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All 50 States Have Now Introduced Right to Repair Legislation

Slashdot
2 months 2 weeks ago
All 50 U.S. states have now introduced some form of right to repair legislation, marking a significant milestone that "shows the power of the grassroots political movement," reports 404 Media. From the report: Thursday, Wisconsin became the final state in the country to introduce a right to repair bill. So far, right to repair laws have been passed in Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon. Another 20 states are formally considering right to repair bills during this current legislative session. The rest have previously introduced bills that have not passed; so far we have seen that many states take several years to move a given right to repair bill through the legislative process. iFixit's Kyle Wiens said covering the entire map is a "tipping point" for the movement: "We've gone from a handful of passionate advocates to a nationwide call for repair autonomy. People are fed up with disposable products and locked-down devices. Repair is the future, and this moment proves it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeauHD

Representative Line: What a Character

The Daily WTF
2 months 2 weeks ago

Python's "batteries included" approach means that a lot of common tasks have high-level convenience functions for them. For example, if you want to read all the lines from a file into an array (list, in Python), you could do something like:

with open(filename) as f: lines = f.readlines()

Easy peasy. Of course, because it's so easy, there are other options.

For example, you can just convert the file directly to a list: lines = list(f). Or you can iterate across the file directly, e.g.:

with open(filename) as f: for line in f: # do stuff

Of course, that's fine for plain old text files. But we frequently use text files which are structured in some fashion, like a CSV file. No worries, though, as Python has a csv library built in, which makes it easy to handle these files too; especially useful because "writing a CSV parser yourself" is one of those tasks that sounds easy until you hit the first edge case, and then you realize you've made a terrible mistake.

Now, it's important to note that CSV usually is expressed as a "comma separated values" file, but the initialism is actually "character separated values". And, as Sally's co-worker realized, newlines are characters, and thus every text file is technically a CSV file.

foo = list(csv.reader(someFile, delimiter="\n")) .comment { border: none; } [Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!
Remy Porter

The software UK techies need to protect themselves now Apple's ADP won’t

The Register
2 months 2 weeks ago
No matter how deep you are in Apple's 'ecosystem,’ there are ways to stay encrypted in Blighty

Apple customers, privacy advocates, and security sleuths have now had the weekend to stew over the news of the iGadget maker's decision to bend to the UK government and disable its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature.…

Connor Jones