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The preliminary injunction prohibits nearly all of the federal government, including DHS, DOJ, and HHS, from coercing and colluding with social media companies to censor free speech, amongst other things: pic.twitter.com/CixBjbT8LN
— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) July 4, 2023
Just as the judge hinted at in our first hearing in May, there is nothing stopping the feds from continuing to censor political speech without this injunction.
— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) July 4, 2023
etba_ss JSobieski
3 months ago
That is the key. Be prepared, but do not let anxiety and worry rule your life. Do what you are supposed to do and let God handle the rest.
It is a bit off topic, but as Americans, we are so conditioned to avoid hardship and persecution that we think when our society turns against Christians (which is happening now) that the world is over. It might be. I don't dig too far into to trying to figure out when the world will end, as we are told that no one knows. We should be prepared for it at any time and prepared also for it to not happen in our lifetimes. The Apostles thought it would happen in their lifetimes. If they were that wrong about that and about how little of Jesus' teachings they got until after his death and resurrection, I hate to think of how much I miss and how much I have wrong.
At the very least, we are headed to a society where there is a real cost of being a Christian. For 250 years, we've had a country that accepted Christianity as the norm and at least pretended to have Christian morals as its underpinning. We are entering a time when that is not just no longer the case, but where society is in open and vocal rebellion against Christianity and against God. Short of a national revival, the question is not if, but when, this happens. We will see the wheat separated from the chaff when it is no longer easy or convenient to be a cultural christian.
There are sites that allow you to submit pictures of people you know and the AI will re-render these photos with these people in the nude, violating people’s privacy in some of the worst ways imaginable.
It can now screen job candidates, which is terrifying when you consider how pervasive and thorough an AI can be in looking into your digital footprint, and combined with the creator’s bias, you may not find a job in your field ever again. //
An AI is just as biased as its creator, and if the creator has given an AI the responsibility of running anything from a search algorithm to moderating a social media website, you can expect the social atmosphere to shift whichever way the programmer’s ideals dictate. News, opinions, and audio/video cuts will all lend toward a certain bias that could affect anything from peer-to-peer conversations to elections. //
You might scoff at this idea, but one of the big dangers AI poses is becoming a sex partner that would give way to a massive decline in the population as birth rates would spiral downward.
Don’t scoff at this idea. There are people hard at work on making this happen already. Vice once did a report on this very issue where they saw this AI/automaton in development for themselves. Combining the tech of a well-built and useful humanoid robot, an advanced AI that is subservient to humanity, and a synthetic but increasingly realistic human body will present something that distracts heavily from human-to-human relationships. Before you know it, people are having sex with machines and not each other, causing a population dive: //
AI will effectively kill us off by getting in the way of birthrates.
If you see this as implausible then I need only present you with the issue in Japan. The rise of the “Otaku,” or people who primarily live isolated lives, is a real threat to Japan’s birth rates which have declined so significantly that it’s become a very real crisis the country is having to deal with.
at the end of your life, all your adventure and possessions and successes will mean nothing if your children hate you. Being “faithful to yourself” is not some kind of self-help victory. It is a surefire way to end up lonely and alone. Being faithful to others before yourself requires a measure of sacrifice. It costs you something on the front end, but on the back end, when you are old and weak and the world has sped past you, it will leave you with the most valuable type of wealth – the wealth of family.
My relative wanted his happiness on his timeline. He didn’t think he should have to pay for it. In the end, he paid handsomely. He found out the hard way that if you do not honor your family, happiness will not follow you to the grave. You will end your life in sadness and loneliness when you need faithfulness and happiness the most. //
I’m sure this Piqué character is having the time of his life and thinking that when he’s done with the hazy, heady days of youth, he’ll be there for his children and be there to reconnect.
But love is like a bank, and if you don’t invest (and investment means sacrificing something right now) in your early years, your account will be empty in your later years. You’ll have the perks of youth to distract you from your emptiness, but youth is fleeting. When you get old, the bank will be empty, and you’ll be left like my relative – old and lonely and despised.
Let your faithfulness to your family be your priority now, even if it’s not sexy or fun all the time. You will not live forever. You won’t even be young for that long. You will grow old and die, if you are so blessed. Think ahead. Plan for that retirement. Invest in love now, invest in self-sacrifice now, invest in the promises you made to your loved ones now.
Or suffer the consequences later. And don’t you dare complain.
