There’s a lot of complete trash. Multiple reskins of the same puzzle game with randomly generated names. Bare bones minesweeper clone written entirely by AI, and advertised as such. That sort of thing.

Back in the Roman empire, they didn’t have any punctuation marks or spaces between words. Reading was a lot harder. It was normal to read very slowly, compared to nowadays. And always out loud, sounding out the words, even in private.

Just for context, almost every federal court is a branch of a state court.

This is not true at all.

Federal courts are part of the judicial branch, not the executive branch. So they don’t shut down when the executive branch “shuts down”, because the shutdown laws don’t apply to them. As a practical matter federal courts can keep running for a while using saved up court fee revenue. They will eventually run out of that money and gave some tough choices about what to do.

The soybeans are not solely grown for export. They also fix nitrogen into the soil for the massive corn crop. And as to the corn, I think some of it is exported, but a lot of it is going to animal feed and high fructose corn syrup. So there’s a vector for food price impacts, particularly at the cheap and processed end of the domestic food supply.

My understanding is that all of this vote data is already exchanged on the public Internet, and that it has to be this way for federation to work. It’s a client and interface design feature to show the data or not to show the data. So you should probably assume that icky people on the Internet are already looking at it.

There’s a rule that the flight has to be within so many minutes of a diversion airport at all times, and this is hard to do in Antarctica.

Nowadays, 180 minutes is fairly common, and there are some planes and airlines that can go to 240 or even as high as 370.

This is only true because the Senate’s floor time is valuable enough that leadership would rather move on to consider other bills than waste time on a real filibuster. The “silent filibuster” is not an official part of Senate rules.

People have been saying that Congress is gridlocked and ineffective, and that is true, by several subjective and objective measures. But even in the gridlocked state there are still a bunch of bills that are debated and passed. And it takes floor time to work on those.

If you’re getting into private jets, you should also know that brands have reputations even there.

Gulfstream is a luxury brand within the private jet world. You can easily get a comparable product from Bombardier or Cessna Textron that performs equivalently, but only pay half as much operating costs as Gulfstream. Like Gucci, you pay a lot of money just for the Gulfstream name.

At the low end of the market, Honda makes a small jet. (This is in the Very Light Jet category which bumps up against the turboprop market).

At the very high end of the market you get into Boeing Business Jets, and the Airbus equivalent. These are converting airliners to your exact interior design specifications. Airliners are like another order of magnitude higher cost to operate.

From The Wiki:

Congress can pass up to three reconciliation bills per year, with each bill addressing the major topics of reconciliation: revenue, spending, and the federal debt limit. However, if Congress passes a reconciliation bill affecting more than one of those topics, it cannot pass another reconciliation bill later in the year affecting one of the topics addressed by the previous reconciliation bill.[3] In practice, reconciliation bills have usually been passed once per year at most.[16]

Edit: Are you saying the Senate and House made two identical budget resolutions in this year? Or is it just that Senate Republicans don’t want to blow reconciliation for the next year on what is probably mostly continuing resolution?

Everything that says 51 can be read as 50 plus VP,.

There is a rule that the reconciliation bill can pass on 51. But there are two main limits on reconciliation:

1. Reconciliation has to be at least nominally about the budget, as you said, and

2. Only one reconciliation bill per fiscal year.

The Republicans already shot their reconciliation shot with the BBB. They can’t do it again until the next fiscal year (which arrives tomorrow, so they can get started).

A bunch of answers but nothing talking about modern consumer devices.

• The OS code on a computer is stored on a “drive”, usually flash memory, but it has to be loaded into RAM to actually run.
• the OS code is usually not encrypted when it’s in RAM. Processors don’t decrypt the code directly on the fly.
• it is relatively common nowadays for the stuff on the drives to be fully encrypted. This can include the OS, it the OS code can be on a separate partition that’s not encrypted.
• For all the major operating systems, there’s not a lot of value in keeping the binary code secret, because they all leak out eventually, anyway.
• If it’s encrypted, the OS code has to be decrypted when it is loaded off the drive into RAM. This is done by a separate “firmware” software during boot.
• the keys needed for boot up cryptography are usually stored in dedicated chips that ship with modern computers. These are called things like TPM or “secure enclave”.
• the chips are hardened against physical attacks that could reveal the keys.
• usually the passphrase is part of an encryption key that encrypts the real encryption key that encrypts the whole disk. Wrong passphrase means the computer is incapable of decrypting the real key.

