You are correct. The public only receives written transcripts of the relevant sections of tape only. Off-topic conversations, meaning anything that is not relevant to the air accident, are not released. The audio files are not released to the public.

Both of these are “without prejudice”, meaning the gov can refile charges if they get their act together on legally appointing a US attorney with the advice and consent of the Senate.

It’s not completely clear, but these dismissals could moot the other pending motions to dismiss, including the vindictive prosecution claims, even though those could result in “with prejudice” dismissal.

The government can appeal these rulings. They have done so in other invalid US attorney cases.

If they refile on Comey, he will argue that the statute of limitations has run out. The government will argue that they get a 6 month extension under a statute. Judge Currie already stated today that Comey’s position is correct, but I don’t know if that opinion binds whatever future judge gets the case when it’s refiled.

Letitia James still has more time on the statute of limitations, so she’s in a worse position.

It might be hard to actually get these cases refiled. Halligan was appointed using an invalid procedure precisely because there’s no way she could pass Senate confirmation. Every other prosecutor of any competence has preferred to get fired rather than charge these cases. The order today gives the judges the power to appoint an interim US attorney again, and if they do so, that one could stop any prosecution. And finally, the cases would have to pass grand jury scrutiny again. We know the Comey charges barely scraped by on 14 votes the first time.

It’s a real geopolitical problem for Russia. Russia got screwed by geography in terms of natural harbors that don’t freeze over in the winter. It’s why they’ve always had a crap navy, going way back into the imperial days.

Right now, the Russian Navy is based in Murmansk (brrrr. limited routes to get out into Atlantic) and the Black Sea. The Black Sea is bad for them because Turkey (a NATO member) makes sure to maintain total control of what passes through the Bosphorous.

Part of what Russia did in Syria during the civil war netted them a lease on a base on the Mediterranean. That could have had some use for power projection, but I think they lost it when a certain opthalmologist was expelled.

Anyhow, it’s hilarious when the trolls posing as MAGA Americans bring this up, because real Americans just take their total abundance of ports that don’t freeze over completely for granted. That’s why I point out secondary, less busy port cities on the Gulf of Mexico, where the water is actually pretty warm (instead of just not freezing over). Just to highlight how good the US has it. Even if we were forced to give up Norfolk and Coronado, there are plenty of other suitable places we could have naval bases.

Ah, yes. As a patriotic American I love our warm water ports like Corpus Christi and Tampa. Don’t you love warm water ports as well?

we have officially submitted upstream pull requests to the historical source repositories of Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III

Zork was originally developed for the PDP-10. It was split into titles I, II, and III for the home microcomputer market. I’d love to learn about just how many revision control systems this code has been through.

Do snow crabs live to be 35?

I remember I went to a Mardi Gras parade that year, and every single float was a joke about Bill Clinton’s penis. Very family friendly that was.

They pick out the small chickens to go to the rotisserie. The chickens for sale raw are substantially heavier on average.

The programming language is named after the comedy troupe, not the snake.

There’s a lot of complete trash. Multiple reskins of the same puzzle game with randomly generated names. Bare bones minesweeper clone written entirely by AI, and advertised as such. That sort of thing.

You missed “CM,” which was common in copyright statements in the 20th century.

Back in the Roman empire, they didn’t have any punctuation marks or spaces between words. Reading was a lot harder. It was normal to read very slowly, compared to nowadays. And always out loud, sounding out the words, even in private.

Just for context, almost every federal court is a branch of a state court.

This is not true at all.

Federal courts are part of the judicial branch, not the executive branch. So they don’t shut down when the executive branch “shuts down”, because the shutdown laws don’t apply to them. As a practical matter federal courts can keep running for a while using saved up court fee revenue. They will eventually run out of that money and gave some tough choices about what to do.

The soybeans are not solely grown for export. They also fix nitrogen into the soil for the massive corn crop. And as to the corn, I think some of it is exported, but a lot of it is going to animal feed and high fructose corn syrup. So there’s a vector for food price impacts, particularly at the cheap and processed end of the domestic food supply.

There’s a rule that the flight has to be within so many minutes of a diversion airport at all times, and this is hard to do in Antarctica.

Nowadays, 180 minutes is fairly common, and there are some planes and airlines that can go to 240 or even as high as 370.

If you’re getting into private jets, you should also know that brands have reputations even there.

Gulfstream is a luxury brand within the private jet world. You can easily get a comparable product from Bombardier or Cessna Textron that performs equivalently, but only pay half as much operating costs as Gulfstream. Like Gucci, you pay a lot of money just for the Gulfstream name.

At the low end of the market, Honda makes a small jet. (This is in the Very Light Jet category which bumps up against the turboprop market).

At the very high end of the market you get into Boeing Business Jets, and the Airbus equivalent. These are converting airliners to your exact interior design specifications. Airliners are like another order of magnitude higher cost to operate.

There’s a class of orbits called “polar orbits” that are sideways and perpendicular to the spin of the earth. These orbits are useful for satellites whose main job is taking pictures of earth, because they will cover nearly all of the earth’s territory over time. You get into a polar orbit by launching to the north outer south.

Aside from that, nearly all launches go towards the spin of the earth, because it’s a free boost. The fancy rocketry word for this is “prograde”.

The sun appears to traverse from east to west in the sky. This means that the earth is moving the opposite way: west to east. So if you want to take advantage of the free boost, the rocket needs to take off in an easterly direction.

The amount of spin you get is greatest if you launch from the tropics near the equator, and it falls off at greater north or south latitudes. In theory, if you set up a launch pad at the north pole, the spin boost would be zero in all directions, because you’re just rotating in place. At the equator, the free boost is around 1000 mph or 1600 km/hr.

So the ideal launch site is as close to the equator as possible, and it has low population off to its east, in case the rocket blows up or crashes. The United States has two sites that meet these criteria: one in Florida and one in extreme south Texas. Both of these face an ocean to the east. Europe launches Ariane rockets from French Guiana in South America. Russia uses Kazakhstan, which is on the southern ends of the old Soviet Union.

Red is crap. Gotta go blue or clear.

Real hyperloop, not the Musk bullshit. Scaled up pneumatic tube systems operating at orbital speeds (7 km/s).