McGruber quotes IEEE Spectrum: Greg Mills, co-owner of Southwest Engineering Concepts, is suing the state of Arizona's technical registration board to protest being fined for working without an engineering license, which Mills maintains he doesn't need because it doesn't pertain to the type of work he performs. It's the latest case pitting engineers against state licensing agencies that by some accounts have become more aggressive in attempting to regulate who can call themselves an engineer, even as the use of that term becomes more widespread. Meanwhile, licensing proponents maintain it's necessary for the public interest and point out that Arizona statutes have clear definitions of what an engineer is... The central issue is Mills' right to call himself an engineer despite not being a state-licensed professional engineer. Mills, an IEEE Member, has worked as an engineer for three decades, at first for aerospace and tech companies. For the last 10 years, he and his wife have co-owned a three-person engineering consulting firm that makes electronics prototypes and other equipment for startups and small and mid-sized companies that can't afford to hire in-house engineering staff... Mills is represented by the same public interest law firm that helped an Oregon engineer win a similar suit against that stateâ(TM)s engineering licensing agency.

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Top democrats make last-minute pitch to their Republican counterparts as impeachment vote looms.

A photo roundup of some of last week's events, including a royal procession in Thailand and demonstrations in Algeria.

Day after security forces disperse demonstration, protesters march on parliament to call for an independent government.

Android Authority argues that the new Microsoft Chromium Edge browser "is full of neat tricks" and "packs more features than Firefox": The final major feature is called Apps. Essentially, Apps allows you to download and install web pages and web apps for use without the Edge browser. Previously, you had to find these dedicated web apps via the Microsoft Store, but now Edge handles downloading and managing web apps all in the browser. For example, you can download the Twitter web app via Edge just by visiting the Twitter website and clicking "install this site as an app" from the settings menu. Once installed, you can run the webpage as an app directly from your desktop, taskbar, or start menu like any other piece of software. It's like saving links only better, as some web apps can run offline too. Alternatively, you can install the Android Authority webpage and run it as an app to catch up with the latest news without having to boot up Edge each time. It's pretty neat and something that I intend to use more often. Overall, Edge offers everything you'll want in a web browser and more. Microsoft finally feels on the cutting edge of the internet. The browser does have a smaller range of supported extensions, but you can also manually install Chrome extensions, according to the article. It adds that Microsoft Edge Chromium "typically uses just 70 to 75 percent of the RAM required by Chrome [and] is even more lightweight than Firefox." And while acknowledging that Microsoft's Windows 10 "has its share" of telemetry issues, the article adds that "at no point during my couple of weeks with Edge have I noticed it thrashing my hard drive. "Chrome has a habit of scanning various files on my computer, despite opting out of all the available data sharing options. This isn't great for system performance and raises obvious security questions."

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At least 22 people killed by ADF fighters in the eastern town of Beni, officials say.

An anonymous reader quotes Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column: WebAssembly is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine and this week, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) dubbed it an official web standard and the fourth language for the Web that allows code to run in the browser, joining HTML, CSS and JavaScript... With this week's news, WebAssembly has officially reached version 1.0 and is supported in the browser engines for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer, and the Bytecode Alliance launched last month to help ensure "a WebAssembly ecosystem that is secure by default" and for bringing WebAssembly to outside-the-browser use. Of course, not everything is 100% rosy. As pointed out by an article in The Register, WebAssembly also brings with it an increased level of obfuscation of what exactly is going on, giving it an increased ability to perform some surreptitious actions. For example, they cite one study that "found 'over 50 percent of all sites using WebAssembly apply it for malicious deeds, such as [crypto] mining and obfuscation.'" Nonetheless, with WebAssembly gaining this designation by W3C, it is, indeed, time to pay closer attention to the newly nominated Web language standard.

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Final declaration called for fresh proposals on pledges on reducing carbon emissions to be in place by COP26.

The second fire in the area in less than a week kills 10 and injures several others, officials say.

Chrome 79 is creating an issue with WebView (the Android component that allows apps to display content from the web), reports 9to5Google: On Friday morning, Android developers reliant on WebView and local storage began encountering an issue where their apps lost data after users updated to version 79 of WebView. Those affected took to Chromium's bug tracker, and have described the incident as a "catastrophe" and "major issue." To end users, it's as if apps were entirely reset and just downloaded for the first time. This includes saved data disappearing or being logged out. Given the level of system opacity, most will blame developers for a problem that's out of their hands. By that afternoon, Google engineers responded and isolated the issue to "profile layout changes" where "local storage was missed off the list of files migrated." A member of the Chromium team apologized Saturday morning, with the Chrome/WebView rollout halted after 50% of devices already received the update. At the highest priority level (P0), Google is currently "working on a solution that minimizes the data loss, and that can be rolled out safely." The last guidance for a patch is 5-7 days.

