The court does not exist to have its reputation protected. It exists to uphold the Constitution, something Roberts should probably become more acquainted with. //
Adam Liptak
@adamliptak
Justice Kagan, dissenting: "The law
does not require that the state equally treat apples and watermelons." //
In other words, Kagan believes the state can have completely arbitrary, discriminatory rules which reward certain sectors while cracking down on religious gatherings. Movie sets with cafeteria tents are fine. Black Lives Matter protests are gravy. But having your neighbor over to pray for you? Kagan believes the state can send you to jail for that based on its own whim. It’s tyrannical, but we are at a point where nothing surprises me anymore. //
Refr
2 hours ago
Funny that a man so concerned about the SCOTUS's reputation and legacy has done for more damage to both since he's been on the bench. //
mlmorrison44
2 hours ago
One small step from--
Justice Kagan, dissenting: "The law does not require that the state equally treat conservatives and progressives. //
acrucesalus mlmorrison44
2 hours ago
Apples and watermelons. Does that also mean the state also doesn’t have to treat blacks and whites the same? Or Asians and Hispanics the same? How about people with disabilities? Can they be treated differently from non-disabled? Not to mention the sexually confused vs heterosexuals.
What is that meme every love loves so much? It’s settled law? Until it isn’t apparently.
These justices have as much sense as a watermelon.
Open letter to CEO asks why AT&T left DSL areas with shoddy Internet access.
A man who has been an AT&T customer since 1960 has a message for CEO John Stankey about the company's failure to upgrade DSL areas to modern Internet service. Aaron Epstein, 90, is so frustrated by his 3Mbps Internet plan that he took out a Wall Street Journal ad in today's print edition in order to post an open letter to Stankey.
"Dear Mr. Stankey: AT&T prides itself as a leader in electronic communications. Unfortunately, for the people who live in N. Hollywood, CA 91607, AT&T is now a major disappointment," Epstein wrote in the letter.
Epstein paid $1,100 to run the ad for one day in the Manhattan and Dallas editions of today's Journal, he told Ars in a phone interview. (Correction: Epstein told us later that he paid $10,000 for the ad, not $1,100.) He chose the Manhattan edition to reach investors who might want to pressure AT&T into upgrading its network and Dallas because that's where AT&T is headquartered, he said.
Rep. Lauren Boebert
@RepBoebert
And the gun grab begins. This week, Biden...
-nominated a gun control lobbyist for ATF director
-pushed red flag laws
-created a plan to seize lawful property
-proposed 6 gun control executive actions
The Second Amendment is being trampled, and I won’t stand for it.
Molly Rogers
@JollyMollyRoger
Your gun should be at least as well-regulated as my uterus.
Dana Loesch
@DLoesch
I can take my uterus on a plane, my county courthouse, I can’t ever forfeit carrying it, I don’t have to pay a fee and ask the government if I can carry it concealed — and other people don't pay for my range time or firearm accessories. //
Ditzy feminists are freaking out and Karening in my timeline because I mocked one of the dumbest analogies of all time. It deserved to be ridiculed and I’ll do it again. Stop making stupid comparisons. https://t.co/IUs2U2S3Nm
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 8, 2021
So let’s listen to Joe Biden in 2005 talk about how doing the very thing he appears to be trying to do now is a corrupt “power grab.” “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” and FDR wanting to do that was “corrupted by power,” Biden said.
Eddie Zipperer
@EddieZipperer
Reminder: Biden refers to court packing a "power grab" in 2005: //
Here he is in 1987 talking about how it is the “futility and absurdity of the devious” meant to punish the justices for having their own opinions (i.e. acting not according to FDR’s political whim). He says such autocratic things were what led to the revolt against the English.
Jerry Dunleavy
@JerryDunleavy
Biden in 1987 approvingly quoting Senate’s 1937 condemnation of FDR's court packing scheme: “It's a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” //
Jerry Dunleavy
@JerryDunleavy
RBG: “Bad idea when [FDR] tried to pack the court… If anything would make the court appear partisan it'd be...one side saying, ‘When we’re in power we’re going to enlarge the number of judges so we'll have more ppl who will vote the way we want them to.’"