Adding this because I don’t see it explained anywhere else:

It takes 60/100 votes to pass the budget bills in the Senate, instead of 51, because the Senate still has a filibuster. The minority Democrats have the power to stop the vote from coming up by simply talking on the floor forever until the Republicans give up and go home.

The 53-47 vote was for a cloture motion, which is to put time limits on debate on a particular budget bill. The rules don’t let Dems filibuster the cloture motion for obvious reasons, so that vote happened. But it takes 60 votes to pass cloture, so it went down.

Now, there are some resolutions that don’t involve coming to a compromise:

• the Democrats could choose not to do the filibuster. Then the bill would come up, and they could all vote against it, but it could pass on 53 votes.
• the Senate could change the rules to get rid of filibuster. This is usually called the “nuclear option” because it removes the 60 vote barrier using a rules vote that only needs 51 to pass. The procedure is to make someone actually start a filibuster, then raise a point of order that filibustering member is taking too long. The Parliamentarian will deny the point of order based on the current rules, but that can be appealed to the whole Senate on a majority vote. And the point of order is not debatable.

There’s a class of orbits called “polar orbits” that are sideways and perpendicular to the spin of the earth. These orbits are useful for satellites whose main job is taking pictures of earth, because they will cover nearly all of the earth’s territory over time. You get into a polar orbit by launching to the north outer south.

Aside from that, nearly all launches go towards the spin of the earth, because it’s a free boost. The fancy rocketry word for this is “prograde”.

The sun appears to traverse from east to west in the sky. This means that the earth is moving the opposite way: west to east. So if you want to take advantage of the free boost, the rocket needs to take off in an easterly direction.

The amount of spin you get is greatest if you launch from the tropics near the equator, and it falls off at greater north or south latitudes. In theory, if you set up a launch pad at the north pole, the spin boost would be zero in all directions, because you’re just rotating in place. At the equator, the free boost is around 1000 mph or 1600 km/hr.

So the ideal launch site is as close to the equator as possible, and it has low population off to its east, in case the rocket blows up or crashes. The United States has two sites that meet these criteria: one in Florida and one in extreme south Texas. Both of these face an ocean to the east. Europe launches Ariane rockets from French Guiana in South America. Russia uses Kazakhstan, which is on the southern ends of the old Soviet Union.

Red is crap. Gotta go blue or clear.

Real hyperloop, not the Musk bullshit. Scaled up pneumatic tube systems operating at orbital speeds (7 km/s).

That’s about the same time as the Know-Nothing party was pushing nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment.

GCC in particular comes with the Runtime Library Exception to the GPL. The exception carves out runtime code from the GPL vital licensing condition, and it doesn’t require software compiled by GCC to attribute back to GCC.

So there’s no legal reason to copy in the GPL text into this notice on account of GCC.

Yes, do convey GPL text if you’re also conveying LGPL text.

There was a book a while back called Guns, Germs, and Steel that delves into this topic.

The root cause, as I understand it, is that Europe is on a continent oriented east-west instead of north-south. And Europe in particular is on the part of that continent that has a lot of easy access to the sea.

East-west orientation allows you to transplant plants and animals long distances and keep them at roughly the same latitudes, which means roughly the same climate. That is a big boon for spreading “civilized” agriculture, which is what creates surplus of labor, which creates non food jobs that advance technology.

Among the common 5-7 domesticated food animals people eat today, all but one or two were domesticated in Mesopotamia, but then spread all over Europe.

Access to the sea is the other component that turns tech advantage into colonialism, because it gives the transportation. Even today, China and Russia are great powers, but they are forced to be continental powers instead of maritime powers, because nearly all of their coast lines are hemmed in by narrow seas that are easy to blockade.

There are, of course, a bunch of other factors I’m not even thinking about and competing opinions. But I don’t for one second think that any of this has anything to do with European “innate intelligence” or skin color.