This is a photo I took the last time I was trying to get off a plane, but the staff refused to bring my chair to the door. I'm waiting with my wheelchair joystick, headrest, and cushion as the cleaning crew moves through the plane.
The Department of Transportation is proposing new rules to improve the experience of passengers like me. However, rules already exist—the problem is that the gate agents, flight attendants, and airport staff who should follow them either accidentally or willfully ignore them.
The new rules include training, and I'm suggesting expanding the training to all customer-facing staff. I also suggest having the rules clearly posted. If you like these ideas, please consider posting a comment to the DOT in support, either in your own words or referring to mine:
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I thank Secretary Buttigieg, Senator Duckworth, Director Benjamin, and Disabled activists for this important proposal. As a Disabled air traveler and power wheelchair rider, I have two requests.
1. The current proposal includes "annual training, including hands-on training, of airline employees and contractors who physically assist passengers with mobility disabilities or handle passengers’ wheelchairs." I request that this annual training be provided to all airline and airport staff who interact with customers, not just those who physically assist or handle.
In fact, as a woman with muscular dystrophy who cannot walk at all, my best experiences have been with the people physically lifting me, and my worst experiences have been with gate agents and flight attendants who treat me with disrespect while violating the law. They have raised their voices at me while I'm instructing my assistant in preparing my wheelchair for stowage, threatened to "offload" me from the flight, repeatedly denied me and rolled their eyes when I request that my wheelchair be brought to the door, and repeatedly resisted ensuring adjoining seats for me and my assistant, who sometimes has to physically prevent me from falling forward from the airplane seat.
I request that you expand the annual training to all customer-facing airline and airport staff, including gate agents and flight attendants, because these staff members have significant power over Disabled travelers' safety and experiences.
2. While the DOT's Aviation Consumer Protection policies (which state "Your device must be returned to you in a timely manner as close as possible to the door of the aircraft") and Airline Passengers with Disabilities Bill of Rights are excellent, they are difficult to call upon in the moment they're being violated. When gate agents, flight attendants, and other staff have tried to pressure me against the law, I have had to resort to finding the DOT's laws and policies on my phone (try doing that in airplane mode!). The times I can successfully excavate and point to the documentation are the only times staff have reluctantly backed down. But I believe the burden of carrying the law around shouldn't fall on each Disabled passenger.
Therefore, I request that these laws and policies be easily visible and available in accessible formats, such as: (a) being posted prominently at gate terminals and check-in desks, (b) being available in print at gate terminals and check-in desks, and (c) being included in onboard brochures at every seat.
I believe these two additions to the proposal will greatly enhance its ability to accomplish its mission to ensure airline passengers who ride wheelchairs can travel safely and with dignity.
Beta12 of NVDA 2024.1 is now available for download & testing.
We know there have been a lot of betas, but THIS is the final planned beta for 2024.1. We'd like to thank everyone who has been testing these and reporting issues to us.
Beta12 of NVDA 2024.1 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what the next version of NVDA has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome y…
For Those Using WordPress.com for Web Site Maintenance: From the WordPress Blog: Welcome to a More Powerful WP-Admin Experience – WordPress.com News groups.io/g/tech-vi/message/64…
This is boggling to me, a drop-in replacement of CUDA and neither #Intel nor #AMD saw it as worth paying to develop? How can chip companies look at NVidia’s #NVDA $2T valuation and “can’t keep ‘em in stock” situation and say “Nah, why would we pay some dude to make us a viable alternative”? (I mean, maybe the library sucks or competing with private projects, but it’s a single developer, Michael, how much could that cost? A million dollars?)
Is there any chance we can encourage you to trend #NVIDIA when that's the company you mean, please? I know what their NASDAQ handle is, but #NVDA is much more widely known as the name of the screen reader we make and the #NVDA hashtag is very widely used for the screen reader. It will save both our communities polluting each other's feeds. If you'd like to find out more about the screen reader, our website is nvaccess.org/ - Thank you!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (GIFT) is a postulate which asserts that normal, well-adjusted people may display psychopathic or antisocial behaviors when given both anonymity and a captive audience on the Internet.