Jonathan Greenblatt, someone of whom we have been highly critical, finally is speaking out against leftwing anti-Zionism. //
Replacing the word “Jews” with “Zionists” to claim some perceived moral high ground was a rhetorical technique pioneered by Soviet disinformation specialists… If you demonize another group enough, there are more than a few people out there who will act—who will think it’s OK to slur a classmate during a pick-up basketball game, or spray paint a synagogue, or jump the Haredi man walking down the street in Brooklyn, or—God forbid—do even worse.
Greenblatt has come a long way, but he has a long way to go. His ADL is not starting from the baseline of being the nation’s leading organization standing up for Jews and fighting anti-Semitism, but from the left-wing political advocacy group into which he’s transformed it. Strong words in isolation must be transformed into strong words and strong deeds when faced with real life occurrences of anti-Semitism whether disguised as anti-Zionism or anything else. So far, the ADL’s response to anti-“Zionism” remains particularly lacking.
Researchers have unearthed hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets, but many remain untranslated. Translating an ancient language is a time-intensive process, and only a few hundred experts are qualified to perform it. A recent study describes a new AI that produces high-quality translations of ancient texts.
The current race to the Moon is opening up opportunities for lunar astronomy.
In May, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new rule that would impose such strict emissions limits that carmakers would only be able to comply with them by switching the vast majority of their production to electric vehicles by 2027.
The EPA estimates that under its new rule, nearly 70% of all new cars and trucks produced in America would be fully electric by 2032.
But the proposed rule is based on a flawed interpretation of the Clean Air Act. The act gives the EPA the authority to regulate air pollutants from vehicles, but not to dictate what types of vehicles consumers can own. It requires the EPA to set emissions standards that allow manufacturers enough time “to permit the development and application of the requisite technology, giving appropriate consideration to the cost of compliance within such period.”
The proposed rule would have negligible environmental benefits but enormous economic and social costs. It would increase electricity demand and strain the electric grid, while annihilating funding for building and maintaining highways, which is derived almost entirely from taxes on gasoline and diesel. //
The proposed rule is not only bad policy, it is also “arbitrary and capricious” because the Clean Air Act does not authorize the EPA to force a transition to EVs. //
The switch from traditional cars to EVs is the definition of a major policy decision, and nowhere in the Clean Air Act does it say that Congress wanted the EPA to make the choice of where, how, and when that switch should happen.
MMarsh Ars Praefectus
8y
3,363
Subscriptor
The stock market's perception of Viasat through this whole project has been.... interesting.
Screenshot_20230714-200332.png
That's not the stock graph of a company that has its act together, is in the lead, and is likely to stay in the lead.
It's the stock graph of a company that's putting a lot of expensive eggs into very few baskets, and has technically superior competitors nipping at its heels.
The Viasat-3 program, while it pushes the limits of technological possibility, is still fundamentally rooted in a system architecture from the 1970s that has now been eclipsed by new and better architectures. In 2019, with LEO constellations still very much unproven, there was some optimism that a revitalized Viasat could be the definitive big fish in the small market. But today? At best, a totally successful Viasat-3 program would hold the line and prevent the company from dying entirely as virtually all of the growth in the market, along with a non-negligible share of current customers, goes to Starlink (and, eventually, other LEO competitors).
If they can get the other two working, the business is still viable for a while, but they've missed the paradigm shift and are probably too late to save it long-term.
A new Viasat communications satellite launched in April has been crippled by a problem when unfurling its huge mesh antenna. The problem jeopardizes Viasat’s much-needed refresh to its space-based Internet network that would let it better compete with newer broadband offerings from companies like SpaceX and OneWeb.
Viasat confirmed the antenna problem Wednesday after it was first reported by Space Intel Report. The satellite in question is named ViaSat-3 Americas, and it launched on April 30 as the primary payload on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. //
The satellite is one of the most powerful commercial spacecraft ever built, with two solar array wings as wide as a Boeing 767 jetliner capable of generating more than 30 kilowatts of electricity. The solar panels deployed soon after the spacecraft arrived in orbit, and the next step was to unfurl a large reflector to bounce Internet signals between the ground and transmitters and receivers on board the main body of the satellite.