There are growing signs that parts of the country may be close to meeting demand for the coronavirus vaccine — well before the U.S. has reached herd immunity.
Why it matters: For the last few months, the primary focus of the U.S. has been getting shots to everyone who wants them, as quickly as possible. Soon, that focus will abruptly shift to convincing holdouts to get vaccinated.
State of play: Red states in the South are administering the lowest portion of the vaccine doses that they receive from the federal government — a sign of low demand, slow public health systems, or both.
‘Red alerts’ of a potential disaster were sent to the companies
By Joey Roulette on April 9, 2021 2:12 pm
Two satellites from the fast-growing constellations of OneWeb and SpaceX’s Starlink dodged a dangerously close approach with one another in orbit last weekend, representatives from the US Space Force and OneWeb said. It’s the first known collision avoidance event for the two rival companies as they race to expand their new broadband-beaming networks in space.
On March 30th, five days after OneWeb launched its latest batch of 36 satellites from Russia, the company received several “red alerts” from the US Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron warning of a possible collision with a Starlink satellite. Because OneWeb’s constellation operates in higher orbits around Earth, the company’s satellites must pass through SpaceX’s mesh of Starlink satellites, which orbit at an altitude of roughly 550 km.
One Space Force alert indicated a collision probability of 1.3 percent, with the two satellites coming as close as 190 feet — a dangerously close proximity for satellites in orbit. If satellites collide in orbit, it could cause a cascading disaster that could generate hundreds of pieces of debris and send them on crash courses with other satellites nearby.
Neither Side is Winning
23 minutes ago
"19 Republicans still voted to confirm him because the GOP remains a mostly useless vestige."
You fail to understand the truth about the 2 party system... Both sides of the same coin will never change the coin...
Red/Blue game theory
"The power structure needs people to believe that the way to solve problems is within the system. That is the KEY to the whole puzzle. The system is run on game theory. The status QUO know that as long as people are working in the system, nothing fundamental can ever change.
The primary method they use to distract people is with the two party red/blue system that gives you a “right” to vote. Do you want red or blue? As long as you are trying to “get back to the constitution” or get someone on the supreme court, you will lose “the game“. Period. How much evidence has to be accumulated? The government never shrinks. The people are ignored. The debt just grows.
The entire red/blue system is the heartbeat. Countless hours are drained off arguing about things that make no difference. The whole industry of Red radio, Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, et. al are doing a great job. They just can’t see that the job they are REALLY doing is not what they think. Some are truly genius in the way they have learned to parse the liberal agenda’s hypocrisy. If they turned that genius on the right target we might actually GET somewhere.
But do we actually ever GET anywhere? No. Just look around. Nothing ever changes. Conservatives. Nothing. Tea party, nothing. Libertarians, nothing. Patriots, nothing. Why? Because the people in these movements don’t understand the real LEGAL GAME. These movements are serving as pointless time drains when they could otherwise be a useful asset for REAL change.
The red/blue game keeps people parsing distinctions and issues that don’t matter! The candidates are never going to change the system. No party will ever “change the system”. The Parties ARE THE SYSTEM. GET IT?
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers. –Thomas Pynchon
Power to the people! And it’s true. You just misunderstand WHICH people.
Still don’t believe me? Then answer this one question. We have had both republican/red and democrat/blue guys running the country alternating since the end of the “great depression”, right? And has there ever been a 20 year period where the government shrank? How bout a 10 year period? how bout just a 5 year period? Get it? The red/blue game is a distraction. It will never work. It can’t. It’s game theory."
source: http://www.thetruthaboutthelaw.COM/rush-limbaugh-is-right-hes-just-analyzing-the-wrong-problems/ //
edintexas
an hour ago
' It’s an easy political cudgel that doesn’t actually do anything which makes it right up Biden’s alley."