This isn't merely wrong, it's *dangerously* wrong. The idea that forcing people to identify themselves online will improve discourse is demonstrably untrue. Facebook famously adopted its "real names" policy because Mark Zuckerberg claimed to believe that "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity":
In service to this claimed belief, Zuckerberg kicked off the "nym wars," turning himself into the sole arbiter of what each person's true name was, with predictably tragicomic consequences:
That's not *despite* the fact that people have to use their "real" names to participate there, but because of it. After all, the people who are most vulnerable to bullying and harassment are the ones who choose pseudonyms or anonymity so that they can speak freely. Forcing people to use their "real names" means that the most powerful bullies speak with impunity, and their victims are faced with the choice of retreat or being targeted offline.
This can be a matter of life and death. Cambodian dictator Hun Sen uses Facebook's real names policy to force dissidents to unmask themselves, which exposes them to arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing. For members of the Cambodian diaspora, the choice is to unmask themselves or expose their family back home to retaliation:
Some of the biggest internet fuckwads I've ever met - and I've met some big ones! - were utterly unashamed about using their real names. Some of the nicest people I know online have never told me their offline names. Greater internet fuckwad theory is just plain wrong.
But that doesn't mean that anonymity is totally harmless. There is a category of person who reliably uses a certain, specific kind of anonymity to do vicious things that inflicts serious harm on whole swathes of people: corporate bullies.
Take Tinyletter. Tinyletter is a beloved newsletter app that was created to help people who just wanted to talk to others, without a thought to going viral or getting rich. It was sold to Mailchimp, which was sold to Intuit, who killed it:
On February 29th, 2024, Mailchimp shuttered TinyLetter, a simple email service that attracted a number of personal and experimental writers in the mid-‘10s.
Tinyletter was a perfect little gem of a service. It cost almost nothing to run, and made an enormous number of peoples' lives better every day. Shutting it down was an act of corporate depravity but some faceless Intuit manager who woke up one day and said "Fuck all those people. Just fuck them."
No one knows who that person was. That person will never have to look those people in the eyes - those people whose lives were made poorer for that Intuit executive's indifference. That person is the greater fuckwad, and that fuckwaddery *depends* on their anonymity.
Or take Pixsy, a corporate shakedown outfit that helps copyleft trolls trick people into making tiny errors in Creative Commons attributions and then intimidates them into handing over thousands of dollars:
Copyleft trolling is an absolutely depraved practice, a petty grift practiced by greedy fuckwads who are completely indifferent to the harm they cause - even if it means bankrupting volunteer-run nonprofits for a buck:
Pixsy claims that it is proud of its work "defending artists' rights," but when I named the personnel who signed their names to these profoundly unethical legal threats, Pixsy CEO Kain Jones threatened to sue me:
The expectation of corporate anonymity runs deep and the press is surprisingly complicit. I once spent weeks working on an investigative story about a multinational corporation's practices. I spent hours on the phone with the company's VP of communications, over the course of many calls. When we were done, they said, "Now, of course, you can't name me in the article. All of that has to be attributed to 'a spokesperson.'"
I was baffled. Nothing this person said was a secret. They weren't blowing the whistle. They weren't leaking secrets. They were a corporate official, telling me the official corporate line. But they wouldn't sign their name to it.
I wrote an article about for the *Guardian*. It was the only *Guardian* column any of my editors there ever rejected, in more than a decade of writing for them:
Given the press's deference to this anodyne anonymity, it's no wonder that official spokespeople expect this kind of anonymity. I routinely receive emails from corporate spokespeople disputing my characterization of their employer's conduct, but insisting that I not attribute their dubious - and often blatantly false - statements to them by name.
These are the greater corporate fuckwads, who commit their sins from behind a veil of anonymity. That brand of bloodless viciousness, depravity and fraud absolutely depends on anonymity.
Mark Zuckerberg claimed that "multiple identities" enabled bad behavior - as though it was somehow healthy for people to relate to their bosses, lovers, parents, toddlers and barbers in exactly the same way. Zuckerberg's motivation was utterly transparent: having "multiple identities" doesn't mean you "lack integrity" - it just makes it harder to target you for ads.
There's a new script for REAPER to play a sound when renders complete. You can choose any sound to play, and you just need to add the script to your global s...