That’s when ground controllers ran into trouble. An “unexpected event” occurred during the deployment of the reflector that may “materially impact” the performance of the satellite, Viasat said. //
The spacecraft was built by Boeing, with a communications payload developed internally by Viasat. The reflector was supplied by Northrop Grumman’s Astro Aerospace, said Dave Ryan, Viasat’s president of space and commercial networks, in an interview before the launch in April. //
The reflector is required to focus signals from the satellite onto a small location on the ground. It’s critical to enabling the satellite to reach thousands of users at once, with a total throughput of more than a terabit per second over its 15-year design life. //
Viasat’s geostationary orbit architecture requires fewer satellites for global reach, but their distance from Earth results in longer latency Internet connections. They also need to be much larger and more expensive than SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, which the company mass-produces at a rate of about six per day and launches into orbit in large batches on a single rocket. SpaceX has launched more than 4,700 Starlink satellites to date. //
Viasat completed the acquisition of Inmarsat, another major satellite operator, in May for $7.3 billion. Taken together, the combined company has 19 large communications satellites in orbit, including 12 operating in Ka-band, the same piece of the radio spectrum used by the ViaSat-3 Americas satellite. //
UnionGirl Smack-Fu Master, in training
1d
1
DistinctivelyCanuck said:
a few articles back, we ended up in a discussion about how certain of the secret squirrel agency satellites can only be readied in a vertical integration facility because how the orientation of the bird literally impacts the ability of the antenna to eventually unfold (the Mentor SIGINT birds if memory serves) the force of gravity in a horizontal orientation could cause the thing to not open up once its flipped vertical...
brainstorming off a massively limited information set.
It would be 'entertaining' if it turned out the same folks did the antenna for VIASAT... which was, of course, integrated in a horizontal orientation first, before going vertical.
second massively limited brainstorm:
it would be interesting to see when NG's launching another one of their MEV's (the mission extension vehicles that go to GEO to provide more station keeping fuel).
For a 700 million dollar bird: I wonder if you send a MEV with a hammer and a pair of scissors on the end of a telescoping arm :)
(yes, I'm joking...) But maybe you send the MEV to go have a look at least... "remove before flight" still in place? :)
Click to expand...Hi! Made an account to reply to this.
I work at NG and am currently sitting across from the successor spacecraft to MEV, the Mission Robotic Vehicle, currently under construction. We can do a bit better than that :) if ViaSat calls us, we can probably try to fix them. And better yet: we launch next year.
www.northropgrumman.com
Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) Satellite Technology
Northrop Grumman continues to push the boundary of possible by building an adaptable satellite servicing and logistics architecture with our Mission Robotic Vehicle and Mission Extension Pods.
www.northropgrumman.com www.northropgrumman.com
The battered Seawolf class submarine that hit a seamount will not be repaired till sometime in 2026 at the earliest. //
The Navy has posted new pictures of its Seawolf class nuclear fast attack submarine USS Connecticut (SSN-22), which was badly damaged when it struck a seamount while on patrol in the South China Sea on October 2nd, 2021. The Connecticut is currently in Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, undergoing a long series of repairs that will last until 2026, at the soonest.
In December 2021, the prized submarine limped back to its home port in Washington State, completing an arduous voyage across the Pacific while surfaced after a long emergency stop in Guam and another stop in San Diego.
LiFi, or 802.11bb, isn't really meant to replace Wi-Fi, but complement it—a good thing for a technology theoretically nullified by a sheet of printer paper. In an announcement of the standard's certification by IEEE (spotted on PC Gamer) and on LiFiCO's FAQ page, the LED-based wireless standard is pitched as an alternative for certain use cases. LiFi could be useful when radio frequencies are inhibited or banned, when the security of the connection is paramount, or just whenever you want speed-of-light transfer at the cost of line-of-sight alignment.
Frauenhofer HHI, one of the standard's developers, suggests "classrooms, medical, and industrial scenarios." Operating in the optical spectrum, rather than the limited amount of licensed radio wavelengths, "ensures higher reliability and lower latency and jitter," says Dominic Schulz, lead LiFi developer at Frauenhofer. It also reduces jamming and eavesdropping and enables "centimeter-precision indoor navigation."
India took the first step toward its second attempt to land on the Moon on Friday with the launch of its Chandrayaan-3 mission from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in the southeastern part of the country. //
To date, only the Soviet Union, the United States, and China have made soft landings on the Moon. India will attempt to become the fourth country to do so and is the first of as many as half a dozen missions that will attempt to land on the Moon during the next six months.
