Futurology Today

Summary

Simon Vickers, 50, is on trial for the fatal stabbing of his 14-year-old daughter, Scarlett Vickers, during a kitchen play-fight at their Darlington home in July.

The court heard the family was throwing food and utensils while making dinner, and Vickers claims Scarlett accidentally impaled herself on a knife he was holding.

Prosecutors argue the wound was too deep to be accidental, alleging deliberate action.

Vickers denies murder and manslaughter, describing the incident as a tragic accident.

Kosovo police on Wednesday raided 10 Belgrade-linked government offices in ethnic Serb areas, the interior ministry said, the latest move by Pristina to dismantle a Serbian system of social services and political offices in the country ahead of parliamentary elections.

Serbia denounced the raids as a "dangerous escalation" just weeks ahead of the vote in majority-Albanian Kosovo, whose independence Serbia has refused to recognise.

Animosity between Kosovo and Serbia has persisted since the war between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanian insurgents in the late 1990s, and Belgrade refuses to acknowledge Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008.

Most of the offices targeted Wednesday provide no actual services on the ground, but have nevertheless long served as the symbolic presence of Serbia's political institutions inside Kosovo.

"The era of parallel and criminal municipalities and institutions of Serbia in the Republic of Kosovo ends," Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla said in a Facebook post. He listed the locations of the offices closed, including one in the capital Pristina.

Serbian post offices and banks were also shuttered during the operation, Svecla said.

Serbian Foreign Minister Marko Djuric called the closures a "dangerous escalation".

"These aggressive moves are not just an attack on institutions but a blatant attempt to undermine the collective rights and identity of Serbs in Kosovo," Djuric said in a social media post.

Employees at the offices said the Kosovo authorities had told them they did not have the proper paperwork to remain open, and signs posted on the buildings said activities on the premise had been suspended.

"They arrived at the office and told us that we could no longer work... they are demanding a certificate. I don't understand what they want," Novak Zivic, who oversees the Serbian local government office in Pristina, told the broadcaster RTS.

During an interview broadcast on Serbian television, President Aleksandar Vucic said employees affected by the closures would continue to be paid as usual.

They "will not lose their jobs, they will have an income and will support their families because Serbia takes care of them," Vucic said.

The raids come as ethnic tensions simmer in Kosovo ahead of February's parliamentary elections.

WASHINGTON, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Scientists have detected emanating from the nucleus of a galaxy relatively close to our Milky Way flashes of X-rays gradually increasing in frequency that seem to be coming from a white dwarf - a highly compact stellar ember - with a death wish.

The observations made using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope appear to show a white dwarf nearing the point of no return - called the event horizon - as it orbits the galaxy's supermassive black hole, according to the researchers.

"It is probably the closest object we've ever observed orbiting around a supermassive black hole. This is extremely close to the black hole's event horizon," said Megan Masterson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral student in physics and lead author of the study that was presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Maryland this week and will be published in the journal Nature.

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The original was posted on /r/sffpc by /u/Accomplished-Fill853 on 2025-01-15 18:38:58+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/sffpc by /u/Puffdotbusiness on 2025-01-15 18:35:13+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/sffpc by /u/Inevitable-Boot-6673 on 2025-01-15 17:57:13+00:00.

The future is now old man ;0]

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The original was posted on /r/framework by /u/zachfeldmanframework on 2025-01-15 17:04:34+00:00.

Hello Framework Community, I’m here to announce an exciting new beta feature we’ve just launched after hearing suggestions from our customers: the ability to share your laptop configuration and have it pre-populated in our configurator!

The code I wrote to make this happen saves some data we were not saving before and that is hard to reconstruct, so we decided to launch this for all orders with laptop configurations going forward. To use the feature, you have to have made an order for your laptop configuration starting a moment ago with some exceptions for orders we were testing with. We just flipped the feature flag to see the sharing link in your Profile -> Orders section generated by saving this extra data. This is what it looks like when your configuration was saved:

When you send the link to someone, they’ll be taken right to the configurator with as much of your configuration filled out as we can (some items may be out of stock, etc.) so they can copy your configuration exactly, super easily!

If you aren’t ready to purchase yet, but still want to share a configuration, you can use the new “Save” button at the bottom or top of the configurator to share a configuration in a similar way. This feature might also allow you to construct a sharing link for your previous configurations as well depending on if they are still available currently in our laptop configurator.

Additionally, the new Profile -> Saved Configurations section allows you to see previous configurations you’ve ordered for orders made after December 19th and for configurations you save:

We hope these features make shopping for our laptops with your friends and colleagues easier. Growing up, I loved going through online computer configurators, maxing out a configuration, or setting one up that would be perfect for the tasks I needed to complete like graphic design, music composition, or compiling code. Sharing it with others makes it even more fun. We hope you enjoy this new feature. But more importantly, we’d love to hear your thoughts so we can keep building features that meet your needs! Feel free to leave a comment to let us know what you think so we can keep on iterating and improving.

• Zach Feldman, Lead Software Engineer, Marketplace

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The original was posted on /r/steamdeck by /u/Mesha8 on 2025-01-15 19:18:47+00:00.

A while ago I decided to buy the switch, my first ever nintendo console. I saw online how much people love their games and assumed I would love them just as much.