But it does do something. The premise that "gun control" is about firearms is completely mistaken. It is about "control", the firearms are almost superfluous. Take away people's ability to protect themselves and their families, bit by bit, and the criminals and the government will have control of the people. Today it is attacking the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle (and "pistol") when rifles of all types were the weapon in fewer than 600 homicides out of fewer than 11,000. As we've noted time and again, rifles of all types were used to commit homicide less frequently than knives, less frequently than "personal weapons" (hands, feet, elbows, etc.) and most assuredly less frequently than the criminal's firearm of choice, the handgun. So this isn't about crime, it isn't about firearms. It is about control. As long as we are an armed nation the Socialist/Communists can't do as they please without any fear of retribution.
tomferal sgtcornflake
15 hours ago
It's too late for that which you can't advocate in this forum as the US Army is now Woke and will soon be even more Woke when they finish their Wrong Thing Purge of their own troops. Then it will be as our Founding Fathers feared.
When a government wishes to deprive its citizens of freedom, and reduce them to slavery, it generally makes use of a standing army.
- Luther Martin, Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention
A standing army is one of the greatest mischief that can possibly happen. Without standing armies liberty can never be in danger, nor with large ones safe
-James Madison ("The Father of the United States Constitution", the Constitution that the Pentagon is now at war with)
There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation, and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors, that those governors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot, but in well-defined cases. Such an instrument is a standing army.
- Thomas Jefferson
In the days following the American Revolution, Jefferson became increasingly concerned about two tendencies he believed were intrinsically connected: the concentration of power in a centralized government, and the establishment of a standing army [especially a career class one].
I draw my line in the sand here. I am not your enemy just because I am breathing. I am not your enemy just because I am walking or eating. I do not deserve to be marked as a “problem” for not participating in a medical treatment. Whether or not I take a vaccine is my business. If you’ve taken your vaccine, it should be of no worry if I do or not. We don’t require people to prove they’ve gotten their flu vaccine every year. You get yours and then get on with your life, assuming you have inoculated yourself. What is the difference with a COVID vaccine?
It is about control. If you can be required to show your medical history to get on a bus or go to a concert, where does it stop?
A lot of people on the left think that “where does it stop” question is a bit hysterical or paranoid. These are the same people who scream all day long about how oppressive and racist the American government is and has been since our founding. Where does it stop? Ask Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman or any American slave or victim of Democrat Jim Crow laws during the Civil Rights Era. The government never stops. If we can’t trust them when it comes to minorities, why would we trust them when it comes to our private health information? //
I expect the government to protect my right to move about my country and participate in commerce freely, regardless of my medical history. This is my line. Here and farther. It is only a hop, skip, and a sew-on patch to complete fascism.
Why not? There’s only one explanation. Prosecutors didn’t tell you. Antifa-friendly Attorney General Keith Ellison, who picked those multiple private attorneys from white-shoe firms to replace regular Hennepin County prosecutors, didn’t tell you. The media obviously didn’t tell you. And the threatening mob that recorded the horrific site of George Floyd handcuffed and prone on a Minneapolis street didn’t tell you. Black Lives Matter certainly didn’t tell you. This is the group that overtly lied about the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, Patrick Kimmons, Jacob Blake, and others. //
Midway through the second week of testimony, defense attorney Eric Nelson showed video from police body-worn cameras from a different angle showing Derek Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s shoulder and upper back, not his neck. Prosecutors immediately began changing their verbiage from “neck” to “neck area,” according to Andrew Branca of Legal Insurrection, who is listening to the trial as I am. //
Pills found in the Mercedes SUV and the police squad car, where Floyd had been for a brief time, had meth and fentanyl in them, which he was believed to have eaten to hide evidence from cops. //
Chauvin and his partner came to back up two other cops who had tussled with Floyd in an attempt to get him in the back of their squad car. It was a priority-one call for a non-compliant, suspected drug-addled perpetrator who had just fought with cops. They encountered Floyd, whom his girlfriend testified worked out every day with weights and played sports. Chauvin weighed 140 pounds and is 5’9″, compared to Floyd’s 223 pounds and 6’4″ frame. //
Testimony in cross-examination of the prosecution’s medical care training expert, Nicole MacKenzie, revealed that the hostile crowd could have contributed to Floyd’s death. How? Due to the hostility, threats, and the possibility that the crowd could get violent, the Minneapolis officers had to “load and scoot” Floyd to get to a safe area where they would meet paramedics and treat him. Paramedics arrived at the previous location and had to find where Floyd had been moved to, burning up a crucial eleven minutes.
