Demi Lovato's huge 2008 single from her debut album featured "wait, what?" censorship.
The album version lyrics say "Kiss me, like you mean it, like you miss me."
The single radio version says "Hold me, like you mean it, like you miss me," spoiling the rhyme for no reason. Unless the promoters thought Disney's teenybopper audience couldn't handle kissing on a song.
What are you listening to this evening?
Dale is on vacation.
Tonight begins round II of the Democratic Primary Debates on CNN.
I've listed all ten participants in alphabetical order and you can vote for up to three candidates.
Let us know in the comment section how the debate went for you and how you liked the other candidates as well.
John Delaney brought his right wing arguments against Medicare for All to the CNN Democratic Debate, kowtowing to the health insurance companies, but Elizabeth Warren was there to smack him down.
After Delaney's repeated claims that we can't do big things with healthcare with Hickenlooper and Bullock as backup singers, Senator Warren looked at him, perplexed. "I don't understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for the President of the United States to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for," she said.
The audience broke out in cheers.
She continued with conviction, "I don't get it. Our biggest problem in Washington is corruption. It is giant corporations that have taken our government and that are holding it by the throat, and we need to have the courage to fight back against that and until we're ready to do that, it's just more of the same."
"Well, I'm ready to get in this fight. I'm ready to win this fight," Sen. Warren said.
She continued, "Insurance companies do not have a god-given right to suck money out of our health care system."
This was definitely a moment and one that was well-received.
A serious crash by a delivery drone in Switzerland have grounded the fleet and put a partnership on ice. Within a stone’s throw of a school, the incident raised grim possibilities for the possibilities of catastrophic failure of payload-bearing autonomous aerial vehicles.
The drones were operated by Matternet as part of a partnership with the Swiss Post (i.e. the postal service), which was using the craft to dispatch lab samples from one medical center for priority cases. As far as potential applications of drone delivery, it’s a home run — but twice now the craft have crashed, first with a soft landing and the second time a very hard one.
The first incident, in January, was the result of a GPS hardware error; the drone entered a planned failback state and deployed its emergency parachute, falling slowly to the ground. Measures were taken to improve the GPS systems.
The second failure in May, however, led to the drone attempting to deploy its parachute again, only to sever the line somehow and plummet to earth, crashing into the ground some 150 feet from a bunch of kindergartners. No one was hit but this narrowly avoided being a worst-case scenario for the service: not just a craft failing, but the emergency systems failing as well, and over not just a populated area but immediately over a bunch of children. The incident was documented last month but not widely reported.
Falling from a few hundred feet, the 12-kilogram (about 26 pounds) drone and payload could easily have seriously injured or even killed someone — this is why there are very strict regulations about flying over populated areas and crowds.
Obviously they grounded the fleet following this incident and will not spin up again until Matternet addresses the various issues involved. How was it even possible, for instance, that the parachute line was capable of being cut by something on the drone?
In a statement to IEEE Spectrum, which recently noted the news stateside, Matternet said that it “had never seen a failure like that in the past, neither in our expensive (sic) testing nor in commercial operations.” (Presumably they meant extensive.) The company issued a slightly different statement to TechCrunch:
This is the first time ever that our vehicle parachute system has failed. As stated in the report, the flight termination system was triggered nominally per the drone’s specification, but the parachute cord was severed during the parachute deployment.
At Matternet, we take the safety of our technology and operations extremely seriously. A failure of the parachute safety mechanism system is unacceptable and we are taking all the appropriate measures to address it.
Swiss Post and Matternet reacted to the incident immediately by grounding all the operations involving this vehicle type. Our experts analyzed the incident and proposed the appropriate mitigations which are being evaluated by FOCA. We will restart operations once Matternet and Swiss Post, FOCA and our hospital customers in Switzerland are satisfied that the appropriate mitigations have been applied.
Drone delivery is a promising field, but situations like this one don’t do it any favors when regulators take a look. Despite sunny predictions from the industry, there is a huge amount of work yet to be done in terms of flight proving the technology, and although 2 failures out of some 3,000 may not sound like a lot, if one of those failures is an uncontrolled fall that nearly takes out some kids, that could set the entire industry back.
California Governor Gavin Newsom is tossing the gauntlet at Trump's feet.
On Tuesday, Newsom signed a law requiring that all presidential candidates submit five years of income tax filings to be eligible for the ballot. To secure a spot on California’s presidential primary ballot in March, returns must be submitted by late November.
“As one of the largest economies in the world and home to one in nine Americans eligible to vote, California has a special responsibility to require this information of presidential and gubernatorial candidates,” Newsom said in a statement, after signing the bill. “These are extraordinary times and states have a legal and moral duty to do everything in their power to ensure leaders seeking the highest offices meet minimal standards, and to restore public confidence. The disclosure required by this bill will shed light on conflicts of interest, self-dealing, or influence from domestic and foreign business interest.”
Will this be tied up in the courts? Is it unconstitutional? I like this thinking:
It seems like it ought to be but Article II states "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors" so it would be a rather remarkable piece of judicial reasoning.
— Jay McKinnon (@opendna) July 30, 2019
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