Ableton 12 released today and I saw a couple of people curious whether it’s worth trying. I’ve been testing it for a while and my main takeaway from it is that it’s for the most part a joy to use. The workflow is quite unique, because you’re essentially assembling different sections of your song that you can play live (hence the name) before committing to a more typical timeline, and I personally found this actually got me making way more musical output than before. You also get a lot of very interesting and varied sounds and patches to work with, and 95% of the built-in devices are accessible (with the exception of the ones based on Max4Live which is kind of like the JS effects in Reaper). There is also currently no way to edit automation like you can in Reaper or Logic, which is probably its biggest limitation right now but will most likely be fixed in a future update. But yeah, if you’ve been wondering if it’s worth trying, absolutely. It’s amazing how it went from completely inaccessible to the state it’s in now even if there are some things left to do. There’s also already some accessibility resources on this page help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/arti…
@Bri I think they've done some amazing #accessibility work as for the first release. I find the non-screen UI a bit too complicated and somewhat chatty, but it might be a good thing for many people. I am still getting used to the workflow because some of the essential statuses are missing. Anyway, just my experience!
I still need 2 more donations to win my "friendly wager" w/ our fundraising team. I bet I could get 10 Mastodon users to donate to a CU Fund during the #buffsallin campaign. If you can spare even $1 and 5 min, PLEASE consider donating to CMCI using this link buffsallin.cu.edu/o/university…. This is a great way to show marketing groups that Mastodon is worth adding to their social media mix.
@mgifford CU uses a fairly unique approach to fundraising where anyone can have a fund for just about any reason. Like frisbee, donate to giving.cu.edu/fund/mens-ultima…. Apple trees? giving.cu.edu/fund/boulder-app…. We have > 2K funds on giving.cu.edu/. This CMCI was one featured in a campaign CU Boudler is running right now called #buffsallin. Not all 2K funds are part of that campaign, but you could donate to any of the funds on buffsallin.cu.edu/ if you add the utm values to the query string.
For 24 hours on March 6, Buffs everywhere will unite behind CU Boulder students and researchers as they lead, innovate and make their impact felt like never before.
@mgifford I am targeting CMCI because ofthe work they have been doing the fediverse made it win/win. The service CU uses for crowdfunding also provided support for drupal.org/project/community_f… in D7, but when using the service directly they provide reports of the donation sources for marketers based on the utm values in the query string. The process of donating is embarrassingly convoluted and we lose utm reporting in the process right now. Community Funded -> D7 Commerce -> Salesforce
@mgifford Everything Community Funded is doing could be built in Drupal Commerce, but the our marketing teams really like working with a vendor used by many of their peer institutions. What we're doing on giving.cu.edu will change in 2025 to remain PCI compliant, but that's no longer a site/service I'm directly responsible for. Adding ?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=organic_social to the end of any funds URL will work and still show that the donor source was Mastodon.
Last week, instead of getting angry at all of the nonsense people were spouting about Apple and the EU and blurting out a series of angry toots, I decided to instead write a calm and measured explanation of how the EU works from a tech management perspective, with references.
"Facing reality, whether it’s about Apple or the EU, is a core requirement for good management"
"Skutočne sme sa ocitli v zlej situácii, keď hrozí, že strategické objetky budú brániť systémy kratšieho dosahu. Lenže je klamlivá predstava, že pred odovzdaním S-300 sme boli v lepšej situácii. Exminister obrany Jaroslav Naď aj armáda potvrdzujú, že predtým zväčša nečinne zaháľala v garážach, lebo nám chýbali náhradné diely atď. Ukrajinci ju pred nasadením do bojov museli najskôr takisto poslať do dielní." 1/2 dennikn.sk/3866575/newsfilter-…
1. Smer vyčíta Ústavnému súdu rýchlosť, ale sám hovorí, že mal maximálne hodiny. 2. Bojí sa o bezpečnosť Mochoviec, ale uráža spojencov, ktorí ich majú brániť. 3. Po vlkoch a medveďoch si Taraba spomenul na bezzásahové zóny.
Say again: WHAT? – Well, OK, 1,114 _duplicated_ apps. – What, you dupe us?
Nah, I MIRROR!
IzzyOnDroid hereby proudly announces its first mirror has gone live about 24 hours ago. A big thanks to Andrew Lewman for giving it a home in the bay area "beyond the sea". So faster access for those "over there", and more resilience too.
