Florida is one of three states where felons who have completed their sentences are still barred from voting; it's also a notoriously inhospitable place for Black people, where the combination of racial profiling, understaffed public defenders' offices, and the threat of farcically long minimum sentences has led to 1.5 million black people with fully discharged felony convictions on their records who are nevertheless banned from voting.
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Michael Froomkin writes, "We Robot, now heading into its 8th year, is lots of fun -- and it's also the leading North American conference on robotics law and policy. The 2019 edition will be held at the University of Miami on April 12-13, 2019, preceded by a day of special workshops on April 11. We just today opened the submissions portal for paper and demo proposals. Full details are in the Call for Papers.
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Jason Boek swerved his truck in front of an Uber driver at 2 a.m., forced him to pull over, then approached his vehicle while claiming to have a pistol and threatening to shoot. Boek was stalking a woman and under the mistaken impression she was a passenger in the vehicle. The Uber driver, Robert Westlake, pulled his own gun and shot Boek once, killing him.
Given the violent threat and the dangerous circumstances, no-one's in trouble: Westlake even performed CPR and called 911, to no avail. But here's the local sheriff to put the unique stamp of Florida on it all:
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said Mr Boek was a "goofball".
"Here's a message for the hotheads of the community: don't do that stuff," the sheriff said.
"Good people carry guns and they will shoot you. A lot. Graveyard dead."
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Can we please have paper ballots nationwide?
Last week at DEFCON 26 in Las Vegas, eleven-year-old Emmett Brewer hacked into a replica of Florida's state election site and changed the voting results. That's scary enough. What's even scarier is that it took him less than ten minutes. An eleven-year-old girl was able to hack into the same site in about fifteen minutes. And more than THIRTY kids were able to hack into replicas of other states' sites in less than half an hour.
That is straight up alarming and you'd think the folks in charge of our state and federal elections would be concerned about this and want to take immediate action. That would be the normal reaction. But we're a long way from normal.
In a statement regarding the event, the National Association of Secretaries of State said it is “ready to work with civic-minded members of the DEFCON community wanting to become part of a proactive team effort to secure our elections.” But the organization expressed skepticism over the hackers’ abilities to access the actual state websites.
“It would be extremely difficult to replicate these systems since many states utilize unique networks and custom-built databases with new and updated security protocols,” it read. “While it is undeniable websites are vulnerable to hackers, election night reporting websites are only used to publish preliminary, unofficial results for the public and the media. The sites are not connected to vote counting equipment and could never change actual election results.”’
I'm sure we'll be fine, though. Read the rest
For seven years, Florida state inmates could buy a $100 MP3 player from Access Corrections, the prisons' exclusive provider, and stock it with MP3s that cost $1.70 -- nearly double the going rate in the free world.
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The only thing worse than a horrific tragedy is a horrific tragedy from which nothing decent is salvaged. Florida's youth voter registration is up 41% since the Parkland shooting and the ensuing Republican Party indifference to mass-murder and open contempt for young gun-control advocates. Florida is the nation's largest swing state. 2018 is an election year. (via Naked Capitalism)
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Richard Salamon, the city planner for Sunrise, Florida, apparently got so nasty after a bundt cake store wouldn't honor his expired coupon that his job is up for review with city commissioners. Read the rest
In 1976, Walt Disney World was riding high: the oil crisis was over, tourists were flocking back to Florida, and the successful bicentennial celebration at the Florida Disney resort had been national news.
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Raimundo Atesiano was chief of the Biscayne Park Police Department in 2013, and he was proud to boast about his department's 100% clearance rate for burglaries -- but according to federal prosecutors who just indicted him, Atesiano conspired with two of his officers to frame a 16-year-old child for unsolved burglaries so that they could impress local officials.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School's class of 2018 got a surprise visit from late night talk show host Jimmy Fallon on Sunday. He took the stage at their graduation ceremony to deliver a humorous and heartfelt commencement speech.
When you think of commencement speakers, you think of people who are inspirational, people who are eloquent, people who've changed the world. When you think of high school students, you think of people who are immature, slightly awkward, still learning to be an adult.