Woodbutcher
3 hours ago
"From the beginning, you couldn’t own any weapon you wanted to own"
Well, yes, Joey boy, you could, in the beginning. Up to and including cannon and warships!
tonysc Woodbutcher
3 hours ago
GMTA, I'm not going to delete my comment but, canons were, indeed privately owned. At the time, I'm not sure what weapon was considered more war-like than a canon but I can't think of any.
Diamondback tonysc
3 hours ago
A fully-armed warship with two dozen of 'em on its gun deck would fit that description nicely, this was why privateers had to have a Letter of Marque and Reprisal before sailing.
The backbone of Revolutionary War naval efforts was actually our privateer fleet, ditto the War of 1812 and the Quasi-War with France.
Consider that the Man-o-War was the ICBM of the day...
tonysc
3 hours ago
From the beginning, you couldn't own any weapon you wanted to own.
That's weird, I seem to remember canons being privately owned back when that silly Constitution was written but maybe he was talking about weapons that hadn't been invented yet. //
Draconis tonysc
2 hours ago
...On the note of 'weapons that had not been invented yet' nothing shows the ignorance of the gun grabbers more than 'when the Constitution was written they couldn't imagine something like today's rapid fire weapons existing'....They have obviously never heard of the Girardoni Air Rifle....
...Developed by Bartolomeo Girardoni in 1779, used by the Austrian army from 1780 to 1815, it used compressed air to fire a projectile each time the trigger was pulled (similar to today's semi-automatic rifles) maintaining that rate of fire for 30 shots before it had to be 'reloaded' with compressed air.....Lewis and Clark even carried one on their expedition....in 1803....
...For those who are a bit vague on history, the Second Amendment was written in 1789 and ratified in 1791 ....TWELVE YEARS after this semi automatic rifle was developed...... //
johncv tonysc
3 hours ago
and warships too. IIRC John Hancock owned one. The Privateers also preyed upon British shipping.
The communists are showing the weakness of their programs - the apparatchik speech writers are as ignorant of history as the students they indoctrinate.
“No amendment to the Constitution is absolute. You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater and call it freedom of speech. From the beginning, you couldn’t own any weapon you wanted to own.”
This is what the government politicians say, right before they are about to impinge on your rights. The phrase about yelling fire in a crowded theater is often used by people trying to curb speech without really understanding the context in which it was used. It was in non-binding dicta in a case that was then later overturned so it was never a binding thought on anything. So when people use it, it reveals they’re not aware of the law.
From The Atlantic:
As Rottman wrote, for this reason, it’s “worse than useless in defining the boundaries of constitutional speech. When used metaphorically, it can be deployed against any unpopular speech.” Worse, its advocates are tacitly endorsing one of the broadest censorship decisions ever brought down by the Court. It is quite simply, as Ken White calls it, “the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech.”
“Lazy cheat” excuse to impinge on your rights.
Part II focuses on the suppression of therapeutic treatments that actually work against the ChiCom virus. Here are some summary points from Dr. Cole’s presentation on that subject:
The current CDC and NIH recommendation: “Go home and isolate; if you can’t breathe or your lips turn blue, then go to the hospital” (this amounts to apathy, not treatment, as physicians are trained to treat people at the first instance of a disease/pathogen)
The earlier the treatment, the more complications that can be avoided over time (simple common sense)
If there is a treatment extant for a disease, then the federal government cannot approve a vaccine by law
The NIH, which is involved in approving medications, co-holds the patent on the Moderna vaccine (a complete conflict of interest!)
