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Yeah. The expensive soap dispenser probably had to pass shock and vibration testing, thermal stress testing, and explosive atmosphere testing… Because that was in the requirements.

Also, as the safety briefing says, “we do not anticipate a change in cabin pressure,” but if a rapid decompression should occur, there was probably some provision made so that the soap dispenser doesn’t just shatter or explode or something.

Is it really just $250? That would be a pretty serious rebuke from the court.

Would a fork be technically viable if Americans and American businesses can’t participate (because the fork works with SDN entities)? Maybe.

The reality is that the Linux Foundation is in the United States, and Linus is a naturalized US citizen who lives in Oregon (at least on Wikipedia). So they both will have to pay attention to avoid transacting business with individuals and companies on the SDN list. That is the law in the United States.

When you enter the United States, customs “inspects” all the stuff you’re bringing back. If it’s more than $850 worth of stuff, then you have to go to the cashier and pay a tax.

The tax is a percent of what the stuff is worth. The percent rate can depend on what type of goods it is, and what country it’s coming from. There are massive tables to look this stuff up.

The stuff you carried out of the country and are now bringing back with you doesn’t count toward the $850 limit.

If you’re shipping stuff in but not traveling with it, there is no exemption. Tax applies right away. You also have to hire a guy called a broker to help you with the CBP paperwork and to submit payment.

So let’s say somebody is importing sugar from the Caribbean, and there’s a tariff. They have to pay a percent to the feds every time they ship in some sugar. They raise the price they charge on the sugar to cover that. Then sugar from Louisiana looks more attractive on the store shelf because it’s cheaper.

Who pays? Whoever is shipping the goods in pays, but they make it up by charging more for the imported products.

Why do it? Usually, you want to make some domestic industry more attractive by raising the price of the foreign competition.

In the sugar example, sugar is more expensive to farm in Louisiana because people get paid more, and the equipment is more expensive. If there wasn’t a tariff, people might stop farming sugar in Louisiana entirely. That might make some people sad. On the other hand, all Americans would be able to pay less for sugar without the tariff.

What they’re saying is this:

1. That land used to have nothin much on it, so it was cheap land, and the property taxes were low.
2. 30 million was spent on building the private wall. I don’t think this money came from the land owner. (This is the crowd funded Trump Wall, right?)
3. With the fancy new wall on it, the property is now appraised at around 20 million (or maybe whatever it was plus 20 million). Whether it’s 75 times or 100 times what it was before is not super important. The point is it went from not much to quite a bit.
4. Property taxes went up in accordance with the new valuation.
5. Property owner is probably not wealthy enough to pay the taxes, so big picture he can’t continue to own the property.

Or, uh, maybe this story is simply false and mistaken reporting.

In fact, it appears Israel was not a party to this proposal, which was floated by the United States. In order for a ceasefire to work, you gotta get all of the belligerents on board.

(not a lawyer). If you bought the game copies that the AIs are playing, then it seems like you’re not making a copy of the game just to have the AI play it.

That kind of assumes that your AI is playing the game through a mechanism like AutoHotKey, generating keyboard or controller inputs that pass through the operating system to the game.

If your AI hooks into or modifies the game code to “play”, then it could run afoul of anti-reverse engineering clauses that are common in the click through license agreements. Those clauses may not be enforceable in your jurisdiction. Legal results on anti-reverse engineering clauses are kind of mixed in the United States.

Edit: for reference, there was a software called “Glider” that played World of Warcraft for you, so you don’t have to grind to level up. Blizzard absolutely hated the makers of Glider, but it stuck around for a long time, before it was ultimately sued into oblivion.

Foreign nationals, let alone foreign governments, are not allowed to give money to political campaigns in the United States. Actually illegal. Bill Clinton got in trouble for it

If you can prove that an NFT scheme was foreign campaign money laundering in court, people can go to jail.

Israel has already been fighting a war with Hezbollah that Hezbollah declared. These attacks were fairly specifically targeted at Hezbollah’s military equipment. They have been arguably successful at disrupting Hezbollah’s communications, and likely command and control systems. That by itself is a valid military objective.

To the extent that these attacks directly hurt Hezbollah personnel, and to the extent that they damaged Hezbollah’s morale: those too are valid military objectives.

So “war crime” gets thrown around here quite a bit just because there are high civilian casualties. The facts are twofold: Civilian casualties have always been a part of warfare; and there is no specific number or proportion that makes some act into a war crime. That’s just not how these kinds of laws are written.

I have not yet seen a strong argument for a specific war crime rooted in a specific basis in international law. A lot of people bring up protocols 1 and 2 to the Geneva conventions, but Israel and the US have not ratified those.

There are other conventions that regulate weapons of war, but I’m pretty sure none of them are going to address pager bombs directly. An argument there would have to be at least somewhat creative.

Here’s the really crazy thing.

Ark City, KS is located on the Ar-KAN-sas River. But this is the same river that flows through Little Rock under the name AR-kan-saw.

The gist of it is that to reenter the atmosphere safely, you need to point the heat shield at the oncoming air. To do that, you need working reaction control thrusters.

Boeing Starliner capsule apparently has some kind of latent failure mode with its thrusters where they start degrading and can fail in a few hours of operation. On the way up, the spacecraft was in transit for around 26 hours, and recorded five thrusters disabled, of which four relit in subsequent testing. One thruster is apparently really dead. The capsule has about fifty thrusters, so being down five doesn’t really compromise steering.

Ground testing of these thrusters was performed at White Sands, NM, and apparently NASA really did not like the results. But I haven’t heard anything about what those tests found.

There’s also a helium leak (active only when the RCS is warmed up), but it’s not clear if this is a critical factor. Compressed helium is used to force the fuel to go out of the thrusters.

As far as I know, the actual estimated risk of failure for this capsule is still pretty low, but now believed to be high enough that they might as well not take the risk. (And remember these are test astronauts… They have a pretty high risk tolerance).

Also, even if the risk of one reentry is maybe low enough to try it, the White Sands and orbital data probably revealed a systemic design problem with the RCS that now precludes operational certification. Since neither Boeing nor NASA is willing to pay for a second test flight, this capsule is effectively dead as an ongoing space program. So why take any kind of risk on a reentry if you don’t have to?

Prison rules. Tether them to the work station.

It’s talking about private citizens. But I only know that from history class, not from reading the article or anything.

If you go on Pentecost, they do this thing where they drop rose petals through the oculus at the end of the mass. Something something symbolizes tongues of fire.

Edit: the Colosseum is also technically a Catholic church.

Incinerated plastic releases green house gases and some amount of micro plastics in the uncombusted ash.

Landfill plastic seemingly just erodes into micro plastics over long time scales.

Lucky Charms are an American breakfast cereal containing sugary marshmallow pieces with a lot of food coloring. Lucky Charms are served in a bowl with milk.

Was this 4k video from an arbitrary source, like a random YouTube video? Or from United’s website?

I haven’t flown outside is Southwest in a while, but they have a bunch of licensed video content that is hosted locally on the plane. And therefore cheap.