A new DOJ lawsuit represents a vital step toward ending an un-American war on disfavored attorneys and defenders of disfavored causes — a war that would do irrevocable damage to our justice system and republic. //
With a new landmark lawsuit, the Trump Justice Department is finally fighting this “barfare” —leftist efforts to render the right defenseless by crushing or chilling conservative attorneys via stress-inducing probes, costly trials, and crippling penalties that include disbarment. On May 13, the DOJ filed a complaint against the bar disciplinary authorities of Washington, D.C., in defense of former Trump I DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, the Constitution, and the rule of law itself.
Those authorities investigated, tried, and convicted the accomplished litigator for a novel “thoughtcrime”: preparing a document proposing a legal course of action based on a reading of evidence that his DOJ superiors disagreed with. //
So after the contest he drafted a letter on the department’s behalf to Peach State leaders to address such matters. He designated the letter as “Pre-Decisional & Deliberative/Attorney-Client or Legal Work Product” and “FOR INTERNAL … USE ONLY,” and dubbed it a “Proof of Concept” document. The letter indicated that the DOJ had identified potential election-swinging issues and called on the state to convene a special legislative session to review and remedy such matters.
Clark presented the letter to his bosses, including Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, for review. They disagreed with its claims regarding 2020 election integrity issues and Clark’s plan to address them. Ultimately, the document would go unsent, only to leak after President Trump had left office during Democrats’ Jan. 6-related political and legal jihad. //
In July 2022, D.C. bar disciplinary authorities charged Clark with ethical violations, including “conduct involving dishonesty,” over his drafting and defending of the document. The then-Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee allegedly spurred the case by lodging an ethics complaint with the D.C. regime. //
What was the tribunal’s reasoning? That Clark’s views did not comport with those of his superiors, his superiors by default represented those of the department, and therefore, by ascribing his conflicting views to the department in his draft, unsent, “pre-decisional” letter, he was somehow being dishonest.
Despite admitting that there were “no factually comparable prior disciplinary cases,” the tribunal recommended that Clark be disbarred.
Clark is appealing the absurd and outrageous case — one that would render it potentially career-ending to provide legal advice that might conflict with that of one’s superiors. The case would also seem to make it fair game for disciplinary authorities to review and potentially render punishment over internal draft documents containing hypothetical legal proposals. //
In addition, the Justice Department notes the D.C. bar disciplinary tribunal’s lenient treatment of leftists in contrast to its treatment of conservatives: When FBI Attorney Kevin Clinesmith was caught doctoring an email to convince the FISA Court to let the feds spy on Trump adviser Carter Page, the D.C. bar gave him a “slap on the wrist” with a retroactive one-year license suspension.
The suit closes with a trio of legal arguments that transcend Clark’s case or claims of a bar disciplinary authority run amok: first, that the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause prohibits state and local bar disciplinary authorities from regulating the work of federal officials like Clark via bar disciplinary proceedings; second, that such authorities engage in unlawful discrimination by subjecting federal lawyers to disciplinary cases never before brought against non-federal lawyers; third, that by targeting federal attorneys over their work, such authorities are unlawfully interfering with presidential power. //
The DOJ’s lawsuit does not directly address lawfare activists’ targeting of non-government lawyers with disbarment and destruction for taking up verboten causes, such as constitutional scholar John Eastman’s work contesting the 2020 presidential election. Still, it may prove far more effective than the Justice Department’s proposed rule giving the agency the right to review (but not to quash) efforts to cripple conservative federal lawyers via the likes of the D.C. bar disciplinary authorities.
Point Nemo is officially known as “the oceanic pole of inaccessibility,” or the point in the ocean farthest from land. Located at 48°52.6’S 123°23.6’W, the spot is quite literally the middle of nowhere, surrounded by more than 1,000 miles of ocean in every direction.
The closest landmasses to the pole are one of the Pitcairn Islands to the north, one of the Easter Islands to the northeast, and one island off the coast of Antarctica to the south.
There are no human inhabitants anywhere near Point Nemo. And scientists chose to call the location “Nemo” because it is Latin for “no one” and as a reference to Jules Verne’s submarine captain from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
The location is so isolated that the closest people to Nemo are not even on Earth. According to the BBC, astronauts aboard the International Space Station are around 258 miles from the Earth’s surface at any given time. Since the inhabited area closest to Point Nemo is more than 1,000 miles away, the humans in space are far closer to the pole of inaccessibility than those on land. //
As for non-human inhabitants, there aren’t very many of those around Point Nemo either. Point Nemo’s coordinates fall within the South Pacific Gyre, an enormous rotating current that prevents nutrient-rich water from flowing into the area. Without any food sources, sustaining most life in this part of the ocean is impossible.
