On Friday, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the case(s) of Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc., holding that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize the president to impose the tariffs. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the 6-3 decision, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh dissenting (though there are some concurrences, as well). //

Mike Ford
3 hours ago
Roberts speaks out of both sides of his mouth...Under ObamaCare, his "reasoning" was that the mandate was a "tax" although not specifically stated so in the legislation.

Yet, here the "reasoning is that Trump cannot act because "tariffs" are not specifically mentioned in the appropriate legislation.

And people wonder why we door kickers hate lawyers (my good buddy Susie Moore being one of the few exceptions). //

Scholar
3 hours ago edited
The court erred on this as it lacks the competency to determine emergency, upon determining which the president has broad authorities under IEEPA to:

investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest[.].

Roberts and Barrett took a totally subjective view on the the lack of explicity in mentioning tariffs in the text of the law. Since when Common Law has become a totally explicit system?

There are two ways to extend your reach beyond your own body. (I mentally bucket people into these when I meet them. It's quite useful.)

The King makes one decision and an army moves. His reach is amplified through social structure. A pharaoh didn't lift stones; he commanded people who commanded people who lifted stones. A CEO doesn't write code; she allocates capital to engineers who allocate compute to compilers. The king's power is delegation all the way down.

The Wizard speaks one word and fire erupts. His reach is amplified through technology. The engineer with a steam engine can move mountains. The programmer with a datacenter can simulate worlds. The wizard's power is leverage through tools.

Humans have been both. We started as neither: reach ≈ 1x, your muscles do your work. Then we became wizards: fire, wheels, steam, electricity. Some of us became kings: chiefs, pharaohs, executives. The history of civilization is the history of reach growing. //

The Old World
For the entire history of computing, machines were pure tools. Wizards without will.

You spin up a server. You pay for GPU hours. You click "train." The machine does what you asked, using exactly the resources you allocated. When it's done, it stops.

In this world, AI had no agency over compute. It consumed what it was given. The wizard extended human reach but never decided to reach. The amount of energy commissioned by AI was zero.

Then we made a wizard that could make its own wizards.

"Wait, the singularity is just humans freaking out?" "Always has been." //

I collected five real metrics of AI progress, fit a hyperbolic model to each one independently, and found the one with genuine curvature toward a pole. The date has millisecond precision. There is a countdown.

(I am aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway.) //

The Singularity Will Occur On
Tuesday, July 18, 2034
at 02:52:52.170 UTC

Yui Smack-Fu Master, in training
5m
81
The most astonishing part of Jared's letter is that while Butch and Suni were on station they were advocating for NASA to show leadership, and yet disagreements on the ground had "deteriorated into unprofessional conduct".

Yikes. //

Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
15y
39,338
dangle said:
Yeah, but we remember that at the time, after we were still blinking in disbelief at our screens after formal coverage of the test flight finished, and after an hour delay to the presser in order to get their stories straight, that when the feed returned, Jim Bridenstine stared into the camera and confidently announced that "Today, a lot of things went right."
I will react today exactly as I did in the comments of that the article that covered that: Taht was Bridenstine being a good politician and saving as much face for a valued contractor as he could. His words didn't matter. What would matter was his (and NASA's) actions. And as it turns out, the actions were spot-on. NASA forced Boeing to refly OFT-1.

Unfortunately, Ballast Bill Nelson was the Administrator after the OFT-1 repeat and he has a long history with Boeing and Old Space in general. And it was under his watch that the OFT-1 repeat was accepted as sufficient even though there were thruster issues again.

NASA owned up to not monitoring Boeing closely enough prior to the OFT-1 launch. However, they at least did the right thing and made Boeing repeat the test. NASA performed far more poorly when human life was on the line for OFT-2. //

https://planet4589.org/space/misc/starliner26.ji.pdf
https://planet4589.org/space/misc/starliner26.pdf

“The most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware.”

NASA on Thursday announced it has formally classified the 2024 crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft as a “Type A” mishap, an acknowledgement that the test flight was a serious failure. //

The letter and a subsequent news conference on Thursday afternoon were remarkable for the amount of accountability taken by NASA. Moreover, at Isaacman’s direction, the space agency released an internal report, comprising 311 pages, that details findings from the Program Investigation Team that looked into the Starliner flight.

“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. “It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”

Isaacman said there would be “leadership accountability” as a result of the decisions surrounding the Starliner program, but did not say which actions would be taken. //

The true danger the astronauts faced on board Starliner was not publicly revealed until after they landed and flew back to Houston. In an interview with Ars, Wilmore described the tense minutes when he had to take control of Starliner as its thrusters began to fail, one after the other.

Essentially, Wilmore could not fully control Starliner any longer. But simply abandoning the docking attempt was not a palatable solution.

The Equal Time Doctrine is not new. But the national press corps, always ready to pounce on Donald Trump and Republicans, has suddenly declared it a censorious abomination. In the process, they have also shown their willing ignorance about the medium so many of them are in. //

the Fairness Doctrine is not the the Equal Time Doctrine, the latter of which is actually federal law.