When NIH and other public health agencies look at therapeutics, the conflict of interest of the federal government in bed with a vaccine company weighs large in the “decision-making” process (they don’t want a therapeutic to work because then they can vend their vaccine) //
Ivermectin (an anti-parasitic given to horses and dogs) is an effective prevention and treatment therapy
Although an anti-parasitic, Ivermectin also is a phenomenal anti-viral prophylaxis and can be used for early treatment, immune modifier treatment during hospitalization, and post-COVID “long hauler” treatment
Ivermectin is safe, effective, and INEXPENSIVE, having been taken by 4 billion people since the 1980s (it is on the world’s most essential drugs list!)
In Petri dish studies conducted, in August 2020, Ivermectin was found to have killed 99% of the virus, but the NIH recommended against its use //
A few Ivermectin studies are finally being conducted independently in the US in Texas, Florida, and Wisconsin hospitals (results: they have decreased their COVID death rates by 70-90%!) //
tonysc NickSJ
....
Once the Wuhan Flu moved from a disease of the body to a disease of the body politic, including treatments becoming part of the political games and deaths attributed to it becoming politically manipulated, I stopped trying to make sense of the number of reported deaths attributed to the Wuhan Flu.
A few weeks back we brought word that Reddit users [derekcz] and [Xerbot] had managed to receive the 2232.5 MHz telemetry downlink from a Falcon 9 upper stage and pull out some interesting plain-text strings. With further software fiddling, the vehicle’s video streams were decoded, resulting in some absolutely breathtaking shots of the rocket and its payload from low Earth orbit.
Unfortunately, it looks like those heady days are now over, as [derekcz] reports the downlink from the latest Falcon 9 mission was nothing but intelligible noise. Since the hardware and software haven’t changed on his side, the only logical conclusion is that SpaceX wasn’t too happy about radio amateurs listening in on their rocket and decided to employ some form of encryption. //
At the end of the post [derekcz] echos a sentiment we’ve been hearing from other amateur radio operators recently, which is that pretty soon space may be off-limits for us civilians. As older weather satellites begin to fail and get replaced with newer and inevitably more complex models, the days of picking up satellite images with an RTL-SDR and a few lines of Python are likely numbered.
As a society, we seem to have mixed feelings about whether it's better to add or subtract things, advising both that "less is more" and "bigger is better." But these contradictory views play out across multibillion-dollar industries, with people salivating over the latest features of their hardware and software before bemoaning that the added complexities make the product difficult to use.
A team of researchers from the University of Virginia decided to look at the behavior underlying this tension, finding in a new paper that most people defaulted to assuming that the best way of handling a problem is to add new features. While it was easy to overcome this tendency with some simple nudges, the researchers suggest that this thought process may underlie some of the growing complexity of the modern world. //
The researchers say they got interested in the topic because they noticed that beyond the admonition that less is more, many fields had specific advice about improvement through subtraction. Editors caution writers about using excess language, social scientists talk about the need to remove barriers, and so on. In contrast, there are few reminders to add stuff to fix problems.
Perhaps, the researchers reasoned, people have no problems remembering to add things even without any prompting. //
Still, the study provides a simple and effective solution for getting a greater diversity of solutions—if it's appropriate, simply remind people that removing features is an option.
"I was a little bit upset," he added. "But I was really so motivated because I wanted the world to say: 'He did it.'" //
And for Abdel-Gawad, even the tugboats didn't offer the same spectacle as his excavator.
"Nobody really focused on those," he said, speaking of the memes about the situation. "It was just the excavator because of the huge size difference, such a tiny excavator in front of such a gigantic ship."