This is a repository of apps to be used with F-Droid. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
Aktualizoval jsem pixelfed.cz na nejnovější verzi 0.11.13 Nyní máme na nový proces registrací. Myslím, že to není špatný nápad, lepší než Captcha, ale zdlouhavější. 1/2
Pixelfed is redefining community engagement with its latest feature: Curated Onboarding. This new feature is not just a way to sign up; it's a way to weave into the community's fabric by sharing your story and intentions on the platform...
Gun Trails v1.2 adds a new novice mode, improved load times & bug fixes. This is close to my original vision for the game, so I'm satisfied with this being the last major patch.
Nechci vypadat jak antivaxer, ale tohle je možná už trochu za hranou 😀 Muž se nechal 217krát naočkovat proti covidu. Zkoumali ho vědci a nedoporučují to zpravy.aktualne.cz/zahranici/m…
podle nadpisu to vypadá, jakoby ho to nějak poškodilo, přitom v článku je, že naopak nemá žádné následky, jen že z jednoho případu se nemají dělat obecné závěry a na základě toho něco doporučovat.
Re last (About Windows 11 losing the android subsystem): Wow, that’s unexpected. But modern Microsoft (as in from the last few months/years) is really aggressively getting rid of everything that’s not profitable or used much anymore. All that to save costs to bring more crappy AI to Windows I guess. Or, could it be perhaps a foreshadowing of Amazon planning to ditch Android in favor of that custom Linux distro which they can control better, which would kill their android app store that Windows depended on? Hmmm…
In other news this was like the one thing that had me even remotely interested in eventually getting Windows 11, especially because it’s the one Android emulator that you can actually get some speech going on.
Best of MikeOldfield: https://goo.gl/5FqCWfSubscribe here: https://goo.gl/xRrbjsMusic video by Mike Oldfield performing Shadow On The Wall. (C) 1983 Mercury ...
It's #TuneTuesday and the theme is #IBoughtItFirst - the first single/album you got for yourself. @communiteatime is driving and picking the music, so don't say we didn't warn you. ⚠️
That first album was...Shepherd Moons by Enya. For a 90s teen into Irish and New Age music, what else would it have been? 😅
This was the fav song, and it made it onto an Ireland travel playlist for OSS-EU back in 2022. And now our earworm is yours! What was your first? 🐛
Enya - Caribbean Blue (Official Video)Subscribe to the Enya channel for the latest official music videos, Interviews and live performances here - https://www...
@chewie Okay, now that is a fantastic story - great tunes and getting to listen to them all to yourself! Let's add those to our Thunderbird Tunes shelf - they go nicely with @killyourfm's Thriller! 🌙 🚶
*cough* We....may have bought our second album, a 'Greatest Hits of Mozart,' to drive our younger sister out of the room we shared growing up. 😅
«That's The Way (I Like It)» es una canción escrita por H.W. (KC) Casey y Richard Finch, grabada y lanzada en junio de 1975 por K.C. & the Sunshine Band para...
Facebook appeared to be experiencing widespread technical problems Tuesday, with thousands of users logging errors in accessing the social media service.
that was me, after I ended a call. I was like, wait, bro! How! Am I hacked? That was my first thought. Turns out, it was facebook piece of shit issue. wow, it was not me. 😄
Yeah, everything went boom. Probably whatsapp around here went along the trainwreck too, because the one contact I have is not answering, which is not a big issue, but facebook threw me out, logged me out, treated me like the trash it is. LOL
cool! The one thing i find myself doing the most when using curl is piping to another program to pretty-print the JSON payload of the response. Would that be a possible option to add to curl? (Shame on me if it already exists)(and I don't mean the write-out option)
TIL if you have your iPhone plugged into your Mac and you do an AirDrop transfer, it can actually use the wired connection, so for iPhone 15 Pro/Max if you use a really good USB-C cable, you can transfer several gigabytes over AirDrop really quickly. Just used this to transfer some videos from the Blackmagic Cam app. WireDrop? 😅
pixelfed.cz na nejnovější verzi 0.11.13
Mám sice doma svůj vlastní server, ale proč nevyužít možnosti být normálním uživatelem 🙂
SuspiciousDuck
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