There Was a Comcast Outage in the Seattle and San Francisco Areas Last Night, and It Sucked: Luckily, some savvy people averted the problem by switching over to a public domain name server (DNS). Turkish citizens used the same technique last year to initially maneuver around the Turkish government's censorship of Twitter.
Comcast SF Bay Area people whose internet is down: change your DNS server to 8.8.8.8 and it should work. pic.twitter.com/k2JX2wS0P1
â Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) June 2, 2015
But If We Had High-Speed Municipal Broadband, We Wouldn't Have to Rely on Comcast and CenturyLink in the First Place: Here's a primer.
A Spill from the Proposed Grays Harbor Oil Terminals "Could Destroy Our Way of Life and Who We Are as a People": Junior Goodell, a member of the Quinault Indian Nation, writes in the Seattle Times that the potential impacts of three proposed oil shipping terminals in Grays Harbor "could be devastating" to tribal identity. Last month, QIN published a detailed report showing that an oil train spill into the Chehalis River or a marine vessel spill nearby could cost the tribe more than a hundred commercial fishing jobs and millions of dollars in lost wages. That report could not put a price tag on the social, psychological, and spiritual losses a spill would incur, nor could it put a price on rights.
Washington Prisons Are So Crowded That the State Could Send Some Inmates to Michigan: The Tacoma News Tribune reports that the state's Department of Corrections signed a contract with a private prison company to house as many as 1,000 Washington inmates in rural Michigan as a temporary backup plan.
A Kid Almost Killed a Fur Seal at the Seattle Aquarium by Throwing a Ball Full of Flaxseeds into the Seal Tank: "Leu" ate the ball, because that's what fur seals do. It took a team of specialists four hours to remove the ball from Leu's digestive system.
What the Hell Is a Flaxseed Ball? And how did this child come into possession of one? Does everyone but me understand what this is?
If You Google "Flaxseed Ball" You Get a Bunch of Recipes for Homemade Energy Bars: But TV news shows the "flaxseed ball" in question as some kind of elastic casing around a bunch of flaxseeds. Alibaba sells "flaxseed with lavender massage" balls that appear to more closely resemble the thing Leu ate.
I Thought Chia Seeds Were the New Seeds of Bourgeois Destruction: But not for Leu.
Anyway, Now OneBusAway Works with Google Maps in Real Time: Finally!
Shell Tells the State That the Polar Pioneer Is Staying at Terminal 5 Until the End of June: And that it will likely be back in November and staying over the winter until next June, possibly along with a drill ship called the Noble Discoverer. Shell offered this response when the Department of Natural Resources told the company that long-term blocking (i.e., rigspreading) in the public waterway violates the state constitution. In a letter to the DNR, Shell said that penalizing the Polar Pioneer specifically would have "significant and unintended repercussions on the maritime industry at large in Seattle." This is the same argument Foss Maritime and the Port of Seattle are using to appeal the city's determination that keeping Arctic drilling equipment in Terminal 5 is not in compliance with the space's land-use permit.
Now That We've All Read Caitlyn Jenner's Vanity Fair Profile: Go read this piece about how Bangladesh is recruiting hijrasâpeople who identify as Bangladesh's third genderâto serve as police.
As of Last Night, Hundreds of People Were "Most Likely Still Inside the Overturned Vessel" That Capsized in the Yangtze River: Five bodies have been recovered out of the 458 people who were on board.