If the result holds up, belugas join a remarkably short list. The mirror self-recognition test (MSR) has been passed, with varying degrees of confidence, by humans (starting around age two), a handful of great apes (chimps, bonobos, orangutans, and—somewhat contentiously—gorillas), Asian elephants, bottlenose dolphins, probably magpies, possibly orcas, and, if you can believe it, a cleaner wrasse. That’s it. No dogs, no cats, no monkeys. Plenty of species we had assumed were self-aware have been tested and failed. //
So what is this test, exactly, and what is it supposed to tell us?
The procedure is this: While the animal isn’t looking, researchers place a mark on a spot [on the animal] it can only see via a reflection. A mirror is then put in front of the animal while the researchers watch. If the animal touches or examines the mark while looking at its reflection, it comprehends that the figure in the mirror is itself. The test is intuitive and easy to perform—and almost no species passes.
Why is this a test of self-awareness in the first place? The logic, going back to the psychologist Gordon Gallup (who invented the test in 1970), is that to use a mirror as a tool for inspecting your own body, you need a mental representation of yourself as a distinct entity. A piece of silvered glass, in this telling, can pry open a lot of cognitive doors.
But those customers don't count. They aren't real Apple customers, because they want to do things that benefit them, not Apple's shareholders. In other words: they're holding it wrong.
Law, not technology, is the true battlefield in the War on General Purpose Computing, a subject I've been raising the alarm about for decades now:
https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/
The fact that there's no technical way to enforce these restrictions means that the companies that benefit from them have to pitch their arguments to lawmakers, not customers. If you have something that works, you use it in your sales pitch, like Signal, whose actual, working security is a big part of its appeal to users.
If you have something that doesn't work, you use it in your lobbying pitch, like Apple, who justify their 30% ripoff app tax – which they can only charge because it's a felony to reverse-engineer your iPhone so you can use a different app store – by telling lawmakers that locking down their platform is essential to the security and privacy of iPhone owners:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones
Google lost a brutal antitrust case brought by Epic Games, makers of Fortnite:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger
Epic's suit contended that Google had violated antitrust law by creating exclusivity deals with carriers and device makers that locked Android users into Google's app store, which meant that Epic had to surrender 30% of its mobile earnings to Google.
Google lost that case – badly. It turns out that judges don't like it when you deliberately destroy evidence:
They say that when you find yourself in a hole, you should stop digging, but Google can't put down the shovel. After the court ordered Google to open up its app store, the company just ignored the order, which is a thing that judges hate even more than destroying evidence:
https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/epic-games-inc-v-google-llc
So it was that last month, Google found itself with just two weeks to comply with the open app store order, or else:
https://www.theverge.com/news/717440/google-epic-open-play-store-emergency-stay
Google was ordered to make it possible to install new app stores as apps, so you could go into Google Play, search for a different app store, and, with a single click, install it on your phone, and switch to getting your apps from that store, rather than Google's.