Welcome to "Opposite Day."
The Parkland, Florida students were the survivors of the shooting that happened nearly four months ago on their campus. Seventeen of their classmates and school staff died in the tragedy on February 14, 2018.
Fallon said he and his wife and two young girls to the ceremony because "we wanted them to see what hope and light looks like."
Watch his full speech in the video above.
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2,000 US schools use textbooks from Abeka, BJU Press and Accelerated Christian Education (ACE), including tax-funded charter schools across America; students who learn from these texts are taught that God wanted Protestantism to flourish in North America and that Catholocism is not a true faith; that it was better Africans to be enslaved and come to "know Christ" than to be free but not Christian; that evolution is untrue; that humans and dinosaurs lived together (and that Noah brought baby dinosaurs on the ark); that the Loch Ness monster is real; that "abortion, gay rights and the Endangered Species Act" are part of a "radical social agenda"; that nonwhites are inferior (60% of the tax-funded scholarship students at charter schools come from racialized minorities and are thus taught that they are racially inferior to their white schoolmates).
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Amazon bills its Rekognition image classification system as a "deep learning-based image and video analysis" system; it markets the system to US police forces for use in analyzing security camera footage, including feeds from police officers' bodycams.
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Fort Lauderdale, Florida's Sun Sentinel daily newspaper published an ad for a gun show on the front page just below stories about a benefit for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and another article about the guilty plea of the man who killed 5 people last year at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood airport. After Stoneman Douglas families and others responded with WTF, the paper apologized and then later announced a moratorium on gun ads. From the Miami New Times:
"It's a mess. It's horrible," says Julie Anderson, the Sun Sentinel's editor in chief. "We're taking every step possible to make sure our editorial staff always see ads before publication so something like this doesn't slip through."
In her statement, publisher Nancy Meyer said, "We deeply regret placement of a gun advertisement on our front page Wednesday morning. It has been against our policy to run gun and other types of controversial advertising on our front page."
(Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)
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Linus F. Phillip was 30 years old when Largo, Florida cops shot him when he drove his car away from a gas-station where he had been stopped by police.
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A young man from Florida hoped to impress a potential prom date with a sign reading "IF I WAS BLACK I'D BE PICKING COTTON,BUT I'M WHITE SO I'M PICKING U 4 Prom?"
The Huffington Post:
Acting principal Kathy Wilks sent this message to parents:
“We want to make everyone aware of a student’s social media post that has caused a very concerning situation. It involves one of our seniors and his ‘promposal’ to another student.
“It was racial in nature and administration became aware of it last night. Many who saw the post are understandably upset with its contents as well as the subsequent commentary to the post. Riverview High School absolutely does not condone or support the message conveyed in this post.”
It isn't clear from the story if the target of his romantic proposal agreed to go to prom with him. Read the rest
A drone captured this aerial peek of Disneyland's Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge (aka "Star Wars land") as it stood at the beginning of last month. I was just at the park this past weekend with my daughter and we caught glimpses of its construction while riding Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. As you'll see, the future planet of Batuu is ginormous (14 acres in total).
The Disney Parks Blog reports:
At Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, guests will be transported to the planet of Batuu, a remote outpost on the galaxy’s edge that was once a busy crossroads along the old sub-lightspeed trade routes. Here, guests will find themselves in the middle of the action at two attractions that take detail and immersion to the next level: one that lets guests take the controls of Millennium Falcon on a customized secret mission, and an epic Star Wars adventure that puts guests in the middle of a climactic battle between the First Order and the Resistance.
As you can see in this video, which Bob Iger shared this morning during the 2018 Annual Meeting of Shareholders, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is shaping up to be one of the most detailed and immersive lands ever created in Disney Parks history.
Star Wars: Galaxy Edge is also being built at Disney's Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World. The lands are estimated to cost $1B each and both are set to open in 2019. Yahoo!
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Sean Simpson is a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who had expressed an openness the idea of arming teachers to prevent school shootings.
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