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Jane Fonda and over 500 celebrities revive McCarthy-era free speech initiative

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Jane Fonda continues to grow her legacy as one of the most engaged activists in Hollywood. The Grace And Frankie actor is relaunching the Committee for the First Amendment, a movement her father, Henry Fonda, was an early member of during the McCarthy era. The group was initially formed in the 1940s to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee, which accused many citizens, including top entertainers, of having communist ties. “The McCarthy Era ended when Americans from across the political spectrum finally came together and stood up for the principles in the Constitution against the forces of repression,” the Fonda-led committee wrote in a letter. “Those forces have returned. And it is our turn to stand together in defense of our constitutional rights.” 

“The federal government is once again engaged in a coordinated campaign to silence critics in the government, the media, the judiciary, academia, and the entertainment industry,” the letter continued. It didn’t mention any specific examples, but we’ve all seen them in the news. Last month, Disney-owned ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! following the host’s comments about the Republican response to Charlie Kirk’s death, prompting outrage from Hollywood, fellow late night hosts, and even Disney’s former CEO. Journalists and private citizens were also fired from their jobs for comments perceived as either celebrating the shooting or not mourning it properly. That’s on top of the attacks Donald Trump has launched on the Smithsonian, NPR and PBS, individual artists like Ariana Grande and Bruce Springsteen, and more since taking office in January.

“We refuse to stand by and let that happen,” the committee declared. “Free speech and free expression are the inalienable rights of every American of all backgrounds and political beliefs – no matter how liberal or conservative you may be. The ability to criticize, question, protest, and even mock those in power is foundational to what America has always aspired to be.”

Jane Fonda is joined by 550 celebrity signatories including Anne Hathaway, Barbara Streisand, Aaron Sorkin, Ethan Hawke, Celine Song, Ben Stiller, Elliot Page, Bill Maher, Julianna Moore, Cynthia Nixon, Damon Lindelof, Judd Apatow, Gracie Abrams, Hannah Einbinder, Jamie Lee Curtis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Billie Eilish, Natalie Portman, and more. (You can check out the full list here.)

“We know there is power in solidarity and strength in numbers. We will stand together—fiercely united—to defend free speech and expression from this assault. This is not a partisan issue. That is why we urge every American who cares about the First Amendment—the cornerstone of our democracy—and every artist around the globe who looks to the United States as a beacon of freedom to join us,” the letter concludes. “And to those who profit from our work while threatening the livelihoods of everyday working people, bowing to government censorship, and cowering to brute intimidation: we see you and history will not forget. This will not be the last you hear from us.”

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InShaneee
22 hours ago
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YouTube agrees to pay Trump $24 million to settle lawsuit over Jan. 6 suspension

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The YouTube logo is seen outside the company

YouTube is the latest social media company to pay Trump tens of millions of dollars to resolve lawsuits brought before he returned to power. The money will fund a new ballroom at the White House.

(Image credit: Josh Edelson)

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InShaneee
2 days ago
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How Ruby Went Off the Rails

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How Ruby Went Off the Rails

For the past couple of weeks, a community of developers who use the programming language Ruby have been closely following a dramatic change in ownership of some of the most essential tools in its ecosystem with far reaching impacts for the worldwide web. 

If you’re not familiar with Ruby or the open source development community, you probably haven’t heard about any of this, but the tools in question serve as critical infrastructure for gigantic internet services like GitHub, Shopify, and others, so any disruption to them would be catastrophic to those companies, their users, and vast swaths of the internet. 



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InShaneee
2 days ago
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EA goes private in record-breaking buyout

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After a few days of rumblings within the industry, major game publisher Electronic Arts (EA) has officially announced that it’s being acquired for $55 billion. The deal, which ranks as the largest ever leveraged buyout according to Variety, involves a group of investors including private-equity firm Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners. The final figure is even bigger than earlier reports, which valued the deal around $50 billion based on EA’s current market value. 

EA is best known for sports games like Madden, FC (rebranded from FIFA), and Skate. It will also release Battlefield 6 early next month. Despite its new ownership, some things will remain the same. The company will still be headquartered in California, with current CEO Andrew Wilson retaining his post. “Our creative and passionate teams at EA have delivered extraordinary experiences for hundreds of millions of fans, built some of the world’s most iconic IP, and created significant value for our business. This moment is a powerful recognition of their remarkable work,” Wilson said in a statement, per Variety. “Looking ahead, we will continue to push the boundaries of entertainment, sports, and technology, unlocking new opportunities. Together with our partners, we will create transformative experiences to inspire generations to come. I am more energized than ever about the future we are building.”