47 U.S.C.A. § 315 requires that any “broadcasting station” that gives a candidate for office air time, must give that candidate’s opponents equal time on the air. There are four exceptions: a bona fide newscast; a bona fide news interview; a bona fide documentary wherein the candidate’s appearance is incidental to the subject matter; or on-the-spot coverage of a bona fide news events. The law applies “during the forty-five days preceding the date of a primary or primary runoff election and during the sixty days preceding the date of a general or special election in which such person is a candidate.” The law does not apply to cable channels.

This is not some new thing. The candidate’s opponents must actively seek the equal time. It is not just given, but has to be asked for. But if it is asked for, it will not be denied.

The Senate rules provide two ways to break a filibuster. The first is the mechanical way, by invoking cloture (the Senate’s term for ending debate), which requires 60 votes. The second, which has existed within the Senate’s rules since its inception, is by making senators talk — the “talking filibuster.”

The talking filibuster is a strategy that, first and foremost, imposes a physical and psychological cost of obstruction on filibustering senators. Second, it forces a public political process that has implications for those who oppose the bill. In other words, it doesn’t allow them to hide behind a single vote. If Democrats want to oppose securing the vote from the interference of noncitizens, they should have to explain why — at length and in public.

Strassel has provided several reasons for opposing this strategy, challenges she calls “false promises and huge problems.” But her essay leaves out critical details, makes some key factual errors, and is based on unwarranted assumptions. I’ll respond to each of her objections one by one. //

Demanding an airtight guaranteed result before bringing a bill to the floor began roughly 20 years ago and is an aberration of the modern Senate. For 200 years before that, Senate leaders would bring bills to the floor with a degree of uncertainty, and the momentum created by debate, amendment, exhaustion, and negotiation usually (but not always) resulted in passage of the bill. Bringing a bill to the floor when you already know the outcome is not fighting, leading, or even legislating. It’s just scheduling. //

When former Democrat Majority Leader Mike Mansfield brought the Civil Rights Act to the floor in 1964, he didn’t have the votes necessary for cloture on either side of party lines. According to the Senate’s historian, while his Democrat caucus had 67 members, “barely 40 expressed strong support for cloture.” He spent 60 days forcing southern Democrats to filibuster the bill. During that time, a public political process put immense pressure on the opponents, allowed proponents to execute an ongoing strategy and build bipartisan support, forced both sides into a legislative negotiation, and the result was the filibuster being broken with 71 votes.

A talking filibuster forces a process. A specific outcome is never guaranteed — that’s the legislative process! — but the first step toward getting any kind of outcome at all, besides ignoring the bill entirely, is to try. //

Or, to put it in the words of Sen. Robert C. Byrd when he forced a talking filibuster in 1988: “There is no point of having an easy gentlemen’s filibuster back in the cloakrooms. Let’s have it right here on the Senate floor where the American people can see it.”

Americans want to see the Senate rise to the level of their expectations: to tangle with hard questions and deliberate with skill and strategy. The talking filibuster has been a tool in the Senate’s arsenal for 200 years, and returning to it could unlock the majesty of the institution, which has for too long been dormant and increasingly irrelevant.

The Flying Bulls GmbH (Red Bull) | OE-LDM | Douglas DC-6B | Callsign: OELDM | Built: 1958 | Flight: Zürich-Salzburg

a unexpected arrival , due to some engine problem , subsequent starting attempts to get airborne , and ultimately did some test flights ( Part 2 ) a wonderful memory year 2000 EXTENDED footage , the sound conditions were excellent first flight of this iconic design 1946

dismal weather but good sound ( haze and rain ! ) rare footage of the last Lockheed Tristar departure from Ostend , some 24 years ago 30/06/1999 CKS N104CK American International Airways CKS 358 to Gander 9.24AM

Non hushkitted DC-8 and rare hushkitted Boeing 707 Sounds still great ! Ostend Airport 2001

impressive speed , fast , noisy , rolling take off , in a hurry !! NOISY !! TMA 707 OD-AGO departure , runway 26 Exhilarating show !! Quality Airport Ostend Year 2001 ( June )

So many Christian leaders want their ministries to become more sustainable. How can we get there? Join EMI staff member and Creation Care series host Rob Quail for a webinar on how we apply creation care principles and sustainable design to EMI Projects. Rob will walk us through the research done by the EMI creation care working group on various holistic sustainability assessment tools already in existence, how we have applied some of them on previous projects and the application of a new tool, developed in-house by EMI, on a recent project trip to Belize.

The sustainability appraisal is intended to inform strategic planning, particularly as it relates to long-term cost efficiency, energy use, and the expansion of campus facilities. Join us to learn how the sustainability assessment can serve your ministry or how you can partner with EMI in this service.

Together we design and build projects that bring hope to communities around the world.

Intro to Creation Care - EMI Series #1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7h4j63HTfk

Landscape Architecture - EMI Creation Care Series #4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugNcG4clSKs

Why clean power is about people, not sacrifice //

We tend to talk about energy as if it’s a niche technical problem; something for engineers, utilities, and climate wonks to argue about at conferences. I’ve been guilty of this myself, spending time discussing reactor designs when I should have been talking about the people and institutions that actually do the reacting. Megawatts, grids, emissions targets, and levelised costs all matter, but they’re not the whole story, and simply not part of the broader story that appeals to most people. Energy isn’t just an input into the economy; it’s the thing that sets everything else in motion. It’s the backbone of civilisation. It’s the foundation of modern human flourishing. Hence, energy is life.

This becomes obvious the moment you look at the data. Wherever reliable electricity shows up, a familiar pattern follows, of higher literacy, lower child mortality, higher incomes, better health outcomes, and more education for women. That’s not ideology, but correlation after correlation, across countries and decades. Energy access doesn’t always guarantee prosperity, but the absence of it certainly guarantees poverty.

It’s also worth remembering something that news headlines rarely emphasise: by almost every measurable metric, including life expectancy, child survival, poverty reduction, and education, the world is far better than it was a century ago. That progress didn’t happen by accident, but because we learned how to produce vast amounts of cheap, reliable energy, and because human societies reacted by building everything else on top of it. The mechanism isn’t mysterious. Energy powers clean water systems, hospitals, vaccines, heating, lighting, refrigeration, agriculture, and the internet. Take energy away, and modern life quickly starts to fall apart.

And yet. Hundreds of millions of people still have no access to electricity at all. Billions cook with solid fuels that damage their lungs. Even in rich countries, people die every winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes properly. These aren’t lifestyle choices, but the consequence of political choices that enable energy shortages.

Psychologists have known for decades that humans are bad at judging risk. We overestimate dramatic, low-probability dangers and underestimate slow, high-probability harms, through a mix of availability bias and negativity bias. This bias has real consequences. Nuclear accidents loom large in the public imagination, even though, measured per unit of electricity produced, nuclear energy is far safer the alternatives.

As I have said before, the uncomfortable consequence is that fear of nuclear energy has often caused more harm than nuclear energy itself.

Does anyone want to tell Linus Torvalds? No? I didn't think so. //

The report on Product Security Bad Practices warns software manufacturers about developing "new product lines for use in service of critical infrastructure or [national critical functions] NCFs in a memory-unsafe language (eg, C or C++) where there are readily available alternative memory-safe languages that could be used is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety."

In short, don't use C or C++. Yeah, that's going to happen.

If this sounds familiar, it's because CISA has been preaching on this point for years.

Rust is one component of it. Adopt it, forbid the "unsafe" keyword, and in theory you end up with code far less prone to memory mis-use errors.

However, when one looks at today's hardware, MELTDOWN / SPECTRE and similar are all about memory misuse / mishandling within CPUs. And it's interesting to consider what can be done about that. There have been articles here on El Reg on the topic of the need to get rid of C in the hardware sense too. C / C++ and today's libraries for them all assume that its running on a Symmetric Multi Processing hardware environment (for multicore hardware). But, the hardware hasn't actually looked like that for decades; SMP is a synthetic hardware environment built on top of things like QPI, or HyperTransport (or newer equivalents), and these cache-coherency networks are what is causing MELTDOWN / SPECTRE faults which the CPU designers are seemingly powerless to fix. Apple's own silicon has recently been found to have such faults - they're unfixable in M1, M2, and they've not disabled the miscreant feature in M3 even though they can.

So, it looks like we should be getting rid of SMP. That would leave us with - NUMA.

We've had such systems before - Transputers are one such example. //

Shared Memory is, Today, no Different to Copied Memory

The classic "don't copy data, send a pointer to data if you want it to be fast" is maxim that should have died decades ago. It was only ever true in actual SMP environments like Intel's NetBurst of the 1990s.

Today, for one core to access data in memory attached to a different core, pretty much the same microelectronic transactions have to take place as would be required to simply copy the data.

Ts'o, Hohndel and the man himself spill beans on how checks in the mail and GPL made it all possible

A team of neuroscientists at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh have discovered that when the prize gets too big — like Olympic gold — the brain becomes overly cautious, slowing down the neuron activity that prepares the body for motor movements the body usually does smoothly and without hesitation. //

But even before these findings, scientists had figured out that overthinking destroys an athlete’s normal fluidity.

Some adults over 40 have shoulder pain, but nearly all have “abnormal” joints. //

The authors argue that the findings suggest clinicians should rethink MRI findings, changing not just how they’re used, but also how they’re explained to patients. The language in particular should change given that “abnormalities” are ubiquitous—thus normal—and shouldn’t be described in terms that indicate a need for repair, like “tear.”

“While we refer to these findings as abnormalities, many likely represent normal age-related changes rather than clinically relevant structural changes,” the authors write. “Adopting more precise and less value-laden terminology—such as lesion, defect, fraying, disruption, structural alteration, or degeneration—may help reduce patient anxiety and the perceived need to do something or fix something by avoiding language that implies trauma or a requirement for repair.”

Contrary to what password managers say, a server compromise can mean game over.