That's what's behind Google's new ban on "sideloading": this is a form of malicious compliance with the court orders stemming from its losses to Epic Games. In fact, it's not even malicious compliance – it's malicious noncompliance
Sean Duffy’s MARAD initiative may look like another Trump-era energy dominance announcement, but beneath the politics lies a serious industrial question: can the United States build the regulatory, shipyard, insurance and port framework needed to make nuclear-powered merchant ships commercially viable before Asia takes the lead? //
The real story behind the announcement made by U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy and the Maritime Administration on 7 May is not that America has discovered nuclear propulsion. It is that Washington has finally recognized maritime nuclear power as a shipbuilding, logistics, insurance, port-access and national-security race, and has decided to enter it. MARAD’s Request for Information, with comments due by 5 August 2026, asks industry to help develop a U.S.-built, scalable, commercially viable SMR model for marine transportation. That is a materially different ambition from funding a reactor demonstration. It is an attempt to build a complete commercial ecosystem. //
Shipping is uniquely suited to nuclear propulsion. The energy density argument for maritime nuclear propulsion is more compelling than for almost any other transport sector. A modern ultra-large container ship consumes between 250 and 350 tonnes of fuel per day at sea. Over a 25-year operational life, fuel can represent billions of dollars in lifecycle cost. Bunker storage, fuel treatment systems, purifier rooms, sludge handling, emissions scrubbers and the growing infrastructure of alternative-fuel compliance consume enormous volumes of space, capital and crew time. Nuclear propulsion potentially eliminates most of that complexity, a reactor fuelled for two decades or more fits within a containment space that returns cargo volume to its owners and voyage economics to their prior simplicity. //
Thorium, increasingly discussed as an alternative fuel cycle, offers further advantages. Thorium-232 converts under neutron bombardment to fissile uranium-233, is three to four times more abundant than uranium in the earth’s crust, produces significantly less long-lived radioactive waste, and is far less susceptible to weapons proliferation. Molten salt reactor designs, which dissolve thorium in liquid fluoride salt that also acts as the coolant, operate at atmospheric pressure rather than under the high-pressure steam conditions of conventional light-water reactors, removing explosive decompression risk. An approval in principle for a nuclear-powered LNG carrier using molten salt technology was granted in 2025. //
The United States now accounts for approximately 0.1 per cent of global commercial ship production. A single Chinese state shipbuilder built more vessels by tonnage in 2024 than the entire U.S. industry has produced since 1945. //
The U.S. has become marginal in commercial construction outside naval programmes, which is precisely why the MARAD announcement repeatedly frames SMR development as a mechanism for rebuilding domestic yards, creating strategic engineering employment, and reconnecting maritime and defence industrial capacity. //
While Europe debates how to tax shipping emissions, the United States is beginning to ask who will build and power the next generation of ships altogether.
South Korea is not waiting for that question to be answered. HD Hyundai has unveiled a 15,000 TEU-class SMR-powered containership concept and is working with ABS on nuclear-electric propulsion systems potentially supplying up to 100 megawatts. China has explored molten salt reactor ship concepts and is investing heavily in thorium-based systems. Russia already operates the only nuclear-powered commercial vessels in service, alongside its Arctic icebreaker fleet.
Once jailbroken, I installed the Kindle Unified Application Launcher (KUAL) software that lets me launch custom applications, and installed the KOReader document viewer and eBook reader app. This app is far more capable than the standard Kindle app, especially when it comes to handling PDF files.
I wanted to see if I could get the Kindle to display a Home Assistant dashboard and discovered the hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver add-on. It's a simple but effective tool that takes regular screenshots of your Home Assistant dashboard, converts the screenshots to a grayscale format for the Kindle, and serves the images over Wi-Fi for the Kindle to fetch.
https://www.howtogeek.com/your-kindle-isnt-just-for-booksheres-5-extra-features-you-can-try-today/
https://www.howtogeek.com/i-switched-to-home-assistants-new-dashboard-and-its-now-my-favorite-hub/
MickelBlue Ars Centurion
11y
282
agt499 said:
:And to the OP's situation, I'm pretty sure the WIIM stuff support the actual ChromeCast Audio protocol too, so they could conceivable replace failing units one at a time is needed without shifting to a whole new system.
WiiM products support Chromecast audio (called Google Cast in WiiM): https://faq.wiimhome.com/en/support...-enable-or-disable-google-cast-on-wiim-device
MickelBlue Ars Centurion
11y
282
Baenwort said:
I'm glad my ChromeCast Audios still work. I'm dreading the day I have to figure out a replacement for them to keep all my old amps around the house playing the same thing in sync.
There's quite a collection of music streamers that support multiple platforms and multiroom audio that could replace a Chromecast Audio, while also offering more functionality:
https://www.wiimhome.com/wiimmini/overview
https://www.arylic.com/products/s10-wireless-preamplifier
https://www.evehome.com/en-us/eve-play
And for anyone only needing an Apple Airplay receiver, similar to the old Apple Airport Express devices: https://www.belkin.com/p/audio-adapter-with-airplay-2/AUZ002ttBK.html I personally have one and it works wonderfully.
Whereas Thomas plants the beacon on where SCOTUS should be on an issue and where it needs to go, Alito is willing to stake out a milder position to help get it there over time. The former provides the big-picture outline, while the latter colors it in. //
What cases like Dobbs and Hamm underscore is the often-unappreciated secret sauce behind many of the Supreme Court’s crucial decisions in recent years. That is, Thomas’ and Alito’s differing but equally necessary approaches to the law working together to produce jurisprudence that accords with what the Constitution calls for.