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Marry Mubaiwa was arrested on Saturday evening and will likely appear in court on Monday, anti-corruption body says.

Slashdot reader alaskana98 writes: In the February 2001 issue of Maximum PC, technical editor Will Smith described in his column what he would like to see in the "perfect set-top box". At a time when arguably the best 'PVR' experience was being provided by the first iterations of the Tivo (with no HDTV or LAN connectivity), Will's description of what a set-top box could and should be comes eerily close to what we now know as the Apple TV and other 'set-top' boxes such as Roku and Amazon Firestick... To be fair, not every feature on his list would come to pass. For example, he envisioned this device as essentially serving as the main "broadband router of a household, sharing your Internet connection with any networkable device in your house". Also, he envisions the media box as providing a "robust web experience" for the whole family, something that today's set-top boxes aren't especially good at (anyone remember WebTV?). Still, in wanting an "elusive magical box" that "will set on top of our HDTV's and do everything our computers, game consoles, and VCRs do, only better", he was prescient in his descriptions of what would eventually materialize as the Apple TV and other like-minded set-top boxes, impressive for a denizen of the year 2001. Are you impressed with Smith's predictive ability? Here's what he wrote... On networking: "My set-top box will have to have a high-speed broadband connection...sharing your Internet connection with any networkable device in your house via standard Ethernet, Wi-Fi compatible wireless Ethernet, Bluetooth". On gaming: "[W]ill include state-of-the-art 3D acceleration and gaming support" and "will include Bluetooth-style wireless connections for all your controllers". On media playback: "[W]ill also serve as a media store, handing the duties of both my high-def personal video recorder (HD-PVR) and digital audio jukebox". On device collaboration: "integrating the ability to automatically synchronize with Bluetooth-enabled" devices. [Though the original article says "PDAs"]

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"The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously Thursday to push a plan forward that would take away several channels of airwaves from automakers and local governments that have been planning to build out a communication network for cars and surrounding smart infrastructure," writes Consumer Reports, in an article shared by McGruber. "The 5-0 commission vote indicated how much ground the auto industry has lost in protecting the airwaves that have been reserved since 1999 as a so-called safety spectrum." The industry and some state and local governments have been counting on it to deliver vehicle-to-everything communications, or V2X, that could improve safety and also help in the development of self-driving-car technology... The FCC plan would all but kill an approach to V2X that relies on short-range radio, called DSRC, that has been deployed by local governments at some 100 test sites around the country, safety advocates say. That could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded local investments into smart traffic lights and other smart road technology would be wasted, according to state officials. The FCC plan would divide 75 MHz of the safety spectrum between WiFi and auto safety applications. The FCC proposal allocates 20 MHz for a newer V2X technology, known as C-V2X, and leaves 10 MHz for either C-V2X or DSRC. All five FCC commissioners spoke about the vast economic potential of more airwaves dedicated to WiFi, and said not enough had happened with the V2X technology to continue to set aside so much spectrum for its exclusive use. Republican Commissioner Michael O'Rielly said some opponents of the FCC plan might say the move puts vehicle safety in jeopardy or will lead to increased fatalities. "That is pure gibberish," O'Rielly said at the hearing. "Everyone on this dais wants our families, friends, neighbors, countrymen, and countrywomen to be safe when traveling in motor vehicles. DSRC hasn't come anywhere close to fruition." Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said other countries were dedicating less than 75 MHz to V2X applications, and the 10 MHz that could be available for DSRC in the FCC plan matches what Japan is doing. The article concludes that the commission "will collect and analyze public comments over the next several months before any plan becomes final. "But the comments of the commissioners and FCC staff left little doubt about the direction the agency is moving in.

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This is the right question. None of us should just shrug it off and say the impeachment vote will be partisan as usual. They shouldn't get off that easy. They must know that we know that they're voting for the end of the Constitution. We should all write this as fact. Make the record clear.

Are you kidding? Amazon appropriated the small company's trademark -- Elastic? Please, NYT call at least one developer before you run a story like this, or do a search. This is super embarrassing -- for you. Here's the problem with the premise. Amazon has been calling their services Elastic this and that since inception. The first was EC2. Elastic Compute Cloud. It was started in 2006, six years before the startup was founded. It seems to me, unless I'm missing something, that the startup copied Amazon.