A bill signed into law by the governor of Texas earlier this month has banned the use of red-light traffic cameras throughout the state. The use of such cameras, which capture images of vehicles passing through an intersection while the stoplight is red, will end when cities’ current contracts with their vendors expire. While supporters of the cameras have promoted them as a means to make traffic safer and generate funds via ticketing, the former and latter purposes have often found themselves at odds. Studies by the Texas Transportation Institute…
In its first season, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. focused on conflicts that fell within the background of the MCU. The enemies faced by the cast were small, localized, not the world-ending threats that the movies’ heroes went up against in each outing. However, in the second season and onward, AoS transitioned to plots with higher stakes, particularly as the entry of the Inhumans raised the villains and the agents themselves to levels of power beyond even some of the ‘proper’ heroes. The episode ‘What They Become’ is a clean break from…
Fake news is content created with the appearance of journalism but without the rigor of the journalistic process, created to draw attention to itself for purposes of driving web traffic for monetization, or to draw attention away from and to degrade public opinion of real news. Regardless of the goal, by contaminating the perception of news with content that is of lower quality, fake or junk news causes the entire sphere of journalism to be perceived as less trustworthy simply for containing or resembling junk news. Journalists can attempt to…
The first round of the contest for leadership of the United Kingdom’s Conservative party ended with results announced Thursday. With 114 votes, Boris Johnson leads the race to be next party leader and Prime Minister. Johnson’s vote count practically guarantees that the final round of the contest will include him as one of two final candidates. 105 MPs would be enough to see Johnson through all further votes to the final two. Trailing Johnson in the votes were Jeremy Hunt at 43 votes, Michael Gove at 37, Raab with 27,…
The Linux operating system is the main competitor to major OSes such as Microsoft Windows and Apple’s macOS. The development of Linux started with a man from Finland named Linus Torvalds. As a computer science student in the 90s, Torvalds decided he did not like the Microsoft MS-DOS operating system available to personal computers at the time. While personal computers used MS-DOS, a precursor to Windows, computers in universities used an operating system called UNIX. Torvalds was introduced to the programming of operating systems by a Unix course at his…
Exit through the Gift Shop is a sort of meta-documentary, directed by the well-known British street artist Banksy. The subject of the film, Thierry Guetta, was at one point a would-be documentarian of the street art movement, who later rebranded as a street artist himself under the name Mr. Brainwash. About two-thirds of the film’s footage was taken by Guetta himself, who was a prolific videographer to the point of obsession, described as carrying a camera absolutely everywhere and having thousands of hours of taped footage stowed in boxes at…
In 1984, a then 19-year-old Michael Dell founded the company that would become Dell Computers with only one thousand dollars, abandoning a college education in favor of selling mail-order hard drive upgrades to corporations out of his condo. Within a year, Dell was making millions, and tens of millions a year after that. Thirty years later, in what Forbes called “the nastiest tech buyout ever,” Dell the man would spend billions to take Dell the company off the publicly traded market and get a majority share in a company that…