India has developed the Chandrayaan-3 mission on a shoestring budget, about $90 million. But it is important for the Indian space agency to demonstrate competence with this second attempt—especially as its neighbor China has flown a series of increasingly complex and successful lunar missions, including landing on the far side of the Moon and returning regolith samples to Earth. If successful, the Vikram lander would touch down further south than any previous lunar mission.
Microsoft has never laid out in so many words why it feels it needs to move away from Calibri, though today's announcement implies that Aptos was made with high-resolution, high-density displays in mind. Calibri replaced Times New Roman as the suite's default font in Office 2007, at a time before "Retina" displays and when 1024×768 and 1280×800 screens were still the norm—a ClearType font, Calibri itself was a response to the shift from CRT to LCD screens.
Aptos was created by Steve Matteson, who is also responsible for Windows 3.1's original TrueType fonts (including Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New) as well as Segoe, which has been Windows' default system font since Vista and is also used for Microsoft's current logo. Given Matteson's history with Microsoft, choosing Aptos over the others feels like the safest possible choice.
The main flavor of Aptos is a sans-serif font—described by Matteson as "Helvetica" but with "a bit of a human touch" that makes it "more approachable and less institutional." But like Apple's San Fransisco typeface, Aptos comes in many different styles, including condensed, monospaced, and serifed versions. //
The switch to Aptos begins today for Microsoft 365 subscribers; for people who bought the standalone perpetually licensed Office 2021, Calibri will presumably remain the default. Calibri will remain an option pinned to the top of the former Office apps' font selection menu, along with Times New Roman and Arial.
As for the options that lost the default typeface contest—Tenorite, Skeena, Seaford, and Grandview—they'll all continue to be available in Microsoft's apps as non-default options. Everyone's a winner.
Scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery that could change the way we think about air pollution. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found that a strong electric field between airborne water droplets and surrounding air can create a molecule called hydroxide (OH) by a previously unknown mechanism.
This molecule is crucial in helping to clear the air of pollutants, including greenhouse gases and other chemicals. //
The discovery is outlined in a new paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which suggests that the traditional thinking around the formation of OH in the atmosphere is incomplete. Until now, it was thought that sunlight was the primary driver of OH formation, but this new research shows that OH can be created spontaneously by the special conditions on the surface of water droplets.
“You need OH to oxidize hydrocarbons, otherwise they would build up in the atmosphere indefinitely,” said Sergey Nizkorodov, a University of California, Irvine professor of chemistry, who was part of the research team.
INNengine of Granada, Spain had produced a opposed-piston engine that packed a pretty powerful punch in an extremely tiny package.
There's no cylinder head in this motor. Also no crankshaft, no camshaft, and no valves. That's why it's no surprise that this engine tips the scales at just 85 pounds. Somehow, it still produces 120 horsepower with just half a liter of displacement, thanks to what the company calls a single-stroke combustion cycle. //
Despite having four cylinder banks, the INNengine (depending on its configuration) actually has eight pistons. This is because the engine is an opposed-piston motor, meaning that each piston's compression stroke is performed against a second piston placed in the same cylinder bank rather than a static cylinder head. It still only has four combustion chambers, though, which means it sounds similar to a four-cylinder engine.
There are no connecting rods to be seen in this motor (at least not in a traditional sense). Instead, the pistons sit on rollers that ride against a lobed circular plate which can be adjusted to affect the engine's timing and compression ratio. As the lobe reaches its peak, the piston rushes towards top-dead-center where fuel is directly injected into the cylinder and a spark plug ignites the compressed air-fuel mixture.
The mechanical configuration also allows for better engine balance. That means typical drawbacks of an internal combustion motor (often referred to as noise, vibration, and harshness) are minimalized.
Once combustion happens, the piston is pushed back against the plate and forces the plate to rotate. This motion is synced between each half of the motor via a shared shaft—meaning, no extra timing components. Both pistons in the same cylinder bank mimic one another's movements almost exactly.