The deal is expected to close by June 2026 (the end of the first quarter of EA’s fiscal year), pending approval from all the usual regulatory bodies. EA and its consortium of investors likely won’t have to jump through the same sort of hoops as, say, Paramount and Skydance, however. As our colleagues at Endless Mode point out, Donald Trump has ties with both Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners (Kushner is his son-in-law) and the Saudi government, which has been pushing further into both the gaming and sports industries in recent years. The deal will be funded by a combination of capital from each of the investors, as well as a roll-over of the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s prior stake in the company.



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InShaneee
2 days ago
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Should Salesforce's Tableau Be Granted a Patent On 'Visualizing Hierarchical Data'?

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp says America's Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted a patent to Tableau (Salesforce's visual analytics platform) — for a patent covering "Data Processing For Visualizing Hierarchical Data": "A provided data model may include a tree specification that declares parent-child relationships between objects in the data model. In response to a query associated with objects in the data model: employing the parent-child relationships to determine a tree that includes parent objects and child objects from the objects based on the parent-child relationships; determining a root object based on the query and the tree; traversing the tree from the root object to visit the child objects in the tree; determining partial results based on characteristics of the visited child objects such that the partial results are stored in an intermediate table; and providing a response to the query that includes values based on the intermediate table and the partial results." A set of 15 simple drawings is provided to support the legal and tech gobbledygook of the invention claims. A person can have a manager, Tableau explains in Figures 5-6 of its accompanying drawings, and that manager can also manage and be managed by other people. Not only that, Tableau illustrates in Figures 7-10 that computers can be used to count how many people report to a manager. How does this magic work, you ask? Well, you "generate [a] tree" [Fig. 13] and "traverse a tree" [Fig. 15], Tableau explains. But wait, there's more — you can also display the people who report to a manager in multi-level or nested pie charts (aka Sunburst charts), Tableau demonstrates in Fig. 11. Interestingly, Tableau released a "pre-Beta" Sunburst chart type in late April 2023 but yanked it at the end of June 2023 (others have long-supported Sunburst charts, including Plotly). So, do you think Tableau should be awarded a patent in 2025 on a concept that has roots in circa-1921 Sunburst charts and tree algorithms taught to first-year CS students in circa-1975 Data Structures courses?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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InShaneee
4 days ago
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Comedian Atsuko Okatsuka posts contract after turning down Riyadh Comedy Festival

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Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Comedy Festival kicked off this weekend—and with it, increasingly vocal criticisms of comedians who have opted to participate in a state-sponsored comedy fest from a state whose report cards from groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have a whole lot of “Needs improvement, can’t seem to stop consigning migrant workers to forced labor” notes penciled in in the comments section. Earlier this week, we reported on comics like Marc Maron and Shane Gillis opening up about their concerns about the festival. (Which sees some of the biggest comedy names on the planet, including Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Pete Davidson, Louis CK, and more, taking the trip out into the desert for what were reportedly very lucrative paychecks.) Now more comics, including Zach Woods and Atsuko Okatsuka, have weighed in—with Okatsuka even revealing the contract she was sent about a possible appearance, including rules about what participants won’t be able to say during their appearances at the fest.

Per Deadline, Okatsuka posted about the festival on Threads this weekend, writing, “FYI there are more of us that said no to the Riyadh comedy festival in Saudi Arabia.” In her post, Okatsuka also posted the list of things comedians have been told they weren’t allowed to talk about, including jokes “that may be considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, embarrassment, or ridicule” Saudi Arabia, its ruling government, royal family, or any religion or religious figure, period. Okatsuka also takes time to point out that “The money is coming straight from the Crown Prince, who actively executes journalists, ppl with nonlethal drug offenses, bloggers, etc without due process. A lot of the ‘you can’t say anything anymore!’ Comedians are doing the festival 😂 they had to adhere to censorship rules about the types of jokes they can make.” (Worth noting that comedian Tim Dillon has said he was kicked out of the festival for a response video he made about accepting the gig, joking, “So what, they have slaves?”)

Woods, meanwhile, addressed the topic on TikTok, posting a scathing video in which he pretended to call out “drips, killjoys, and dweebazoids” suggesting comedians shouldn’t go out “whitewashing a regime that just in June killed a journalist.”

The Riyadh Comedy Festival is scheduled to continue through October 9, which suggests it’s going to continue to be the major lightning rod for criticism in the comedy world for at least a couple of weeks to come.



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InShaneee
4 days ago
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