Another factor that drained any humor from the situation for him was how frightening it was to be underneath the enormous vessel, he said.
From his estimation, the Ever Given was lodged about 6 meters higher than where it would naturally float, and his job was to pry at the rock and mud encasing it. He said he had a very real fear that instead of refloating the ship, he would destabilize it, causing it to topple onto him.
"If you see the size of the ship, and you see the size of the excavator, it is absolutely terrifying," he said. Another two workers in excavators, who arrived at the scene a couple of days in, were too scared to work directly beneath the ship, Abdel-Gawad said.
Biden is a classic BS artist. He’s the kind of guy who just says things and hopes people don’t hold him to anything that comes out of his mouth down the road. His infrastructure bill is not going to deliver a nationwide, high-speed rail system that travels as fast as an airliner no matter how much we “imagine” it. Selling this kind of snake oil to push through legislation loaded with pork that will further bankrupt future generations isn’t laudable. It’s stupid and manipulative. //
writeofcenter
7 hours ago edited
Most modern Presidents have extolled the virtues and performance goals of sub-orbital passenger rockets and vehicles. Instead of looking to the future.....
Biden's still stuck in the 1950's.
P.S. The railed foundations and beddings have to be completely rebuilt for these trains to operate. We all know where that is going..... FAILED ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENTS.
This is "make work" for campaign contributors, //
Reply
−
Avatar
nmABaca
35 minutes ago
True story:
On vacation in Mexico, rode around the resort on a bicycle every day. Kept seeing a crew digging a drainage ditch by hand while a new backhoe was parked nearby. I am bilingual and on the last day, I stopped and asked the foreman why they didn't use the backhoe. "Then, what would the men be doing" he answered.
Welcome to Joe Biden's infrastructure development program, hope you know how to use a pick and shovel!
(My Dad once told me that in the 1930s, the men called FDR's WPA "We piddle around" because it was a lot of men doing almost nothing.)
malor Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius et Subscriptor
jump to post
I think it's important to point out that this case covers only one kind of API, a direct programming API where you're incorporating libraries into your main program. Because of the rules of most computer languages, this means that the header files and user-written program files have to look almost exactly the same in the function definition and call location. If they don't, it won't work. If you're trying to call the C standard library printf(), and you call it as printg(), ain't nothing gonna happen.
Thus, any programmer providing a replacment printf(), if he or she wants it to work with existing code, must generate a printf() header in their library that will look pretty much exactly like every other printf() in every other C standard library. It doesn't mean they copied it, it means that there's only one possible way to express that idea. Thus, a reimplemented library of any kind will, by necessity, have a duplicate line for each function. If it doesn't, it won't work as a drop-in replacement.
However, many other APIs are network-based. It seems unlikely to me that copyright would ever apply there, because each provider of an API will be able to write their own code. There might be a few lines of identical source, but for the most part, the code base will be very different. Both Apache and nginx, for instance, support the http API, but there probably isn't much duplicate code between the two projects. Either can be used as a webserver, but it will be instantly apparent that each is a unique creation.
And then compare those with a hypothetical web server written in, say, Rust..... the new codebase would look absolutely nothing like its predecessors. Copyright protection would even more clearly not apply.
API is not a well-defined term, and I think the Supreme Court probably got this exactly right.... this type of API infringement is not covered under copyright, because it's functional. This is the only kind of API infringement where copyright is likely to apply, so a clear decision that it does not will probably put a stake in the whole idea. Almost any other kind of API 'infringement' would obviously not be a copyright matter.
Google lays out the benefits of Rust over C/C++, saying, "Rust provides memory safety guarantees by using a combination of compile-time checks to enforce object lifetime/ownership and runtime checks to ensure that memory accesses are valid. This safety is achieved while providing equivalent performance to C and C++." In line with similar stats that Microsoft has published, Google's blog post says that "memory safety bugs continue to be a top contributor of stability issues, and consistently represent ~70% of Android’s high severity security vulnerabilities."