The San Diego Public Library system just wiped out overdue fines for 130,000 people. It's part of a growing trend, reports NPR: The changes were enacted after a city study revealed that nearly half of the library's patrons whose accounts were blocked as a result of late fees lived in two of the city's poorest neighborhoods. "I never realized it impacted them to that extent," said Misty Jones, the city's library director. For decades, libraries have relied on fines to discourage patrons from returning books late. But a growing number of some of the country's biggest public library systems are ditching overdue fees after finding that the penalties drive away the people who stand to benefit the most from free library resources. From San Diego to Chicago to Boston, public libraries that have analyzed the effects of late fees on their cardholders have found that they disproportionately deter low-income residents and children. Acknowledging these consequences, the American Library Association passed a resolution in January in which it recognizes fines as "a form of social inequity" and calls on libraries nationwide to find a way to eliminate their fines.... Lifting fines has had a surprising dual effect: More patrons are returning to the library, with their late materials in hand. Chicago saw a 240% increase in return of materials within three weeks of implementing its fine-free policy last month. The library system also had 400 more card renewals compared with that time last year. "It became clear to us that there were families that couldn't afford to pay the fines and therefore couldn't return the materials, so then we just lost them as patrons altogether," said Andrea Telli, the city's library commissioner. "We wanted our materials back, and more importantly, we wanted our patrons back..." in San Diego, officials calculated that it actually would be saving money if its librarians stopped tracking down patrons to recover books. The city had spent nearly $1 million to collect $675,000 in library fees each year.

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PM's exit likely to end his political career but not 'dysfunctional system' that brought him to power, analysts say.

An unflinching look at South Korea's Sewol ferry disaster as it unfolds and its ramifications on a nation.

"The desperate search for ways to help the world's coral reefs rebound from the devastating effects of climate change has given rise to some radical solutions," reports the Washington Post. There's coral "nurseries" in the Caribbean, while Hawaiian scientists are trying to breed a new and more resilient type of coral. But at least one team focused on the herbivorous fish which improve the microbiomes around the reefs -- party by eating the seaweed that would otherwise compete with the coral. And they think the solution lies in sounds: On Friday, British and Australian researchers rolled out another unorthodox strategy that they say could help restoration efforts: broadcasting the sounds of healthy reefs in dying ones. In a six-week field experiment, researchers placed underwater loudspeakers in patches of dead coral in Australia's Great Barrier Reef and played audio recordings taken from healthy reefs... The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that twice as many fish flocked to the dead coral patches where healthy reef sounds were played compared with the patches where no sound was played... According to the study, the number of species present in the reef patches where healthy sounds were played increased by 50 percent over the other patches. The new fish populations included species from all parts of the food web, such as scavengers, herbivores and predatory fish. Importantly, the fish that arrived at the patches tended to stay there... The technique, if it can be replicated on larger scales, could offer scientists another tool to revive coral reefs around the world that have been ravaged by climate change, overfishing and pollution in recent years. Scientists have warned that climate change may already be accelerating too fast for some reefs to recover at all and that conservation efforts are not keeping pace with the devastation. Severe coral bleaching triggered by extreme heat waves killed off 50 percent of the Great Barrier Reef, the planet's largest coral reef, in 2016 and 2017. Such bleaching events -- which occur when the nutrient-rich and color-providing algae that live in corals are expelled because of heat stress -- are occurring four times as frequently as they did in the 1980s, as The Washington Post has reported.

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Social Democrats elect new leaders, putting at risk the chancellor's coalition government.

PM announces plan to step down in January after coming under pressure over scandal surrounding journalist's killing.