Whether in victory or defeat, these two justices are laying the foundation of solid originalist interpretation for future courts to look towards in related matters before the bench. Their combined presence at SCOTUS is a blessing, one which Americans would be wise to appreciate while they have it.
America's telecoms regulator has unveiled new measures to speed the transition to modern high-speed networks, but critics argue the move could leave behind those in rural areas or with special needs.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says it has adopted rules that let telcos retire their aging copper line infrastructure, and claims this will free up "tens of billions" annually for the rollout of high-speed, all-IP-based networks.
According to the FCC, the build-out of modern networks is hindered by "the need for carriers to divert precious resources to the maintenance of deteriorating legacy networks that deliver outdated services to an ever-decreasing number of subscribers."
Microsoft knows that these are all issues because PowerToys has fixes for all of them, except they're not fixes that make it into Windows 11.
Speaking to Ars in the wake of the controversy, Rosenbaum says he “learned a lesson” and is “going to be much more suspicious” and “reticent to trust” AI outputs going forward.
But he also can’t tear himself away from the tools. Rather amazingly, Rosenbaum is not interested in going back to the AI-free research process he used to write previous books.
“The idea of taking X years off [from AI] while it sorts itself out, and going back to, like, Microsoft Word … it’s just not in my nature,” he told Ars. “[AI] is magical. Because it connects, it knits together ideas and gives you pathways to think about things that you’re not going to come up with on your own.”
It’s also magical in another way: Like J.R.R. Tolkien’s One Ring, AI convinces many of those who use it that they can control its power properly. But can they?
In the O.J. Simpson case, one of its early lawsuit efforts, DirecTV had an investigator on-site who physically turned on Simpson’s TVs and saw the unscrambled DirecTV programming. But this kind of evidence was hugely expensive to collect and required law enforcement help. Most later DirecTV cases were based merely on device purchase lists; DirecTV had no idea what people like Treworgy were actually doing inside the walls of their homes.
In the Treworgy case, both the district court and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that simple ownership did not create “a private right of action against a person in possession of access devices in violation of section 2512(1) (b).” In other words, DirecTV couldn’t sue people just for buying a card or a bootloader; they had to show actual illegal activity. //
After the judge ruled against Simpson, the only remaining issue was how much he would owe in damages.
DirecTV had requested $20,000 under each of two separate laws, for a total of $40,000. The judge noted that Simpson had not “used the devices commercially or for resale,” so she declined to award the full request. Instead, DirecTV got $15,000 in damages under the first statute and $10,000 under the second, for a total of $25,000.
The higher cost, though, came from legal fees. DirecTV submitted a motion for Simpson to pay its lawyers after his loss, and the judge agreed to a $33,678 legal bill.
The court granted final judgment on November 29, 2005, ruling that “the Juice” owed DirecTV a grand total of $58,678. It was pricey, yes—but in a way, Simpson got off cheap. When the recording industry launched its own mass lawsuit campaign, college students and single moms were eventually hit with $675,000 or even $1.92 million verdicts.
Deciphering the third transport protocol's four RFCs is a task to rival the proverbial blind man trying to understand an elephant. //
Streams are the primary mechanism making QUIC a better fit for request/response operations. When HTTP runs over TCP, the only way to allow one request to proceed independently of another is to open multiple parallel TCP connections.
With each connection running its own congestion control loop, the experience of congestion on one connection is not apparent to the other connections; each connection tries to figure out the appropriate amount of bandwidth to consume on its own, while competing with the others. And if HTTP runs over a single TCP connection, a single dropped packet blocks the entire progress of any requests in flight until that lost packet is retransmitted.
So QUIC allows for many streams within a single connection, and each stream can make progress independently from the others. A single packet loss only impacts the stream (or streams) whose data was in that packet. At the same time, QUIC can use that one packet loss to respond appropriately to congestion. //
Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie are the authors behind Computer Networks: A Systems Approach and the related Systems Approach series of books. All their content is open source and available for free on GitHub. https://github.com/SystemsApproach
US Mobile offers service through those two networks as well as Verizon’s, rebranding the options as Dark Star (AT&T), Light Speed (T-Mobile), and Warp (Verizon). //
A 2026 survey of Consumer Reports members placed US Mobile at the top of the publication’s customer-satisfaction ratings for phone carriers for the second year in a row. US Mobile received top marks for value, customer support, and overall quality of data service.
the passenger version of the Boeing 747-8, also known as the 747-8I for 'Intercontinental,' has a fuel capacity of 63,034 gallons (238,610 liters). According to Boeing, these aircraft have a range (based on a load of 410 passengers) of 8,900 miles (14,320 km). Dividing the latter by the former, we get a figure of just 0.142 miles per gallon.