When the pistons reach the bottom of their strokes, a respective intake and exhaust port is uncovered. One piston is timed to reach bottom-dead-center slightly prior to the other, this allows the exhaust gasses to escape out of the exhaust port and create a vacuum inside of the cylinder—this technique is called scavenging. Fresh air is then pulled in via the intake port as the combustion byproduct is expelled. This effectively gives the pistons double duty, performing the work normally handled by valves in a typical combustion engine—which means that the common drawback of direct injection, carbon-laced valves, is a thing of the past. //
Now, here's the thing: this motor isn't a one-stroke engine. It has a compression stroke and exhaust stroke, making it a two-stroke cycle. INNengine acknowledges this and has said that it brands the motor as such because people would assume that a two-stroke engine would need to have oil mixed in along with fuel. Most two-strokes do. The company says that the one-stroke name was suggested by an "external ICE institution" and they found it to be "catchy," so INNengine stuck with it. //
the company seems to be instead targeting the EV market as a range extender, especially since that's the way the industry is ultimately headed.
The ancient Romans were master builders and engineers, perhaps most famously represented by the still-functional aqueducts. And those architectural marvels rely on a unique construction material: pozzolanic concrete, a spectacularly durable material that gave Roman structures their incredible strength.
Even today, one of their structures – the Pantheon, still intact and nearly 2,000 years old – holds the record for the world's largest dome of unreinforced concrete.
The properties of this concrete have generally been attributed to its ingredients: pozzolana, a mix of volcanic ash – named after the Italian city of Pozzuoli, where a significant deposit of it can be found – and lime. When mixed with water, the two materials can react to produce strong concrete.
But that, as it turns out, is not the whole story. An international team of researchers led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that not only are the materials slightly different from what we may have thought, but the techniques used to mix them were also different.
The smoking guns were small, white chunks of lime that can be found in what seems to be otherwise well-mixed concrete. The presence of these chunks had previously been attributed to poor mixing or materials, but that did not make sense to materials scientist Admir Masic of MIT. //
One of the questions in mind was the nature of the lime used. The standard understanding of pozzolanic concrete is that it uses slaked lime. First, limestone is heated at high temperatures to produce a highly reactive caustic powder called quicklime, or calcium oxide.
Mixing quicklime with water produces slaked lime, or calcium hydroxide: a slightly less reactive, less caustic paste. According to theory, it was this slaked lime that ancient Romans mixed with the pozzolana.
Based on the team's analysis, the lime clasts in their samples are not consistent with this method. Rather, Roman concrete was probably made by mixing the quicklime directly with the pozzolana and water at extremely high temperatures, by itself or in addition to slaked lime, a process the team calls "hot mixing" that results in the lime clasts.
"The benefits of hot mixing are twofold," Masic said.
"First, when the overall concrete is heated to high temperatures, it allows chemistries that are not possible if you only used slaked lime, producing high-temperature-associated compounds that would not otherwise form. Second, this increased temperature significantly reduces curing and setting times since all the reactions are accelerated, allowing for much faster construction."
And it has another benefit: The lime clasts give the concrete remarkable self-healing abilities.
When cracks form in the concrete, they preferentially travel to the lime clasts, which have a higher surface area than other particles in the matrix. When water gets into the crack, it reacts with the lime to form a solution rich in calcium that dries and hardens as calcium carbonate, gluing the crack back together and preventing it from spreading further. //
It could also explain why Roman concrete from seawalls built 2,000 years ago has survived intact for millennia despite the ocean's constant battering.
When Congress approved and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966, it became the law of the land that the public business of the United States is the business of the American public.
Just because the FOIA had become the law, however, little immediately changed in the dominant culture of secrecy, self-serving, and cover-up that always and everywhere pervades bureaucracies, but especially the sprawling bureaucracy of the federal executive branch.
That suffocating and constantly expansive culture would only change when millions of individual citizens and activists (plus journalists devoted to “the public’s right to know”) made continuing use of the FOIA and insisted that the law be respected and followed, even if doing so required persistence and insistence to the point of hiring lawyers and heading into court.
When the authoritative history of the succeeding 56 years is written, one individual and the non-profit group he founded will stand out — Adam Andrzejewski and Open the Books. The reason why is captured in the OTB purpose, “Every Dime. Online. In Real Time,” and its standing invitation to “Join the Transparency Revolution.”
There are legions of advocacy and activism groups in America that raise hundreds of billions of dollars each year based on claims of working to make government better. But not one of them can match the monumental accomplishment of Andrzejewski and OTB.
Here’s why: transparency is the absolute prerequisite to accountability in government. That’s the ideal underlying the FOIA and the essential condition for the survival of a republican democracy. And knowing how the government is spending the tax dollars of its citizens is the necessary first step to achieving genuine and enduring accountability. That is where Andrzejewski and OTB excel as no other individual or group in America.