The Fated Mates podcast pics the best romance novels of 2020—books with badass heroines, larger-than-life heroes, brilliant structure, and outstanding writing.

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As a teenager in the late 1980s, James Dewitt “J Dilla” Yancey worked as a junior police cadet for the Detroit Police Department. Several years later however, after suffering through one too many many incidents of police harassment and racial profiling as young adult, his opinion of the police would change as he would record “Fuck the Police” in 2001.

In an interview years later, his mother, Maureen “Ma Dukes” Yancey, gave further detail on Dilla’s reason and motivation for the song: “That song was totally true. He caught so much flack from the police for being a clean young man. The police department was down the street from where we lived, and every time he pulled off they’d stop him and harass him. They even tossed the car once looking for something; because he was young and clean-cut, they thought he was selling drugs. [D12 rapper] Proof was at the house one evening when James had another run-in with them. He had only gone to the gas station which was three doors away. I told him not to get upset because he was hurt to tears. He was so angry and just tired of being harassed, so I told him, ‘Look, this is what you do: you go downstairs and make a song about it, and you laugh in their face.’ And that’s when he came up with the 'F the Police’ thing. And people are still singing it today! Every time I go somewhere, that’s one of the songs they play.” [+]

These are up-to-date values for Rt, a key measure of how fast the virus is growing. It’s the average number of people who become infected by an infectious person. If Rt is above 1.0, the virus will spread quickly. When Rt is below 1.0, the virus will stop spreading.

Five years ago, Stephenson-Goodknight didn’t have her own Wikipedia page. For most of her life, she didn’t contribute to the website at all. But Stephenson-Goodknight has become a superstar in the community, and a pioneer for gender equality on a platform deeply in need of articles about women. She has written over 5,000 articles for the website, nearly 1,400 dedicated to women specifically.

That’s not insignificant, given that only 18 percent of Wikipedia’s biography entries are about women.

A different side of Faith No More.

The two versions of Pinball Number Count is a feature, not a bug.

"Abrasive, hard, but never gratuitously unpleasant."

Tom Colicchio is a really thoughtful guy, and he's been very busy working on behalf of small restaurants and the people who work there.

A simple and effective facemask design by Loren Brickter

An estimated 65,000 doctors trained in other countries are ineligible to practice here because they haven’t met U.S. requirements that they have a year of resident training stateside.

Nationwide, an estimated 30,000 so-called Dreamers work in health care. Yet along with their brothers, sisters and cousins, all are poised to lose their status in June, when the virus may still be raging

"With about 200,000 people flowing into and out of jails every week, there are great risks not only for the detained, but also for jail workers and surrounding communities."

"We’d like to help," said the Rev. George Nicholas, chairman of the African American Health Equity Task Force. Yet he says no one has contacted the task force, which formed in 2014 to address health disparities. So the group, along with the Buffalo Center for Health Equity and others, is preparing a news release to put the issue on the table.

That’s par for the course. It’s routine around here for policymakers and elected leaders to hatch plans to address community concerns without involving the ground-level experts within those communities.

So far, Zoom has secretly installed web servers on users' systems, leaked email addresses and photos to other users, falsely claimed to support end-to-end encryption, and leaked data to Facebook.

And that's just the stuff we know about.

"With our company roots in sending large files, sharing is deeply ingrained in our culture. As such, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we publish a number of internal tools and libraries as open source. We used to publish this software under the MIT License; a short and readable license that permits anyone to use our technology freely, in whatever way they see fit. As of last week, we have begun switching projects over to the Hippocratic License. The Hippocratic license is based on the MIT license, but extends it to restrict the freedom to use to only those applications that do not harm others."

Software is considered Ethical Open Source (EOS) when it meets all of these criteria:

• It benefits the commons. The license under which the software is released must not prohibit modification, derivative works, and linking or compiling with other software (unless under a copyleft provision), in the general spirit of open source distribution. It is created in the open. The source code must be publicly available, developed and maintained in public view, and welcoming of public contributions (subject to review and approval by the software project’s maintainers.)

• Its community is welcoming and just. The software project’s community of maintainers and contributors must be governed by a comprehensive code of conduct that is consistently and fairly enforced.

• It puts accessibility first. If the software has a user interface, it must be designed with accessibility in mind, ensuring all software functionality is available to all users, including users who may rely on assistive devices.

• It prioritizes user safety. The software must be designed with features and safeguards that minimize the risk of abuse or harm to others through the use of the software.

• It protects user privacy. If the software collects end-user data, the entity running the software must, upon request, delete or provide to the end-user any and all data generated and stored from the end-user’s usage of the software. All such data provided to the end-user must be in either a human-readable or widely interoperable open format.

• It encourages fair compensation. The software project’s maintainers may, at their discretion, request remuneration in the form of code contributions, financial consideration, or other forms of voluntary support from organizations that derive commercial value from the software.