather supply no electricity than bad electricity. Automated controls through the electricity system will disconnect the supply if the frequency or voltage is “off-spec.”

Frequency Control is an often neglected topic and worth getting a good mention.

In the October 2022 version of the FAA Guide for Aviation Medical Examiners, the FAA quietly widened the EKG parameters beyond the normal range (from a PR max of .2 to unlimited). And they didn’t widen the range by a little. They widened it by a lot. It was done after the vaccine rollout.

This is extraordinary. They did it hoping nobody would notice. It worked for a while. Nobody caught it.

But you can’t hide these things for long.

This is a tacit admission from the US government that the COVID vaccine has damaged the hearts of our pilots. Not just a few pilots. A lot of pilots and a lot of damage.

Internet whispers suggest that the (((elite))) are actively courting un-vaccinated pilots for their private air transports.

Getty Images is suing Stability AI, creators of popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, over alleged copyright violation.

In a press statement shared with The Verge, the stock photo company said it believes that Stability AI “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright” to train its software and that Getty Images has “commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London” against the firm.

Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge in an interview that the company has issued Stability AI with a “letter before action” — a formal notification of impending litigation in the UK. (The company did not say whether legal proceedings would take place in the US, too.)

Whoops.

Here at The Reg FOSS desk, we've felt this was coming ever since we reported that Big Blue was launching new POWER servers which didn't support AIX – already nearly eight years ago. Even if it was visibly coming over the horizon, this is a significant event: AIX is the last proprietary Unix which was in active development, and constitutes four of the 10 entries in the official Open Group list.

Within Oracle, Solaris is in maintenance mode. Almost exactly six years ago, we reported that the next major release, Solaris 12, had disappeared from Oracle's roadmap. HPE's HP-UX is also in maintenance mode because there's no new hardware to run it on. Itanium really is dead now and at the end that's all HP-UX could run on. It's over a decade since we reported that HP investigated but canceled an effort to port it to x86-64.

“What is dead may never die.” - House Greyjoy