"1983 had seen an explosion of home computer models of varying capabilities and at various price-points," remembers the vintage computing site Paleotronic, looking back at the historic tech battle between Commodore, Texas Instruments, and eventually Coleco. Slashdot reader beaverdownunder shares the site's fond remembrance of the days when "The question on everyone's minds was not who was going to win, but who would survive." Commodore's Jack Tramiel saw an emerging market for low-cost home computers, releasing the VIC-20 in 1980. At a US$299 price point sales were initially modest, but rival Texas Instruments, making a play for the bottom of the market, would heavily discount its TI99/4A, and start a price war with Commodore that culminated with both computers selling as low as $US99. Only one company was going to walk away... [W]hile TI spokesperson Bill Cosby joked about how easy it was to sell a computer when you gave people US$100 to buy one, Jack Tramiel wasn't going to take this lying down, and he dropped the price of the VIC-20 to US$200 in order to match TI. However, unlike TI, who was selling the 4A at a loss in order to gain market share, Commodore wasn't losing any money at all, since it owned MOS Technology, the maker of many of the chips inside of the VIC-20, and as a result got all of those components at cost. Meanwhile TI was paying full price and haemorrhaging cash on every model sold. You would think TI might have realised they were playing a fool's game and back off but instead after Tramiel dropped the wholesale price of the VIC-20 to US$130 they went all-in, dropping the 4A's retail price to $150. Commodore went to $100, and TI matched it, with many retailers selling both machines for $99. Inside TI, Cosby's joke stopped being funny, and many wondered whether management had dug them into a hole they could never climb out of... After all the dust had settled, the only real winner was Commodore. It fended off all of its competitors and cemented the Commodore 64 as the low-budget 8-bit computer everyone wanted their parents to buy.

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Labour party lawmakers give 'unanimous support' to embattled PM Joseph Muscat as protesters demand his resignation.

Critics of coalition with Chancellor Merkel's conservatives are chosen as new leaders of junior partner party.

"Kali Linux 2019.4 was released last week and with it comes an 'Undercover' mode that can be used to quickly make the Kali desktop look like Windows 10," reports Bleeping Computer: Kali is a Linux distribution created for ethical hacking and penetration testing and is commonly used by researchers and red teamers to perform security tests against an organization. As most people are used to seeing Windows and macOS devices being used, it may look suspicious to see a user running Kali Linux with it's distinctive dragon logo and a Linux environment in an office lobby or other public setting. With this in mind, in Kali Linux 2019.4 the developers created a new 'Undercover' mode that will make the desktop look similar to Windows 10 in order to draw less suspicion. The script even hides Kali's dragon logo, explains a post on the Kali blog, so "you can work a bit more incognito. After you are done and in a more private place, run the script again and you switch back to your Kali theme. Like magic...!" "Thanks to Robert, who leads our penetration testing team, for suggesting a Kali theme that looks like Windows to the casual view..."

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After months of violent clashes, Adel Abdul Mahdi said he had no other choice, but to resign as Iraq's prime minister.

Guatemala's northern Peten region anchors the largest tropical forest north of the Amazon but as more people settle in the area, poaching and other threats to its biodiversity are rising fast.

At a dinner last night with local friends, a question came up -- What is Digital Ocean? I mention them in my posts and the nightly email.

I realllly like that people read my blog even if they don't know what everything means. This is one of the big principles of the net -- ignore what you don't understand. But read it anyway, over time unfamiliar ideas do sink in. I was tired and too much under the influence of White Russians last night to attempt the answer. I'll try now.

Think of Digital Ocean as a giant warehouse of personal computers. You can rent one of the computers for about $20 a month, and put software on the computer, even stuff that I write myself. This is a big deal because the ability to run software "in the cloud" used to be something only employees of big companies could do. Now anyone can.

Unlike my house in the woods their computers are less likely to lose power or their net connection. Also their warehouse is in a place where your computers, and your phone, can access it. I don't want thousands of people connecting to the computers in my house. It's a security thing.

So I pay them money and they run the server for me.

Over the years, as you might imagine, the cost goes down and the power goes up. A lot. They have competition, so that helps keep the price down and performance up. I like Digital Ocean because their software and docs are good, and I just like the company. They are by far not the biggest company in this space, all the major tech companies compete, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM.

PS: This is not an ad. I pay full price for my Digital Ocean servers.

There's no doubt we have crossed the tipping point in the climate crisis. Part of the equation is politics. We're not only not doing anything to halt the crisis, we're accelerating it.

For crying out loud it’s what, December already? What the..