So then they decide to hold Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress which is the only escalation they have in this position.

Also, Merrick Garland is the head of the DOJ, and only the DOJ can prosecute contempt of Congress as a crime. So if Congress says that DOJ is acting in contempt of Congress, they’re asking DOJ to prosecute itself.

It’s just a type of injury. Injuries themselves don’t give you a right to sue, you have to be injured by someone else doing something wrong.

Can I sue for blindness? Yes, if someone caused my blindness in a way that they’d be liable for. Same with other injuries like broken bones or lost employment or embarrassment or paralysis.

So if someone drives drunk and hits you with their car, paralyzing you and causing loss of enjoyment of life, you can sue them and would have to prove liability (they caused your injury in a way that causes them to have to pay for it) and damages (the amount of money they owe you based on how injured you are). Something like loss of enjoyment of life would be part of the second part of the analysis.

For my personal devices:

• Microsoft products from MS DOS 6.x or so through Windows Vista
• Ubuntu 6.06 through maybe 9.04 or so
• Arch Linux from 2009 through 2015
• MacOS from 2011 through current
• Arch Linux from 2022 through current

I’ve worked with work systems that used RedHat and Ubuntu back in the late 2000’s, plus decades of work computers with Windows. But I’m no longer in a technical career field so I haven’t kept on top of the latest and greatest.

Scientology with Chinese characteristics

When they say modules, does that mean mainboards?

They mean each part. Here’s their store for individual parts.

This announcement includes a new display, so anyone with the old display can swap out their old one for the new one. People can swap out batteries. Keyboards. Touchpads. It’s a modular design so that each module can be swapped out if broken, or if there’s been an upgrade the user wants.

Those small USB drives are too slow anyway, often limited to USB 2.0 interfaces or slow flash modules. I’ve switched over to an SSD specifically because of how slow booting and installation is from a standard 10-year-old USB stick.

Yes, a big chunk of the flight demand probably comes from the fact that each is a hub for a major airline (American Airlines has its big hub in DFW, and United has one of its major hubs in IAH).

Still there are a lot of flights between the two cities for passengers who are starting and stopping their journeys there.

every distro I’ve tried has a strong sense that if you’re using the GUI you don’t need or deserve admin controls

It’s more that GUI programs can’t be trusted with root privileges. They’re not designed for that, and can break things in unpredictable ways.

Because all the politicians from Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey will demand that their cities be included on the stops, and cutting into the efficiency of the whole project.

And all the landowners in between would have to be paid off at market rates for that land, so it’d be much more expensive on that front.

It’s not surprising that the first city pair would be a commonly traveled route with cheap flat land in between. Once that’s demonstrated to work, they can start trying it for cities where the need to purchase rights for the route will be more expensive, and on terrain where long straight segments are more challenging to construct.

I wonder how much traffic it will get.

This source says average, about 24,000 people drive between the two cities any given day, and there are about 30 commercial flights per day between the cities. That sounds like a decent amount of potential demand.

This article is about the dropping analyst predictions, leading up to the actual announcement from Tesla.

The official announcement a few hours after the article was 386,810, significantly lower than even the low expectations.

The cars being very expensive while also becoming ubiquitous

Tesla has had several price drops in the last year or two, and the tax credits got better (at least for cars that qualify, which most Teslas do).

I think it’s because Elon Musk started being a drag on the Tesla image. Other expensive cars (EV or otherwise) are doing fine.

Chavez Rodriguez outlined that abortion will be on the ballot in Florida, where the state Supreme Court issued a ruling that puts a six-week ban into effect May 1. Democrats see abortion as a winning issue for them in 2024 after experiencing better-than-expected results in the midterm elections months after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

That’s basically a key point here. Abortion is banned in Florida, but a state constitutional amendment protecting the right to abortion is on the ballot the same day as the presidential election.

That does change the electoral dynamic.

Our vending machines usually dispense sodas in 20-ounce bottles, or 12-ounce cans.

16-ounce pints are a very common size for beers (and even coffee), but not for sodas.

The 1 liter bottles aren’t common throughout the US, and from what I’ve seen, seem to mainly show up in the northern states near Canada.

dispensing soda

Only the 2 liter bottles. We still generally use 12 ounce cans and 20 ounce bottles. Our gas station/fast food fountain drinks are also measured in fluid ounces.

Good writeup.

The use of ephemeral third party accounts to “vouch” for the maintainer seems like one of those things that isn’t easy to catch in the moment (when an account is new, it’s hard to distinguish between a new account that will be used going forward versus an alt account created for just one purpose), but leaves a paper trail for an audit at any given time.

I would think that Western state sponsored hackers would be a little more careful about leaving that trail of crumbs that becomes obvious in an after-the-fact investigation. So that would seem to weigh against Western governments being behind this.

Also, the last bit about all three names seeming like three different systems of Romanization of three different dialects of Chinese is curious. If it is a mistake (and I don’t know enough about Chinese to know whether having three different dialects in the same name is completely implausible), that would seem to suggest that the sponsors behind the attack aren’t that familiar with Chinese names (which weighs against the Chinese government being behind it).

Interesting stuff, lots of unanswered questions still.

The best thing you can do to limit global warming without political power is to not reproduce

This relies on some assumptions that I question. Each person doesn’t contribute a fixed amount to emissions, and it’s not even a bell curve distribution. The rich contribute orders of magnitude more to the problem than the poor. The top 1% contributes almost twice as much as the bottom 50%..

And with birth rates where they’re at, at different levels of income/wealth, I’m thinking that plenty of childless people can contribute more to the problem than an entire bloodline of people who have huge families.

The feds will front the money to start clearing the harbor and fixing the bridge as soon as possible, but I’d think that they’re gonna go after the ship for whatever they can recover. They have whole offices of lawyers who go after liable parties for costs they end up covering.

the liability of the owner or owners of any ship or vessel … shall in no case exceed the amount or value of the interest of such owner or owners respectively, in such ship or vessel, and her freight then pending".

I think that’s probably way more than $39 million.

The Ever Given that got stuck in the Suez Canal was worth about $125 million carrying about $600 million in cargo. It had a capacity of 20,000 TEU (twenty foot equivalent units).

This MV Dali has a capacity of about 10,000 TEU and was carrying 4700 containers. I think no matter how you slice it, the value of the ship and its cargo would be in the hundreds of millions.