When the government is this big, this overbearing, this out of control, the opportunities for graft likewise grow out of control too - and the attraction to people who are seeking that kind of graft grows out of control along with it.

That's where you get the federal government sending almost $400k to a Chinese company for one magic bus and that same company shoveling campaign contributions to the politicians who made the funding happen.

One hand washes the other. //

Chelan Jim
an hour ago
Electric buses are having issues. An article from Government Technology (govtech.com) on March 2024:

The director of the New York Association for Pupil Transportation said 20 out of 100 electric school buses are down on any given day, due to problems with the buses or with their charging devices.

The article goes on to say:

Traditional diesel buses, for instance, have a failure rate of 1 or 2 percent, meaning that out of a fleet of 100 buses, one or two would be down for repairs on a given day, said David Christopher, executive director

And the electric buses cost about $100,000 more per bus.

ince early September, Cloudflare's DDoS protection systems have been combating a month-long campaign of hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks. Cloudflare’s defenses mitigated over one hundred hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks throughout the month, with many exceeding 2 billion packets per second (Bpps) and 3 terabits per second (Tbps). The largest attack peaked 3.8 Tbps — the largest ever disclosed publicly by any organization. Detection and mitigation was fully autonomous. The graphs below represent two separate attack events that targeted the same Cloudflare customer and were mitigated autonomously.

Bill Whitaker actually did a good job of asking some probing questions, and Kamala gave some ridiculous answers, including one incredible word salad about Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They released a clip on it early, but then when they did the whole interview on Monday, the answer had changed and been edited. //

anon-tf71 an hour ago
Can we sue CBS for election interference?

polyjunkie anon-tf71 an hour ago edited
Well, in New York, they would have to make some errors in their tax returns by deducting the expenses associated with the interview as a business expense instead of a contribution in kind to the Harris campaign. They would then be misdemeanor “bookkeeping errors”. Then, after the statute of limitations expires, the DA can declare that the statute was extended for a year for “reasons”, and then add them all together, declare them to now be felonies because “election interference”, and try CBS. So, yes. I would say sure, try them for election interference.

FrogsAndChipsSilver badge
He's right, of course
The importance of using the active voice cannot be emphasized enough.

DostoevskyBronze badge
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Re: He's right, of course
It appears my idea was stolen by you.

2 days
Bill Gray
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Re: He's right, of course
I suspect about 50% of us came here to make that post. I first came across it from a list of 'fumblerules', I think collected by William Safire circa 1980, that included :

Don't use no double negatives.

Sentences should a verb.

One will never have used the future perfect in one's entire life.

Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read and figure out.

I've told you a thousand times : avoid hyperbole.

(plus quite a bit more not currently coming to mind) //

2 days
rafff
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Re: He's right, of course
"I have searched for a word that refers to itself."

In a logic text book I once read the word is "homologous". "Heterologous" denotes a word that does not refer to itself. Clearly, there are no other possibilities.

"Short" is a short word, and so is homologous; "long" is not a long word and so is heterologous. But what about "Heterologous" itself? If "heterologous" is heterologous then it does not refer to itself and so must be homologous. But if it is homologous then it does refer to itself and so is heterologous.

Benegesserict CumbersomberbatchSilver badge
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Re: He's right, of course
There's a Dr Gödel here who would like to have a word with you. //

“Noncitizens voting in federal elections is illegal under the ‘Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996,’” Braynard said in a statement announcing the ad blitz.

“However, there are still cases of it occurring, putting noncitizens at risk of facing serious charges and of affecting the outcome of our elections,” he claims.

One such ad, posted to YouTube, begins by reminding all Americans of the importance of voting in the elections come November. But should one attempt to cast an illegal ballot, they face significant repercussions. //

The group also cites a peer-reviewed scientific study published in Electoral Studies in 2014 that found non-citizens had, in fact, voted in U.S. elections.

The study claims non-citizen voting “likely changed 2008 outcomes including Electoral College votes and the composition of Congress.”

It also reveals that “non-citizens favor Democratic candidates over Republican candidates.”

It goes to the heart of an argument long made by X CEO Elon Musk, who has repeatedly pointed out that the census counts illegal aliens, affecting the congressional makeup in blue states and incentivizing Democrats to allow open-border policies to continue unabated.

“If Dems win President, House & Senate (with enough seats to overcome filibuster),” Musk warned previously, “they’ll grant citizenship to all illegals (and) America will become a permanent one-party deep socialist state.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0261379414000973 //

In addition to allowing non-citizens to be counted towards congressional apportionment, the Biden-Harris administration has been actively granting citizenship to immigrants at speeds not seen in over a decade.

REPORTER: Is the increase in tornados [caused by] global warming?

DESANTIS: I think you can back and find tornadoes for all of human history, for sure, and especially, you know, Florida, how does this storm rate in the history of storms? I think it hit with a barometric pressure of (looks at the man behind him), what was it? About 950 millibars when it hit?

Which, I think if you go back to 1851, there's probably been 27 hurricanes that have had lower, the lower the barometric pressure, the stronger it is. I think there have been about 27 hurricanes that have had lower barometric pressure on landfall than Milton did, and of those, 17 occurred, I think, prior to 1960, and the most powerful hurricane on record since the 1850s in the State of Florida occurred in the 1930s, the Labor Day hurricane. Barometric pressure 892 millibars.

It totally wiped out the Keys. We've never seen anything like it, and that remains head and shoulders above any powerful hurricane in the State of Florida. The most deadly hurricane we've ever had was in 1928, the Okichobi hurricane. Killed over 4,000 people. Fortunately, we aren't going to have anything close to that on this hurricane, but even ones like Ian, it wasn't anything close to that. Yeah, I just think people should put this in perspective. They try to take different things that happen with tropical weather and act like it's something. There's nothing new under the sun. This is something that the state has dealt with for its entire history, and it's something that we'll continue to deal with.