The figure for the Boeing Business Jets (BBJ) version of the 747-8 is slightly more favorable. Indeed, based on an assumed capacity of just 100 VIP passengers, this private jet has a range of 10,213 miles (16,437 km), resulting in a figure of 0.162 miles per gallon. As for the 747-8F, which carries cargo, its range of 4,908 miles (7,899 km) and fuel capacity of 59,734 gallons (226,095 liters) give it a figure of 0.082 miles per gallon. But are these low figures as bad as they seem at face value? //
the 747-100, Boeing's data shows that this version of the iconic quadjet could typically fly for up to 5,320 miles (8,560 km). When this range is offset against the 747-100's maximum fuel capacity of 48,445 gallons (183,380 liters), we get a figure of 0.11 miles per gallon. As such, the 747-8's score on this front has improved by more than 29% from the oldest to the newest model. //
when we multiply the 747-8's figure of 0.142 miles per gallon by its capacity, for this purpose, of 410 guests, we get a much healthier figure of 58.22 passenger miles per gallon. Of course, a full five-seater car would only need to achieve around 11.65 miles per gallon to get a higher passenger miles per gallon figure, but, in reality, cars often only transport their driver. As such, in this regard, a fully loaded 747 can be more efficient than certain cars in the event of solo occupancy. //
Boeing 747 Production
Sub-Family
Number Produced
747-100
205
747SP
45
747-200
393
747-300
81
747-400
694
747-8
155
Turning a Kindle into a portable monitor isn't something you can do with the standard firmware. Amazon locks its software down so you can't just throw some code onto your Kindle and get it to display whatever you want.
The good news is that plenty of people far smarter than I am have figured out how to jailbreak many Kindle devices. I'd already done this to my Kindle and installed the KUAL app launcher that lets me install and run custom apps such as KOReader. Using the USBNetwork software, I was able to connect my Kindle to my computer over USB and SSH into it as if it were a network device.
https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-jailbreak-a-kindle-ereader/
With my Kindle jailbroken, I was able to set up a method of getting the Kindle to display a mirror of my Mac desktop. This works by running a shell script on my Mac that takes a screenshot of my desktop every half a second. This is passed through ImageMagick, an open-source image processing tool that converts the image to grayscale and resizes it to the correct resolution for the Kindle's screen.
This image is then made available as a JPEG over my home network using Python's lightweight web server. Another shell script running on the Kindle fetches the JPEG over Wi-Fi using Wget, a common tool for downloading files. The JPEG is then displayed on the Kindle screen, and the process repeats, producing a near-live mirror of my Mac desktop running at around one frame per second.
The result was better than I was expecting.
WASHINGTON — Thousands of Americans on Sunday converged on the National Mall to mark the country’s 250th birthday with a prayer festival featuring religious music and speeches by leaders from across faiths.
In February, President Trump declared May 17 a national day of prayer and a time “to rededicate America as one nation under God” in a move that energized evangelicals.
“This is a recognition of the deeply embedded history and religious and moral tradition of the country,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told “Fox News Sunday” about Sunday’s massive religious gathering in DC. //
The May 17 date for the national prayer days traces its origins to America’s early days.
Shortly before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the colonial Congress declared May 17, 1776, a national day of fasting and prayer
The automaker marked its first annual loss in more than 70 years.
After US government policies wrecked the country’s electric vehicle market, automakers have been scrambling to adapt. The loss of federal clean vehicle tax incentives and funding for charging infrastructure, combined with capricious tariffs, has resulted in a 28 percent drop in EV sales for the first three months of the year.
That’s a far cry from just a few years ago, when optimism abounded and a strong commitment to an EV-heavy portfolio translated into a higher share price. As those commitments are abandoned, there’s a financial price to pay, including more than $9 billion of write-downs for Honda, which made its first operating loss in the company’s history.