When the switch arrived I didn't feel too excited about it. It felt sort of flimsy and the buttons were small. I was then also disapointed to find out how much nintendo games cost and that they basically never go on sale, so I had to go through the hassle of getting second games. What also stood out to me was that games that are cheaper on every other console were almost twice the price here (e.g. Doom was regularly on sale for 15, but costs 40 on switch, and it's a worse looking version).

I didn't feel like double dipping, and I wasn't in the mood to make progress in a game in two places. In the end I didn't even like nintendo games that much, so my switch ended up collecting dust pretty quickly.

That experience held me back from buying the deck until now. But recently I finally got one and I could immediately tell that it was different this time. Within a minute of booting it up I had access to my entire game library. And I can play them with mods.

On top of that the trackpads are amazing. Despite there being more powerful handhelds I went for the steam deck because of the trackpads and I am so glad that they not only work as I imagined, but are actually even much better than I hoped they would be.

Best of all I no longer have to consider where I buy I games, it doesn't matter at all anymore.

I would describe the steam deck as one of the best purchases I made in recent years. Absolutely worth it.

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The original was posted on /r/steamdeck by /u/PercentageClassic419 on 2025-01-15 17:59:25+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/steamdeck by /u/Averagemanguy91 on 2025-01-15 16:56:44+00:00.

On SD it's the perfect little side game to just distress and mess around with. The kind of game that thrives on the decks portability. I got it for 2 dollars during the winter sale but didn't pick up any dlc. Waiting for the next sale, but which DLC should I prioritize? The garden one was fun in the demo but they all look like fun

How does it differ culturally from here? Should I avoid some things or are there Chinese social media norms I should be aware of?

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The original was posted on /r/linux_gaming by /u/KosmicWolf on 2025-01-15 16:00:01+00:00.

I've been a Linux user since 2009, though it didn't become my main system until 2017 with Pop!_OS. And for the last few years, I've been exclusively on Linux.

Recently, I ran into some issues with some visual novels on Linux, and I was also curious to try out Affinity Photo, GIMP is okay, but I've always found its UI a bit clunky. Plus, I wanted to check out some other things like the Apple Music app and the Google Play Games app. Since I'm not a fan of dual booting, I decided to go all-in with Windows 11.

Just to be clear, I don't dislike Windows, and I actually quite like the Windows 11 UI. However, the overall experience wasn't really any better for me. Maybe it's because I've been on Linux for so long and I tend to buy hardware with Linux compatibility in mind and use software that works well on Linux.

Everything on Windows just felt slower and more tedious. For example, installing software felt less efficient – hunting around for EXE files on the web. I tried Chocolatey, but it was a bit slow. Browsing files, navigating settings, and using the different menus also felt slower. Even file transfer speeds seemed slower. I'm not saying the system itself was slow, just slower compared to what I'm used to. Also, while Windows 11 has visually appealing menus, they're not entirely functional, so sometimes I found myself having to use the old Control Panel.

Beyond that, Linux has come such a long way that my workflow (game dev and coding) and the games I play weren't any better on Windows. I know there are games like Fortnite that don't work on Linux, but I don't play those. Coding in JetBrains or VS Code wasn't any better (I'm aware Linux has been better at this for a long time), Blender was about the same, and since I've been learning Godot (which works great on Linux), I wasn't seeing any advantages there either.

So, what about the things I wanted to try on Windows? Well, the visual novels didn't work there either. The Apple Music app is fine, but my current setup can't take advantage of lossless quality anyway, so Cider on Linux does the job just fine. Google Play Games is pretty barebones. And Affinity Photo? It actually works well in a VM! I wouldn't recommend it for production work, but since I'm just testing it out and learning how to use it, it's perfectly fine for now. But if it's just for one piece of software, I can keep Windows to go on an USB.

To sum it up, Windows felt slower and didn't offer me a better experience, so I went back to Linux – Zorin OS, specifically. Why Zorin? I wanted a stable distro that looks nice, has great software compatibility (Ubuntu-based distros are the best for this imo), and I don't have the energy these days to troubleshoot random issues on more niche distros. I could have gone with Mint, which has a newer base (Zorin 17 is based on Ubuntu 22.04, while Mint 22 is based on Ubuntu 24.04), but I already had Zorin downloaded, so I went with that.

And in case anyone's curious, here's the hardware I'm running:

• Ryzen 5 5600X
• 32GB of RAM
• RTX 4060ti (yes, I went with Nvidia instead of AMD on Linux)
• 2x 1TB NVMe SSDs

Oh, and my peripherals (mouse, keyboard, headset, gamepads, etc.) don't require any special software and I have a single ultra wide monitor so VRR works fine and I don't use HDR ( HDR in my monitor sucks either way)

Miami-Dade’s newly elected property appraiser says it’s time for county property estimators to factor in the harm that climate change will bring to the local real estate market — and to lower property values accordingly.

Archived copies of the article:

• archive.today
• web.archive.org
• ghostarchive.org

Dr. Michael Parenti 1986 Lecture "Yellow Parenti"

Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

But that expropriation of the Third World—has been going on for 400 years—brings us to another revelation—namely, that the Third World is not poor. You don't go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich! The Philippines are rich! Brazil is rich! Mexico is rich! Chile is rich—only the people are poor. But there's billions to be made there, to be carved out, and to be taken—there's been billions for 400 years! The Capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labour. They have taken out of these countries—these countries are not underdeveloped—they're overexploited!

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The original was posted on /r/technology by /u/chrisdh79 on 2025-01-15 11:10:05+00:00.