REPORTER: In your history, sir, how many storms form as rapidly as they have between Helena and Milton.

DESANTIS: I think most people remember 2004 where it seemed like we had them every other week in 2004. Then there's also time period. From 2006-16, we had no hurricanes at all in Florida. There's also been times where we had a lot. In the 1940s, we were hit a lot. Now, more recently, we've had a spate for more. That's just kind of the nature of it, but this really does, it has a lot of similarities to 2004 in terms of the season.

In late August, Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at CBS News, sent an email to all CBS News employees reminding them to “be careful with some terms when we talk or write about the news” from Israel and Gaza. One of the words on Memmott’s list of terms was Jerusalem.

Of Jerusalem, Memmott wrote: “Do not refer to it as being in Israel.”

He continued, in a note sent to thousands of journalists at the network: “Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed. The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its ‘eternal and undivided’ capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem—occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war—as the capital of a future state.”

Jerusalem’s status is indeed contested. For instance, the United States’ embassy in Israel is in Jerusalem, and the Jordanian Islamic Waqf has custody of its holy sites. But acknowledging the competing claims on different parts of the city, or declining to refer to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, are one thing. Denying that it is in Israel at all is quite another.

In which country is the Israeli Knesset, the home of the Israeli prime minister and the home of the Israeli president, located? The answer to that question is self-evident. Except, it seems, at CBS. In the rest of the United States, the answer is clear: Since 1995, when Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, the government has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Grammatical errors in the post itself notwithstanding (Muphry's law is axiomatic in this type of post, and likely also in this article describing it), The Reg thinks Torvalds is correct. The passive construction, which may be found in scientific papers and technical writing, can be confusing and annoying. It creates a lack of clarity that leads not only to confusion about responsibility or agency, but often hides important information about who should be doing what and when. Ideal for certain vendor manuals, then. //

The Linux supremo declared:

But what does make extra work is when some maintainers use passive voice, and then I try to actively rewrite the explanation (or, admittedly, sometimes I just decide I don't care quite enough about trying to make the messages sound the same). So I would ask maintainers to please use active voice, and preferably just imperative. //

Illustrating the point, and showing how far the Linux kernel chieftain has come from his more belligerent days, Torvalds said he'd "love it" (yep, he's a new man) if people would avoid writing their "descriptions as 'In this pull request, the Xyzzy driver error handling was fixed to avoid a NULL pointer dereference.' Instead, write it as 'This fixes a NULL pointer dereference in ..'"

The directive comes years after the great punctuation rant of 2016, where Torvalds pressed "brain-damaged shit-for-brains devs" to drop the "disgusting drug-induced crap" and use asterisks properly. He's toned it down several notches, basically.

His new film “Line in the Sand,” however, may go down as his biggest achievement yet, as it is a powerful, moving look at the border crisis, the human trafficking that goes with it, and the moral rot at the center. /)

I asked him what surprised him most while making this film, and he said it was the endless grift:

All the people that are on the take, all the people that were making money off of this. All the people that were not willing to do the right thing because they wanted to benefit. I don't know if that was surprising—but it was shocking to hear what people were saying.

James O'Keefe
@JamesOKeefeIII
🚨WORLD PREMIERE🚨

Line in the Sand (2024) - Official Trailer | James O’Keefe, Debut Film

Undercover journalist James O'Keefe goes to the front lines of the migrant industrial complex using hidden cameras and raw testimonials. O'Keefe reveals the shocking reality of the U.S.…
Embedded video
11:06 PM · Oct 9, 2024 //

Perhaps the most interesting thing he revealed, however, is just how much money is involved in perpetuating the problem and how many people on both sides of the boundary are benefitting from it—even as it endangers our country and causes misery for untold thousands (millions?).

Although O’Keefe didn’t get especially political in the film, the reality that he deftly portrays is one of a humanitarian disaster in large part caused by the corrupt Biden-Harris regime, aided and abetted by NGOs and others profiting from pain.

This is not journalism. It's naked activism backed by an insane DEI apparatus that seeks to control the flow of information. The fact that CBS News even has a "Race and Culture Department" that is pre-vetting interview questions is an incredible breach of journalistic ethics. Yet, it's Dokoupil who is being accused of violating editorial standards.

Naturally, not a single mainstream press "media report" such as CNN's Brian Stelter has mentioned any of these scandals. Between this and the editing falsehoods by "60 Minutes," where a completely unrelated answer was cut and pasted to a question Harris flubbed, CBS News should not be considered a "news" network. At the very least, Republican politicians need to blackball them.

Many of the residents we spoke with lost their homes to landslides and flooding during Hurricane Helene.

The Daily Signal asked people a simple question: “What do you want to say to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris?”

An overwhelming majority said that they are frustrated that the U.S. government is spending billions of dollars abroad instead of helping American citizens first.

Frank Butera, a business owner in Lake Lure, said, “It’s nice that you’re helping the illegal immigrants, but it’s time to help us people that paid taxes all our life.”

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In Android 14, Google introduced new limitations on the installation of applications targeting old versions of Android.

What’s changing
From Android 14 it is no longer possible to install any application that targets an API level below 23 - Android 6.0. Attempting to do so will trigger a security exception //

It's certainly better to ensure apps are targeting the latest API level where possible, but as long as applications target an API level of 23 (Android 6.0) or higher for Android 14, and 24 (Android 7.0) or higher in Android 15, apps will continue to be able to install without issue. //

Yes, on an Android 14 device you may connect to ADB and sideload an application with: