There is a blue van in the right lane,

*car in front of a blue road sign

at 270 km/h (168 MPH), he’s going to be right behind it in a second.

The bollards on the right side of the road are at a distance of 50m from each other, by which we can estimate that the other car is at least 250 to 300 meters away. 270km/h equals 75m/s so they are about 4 seconds behind (if the other car was stationary).

Therefore the lane is not – in fact – free.

To answer this question it is much more important to know what is on the right lane next to or behind the car, which we do not see in this image anyway.

Yeah but like I said, if you promise some other form of compensation on the level or above what they lose in benefits, you will still find people willing to follow these illegal orders. Hell you could find people willing to follow illegal orders even before this ruling, but now that the presidents right to give illegal orders is explicitly enshrined in constitutional jurisprudence this pre-existing problem is much worse. I doubt those people will care about a dishonourable discharge, on the contrary it will make them martyrs to “the cause” and they will be worshipped for it. And it remains to be seen how all this would play out in court, I guess it’s quite possible for the defence to argue that if the president has immunity for giving orders, their subordinates have immunity for following those orders.

All good points if true. However I will say that to my limited understanding a crime under a specific law having been pardoned, that same law can then not be used to prosecute this crime anymore. Meaning states would have to find a different (preferably state) law under which the same offence is punishable.

And that is all disregarding other issues like packed courts, republican controlled states, the vagueness of double-jeopardy in this regard, and the general chilling effect a presidential pardon would have on prosecutors to even press charges in the first place.

The loss of benefits is easily circumvented by promising a golden parachute along with the pardon, so I could still see a lot of fanatics doing the crime “for country and freedom” or whatever they tell themselves.

Overall this seems like a potentially dangerous erosion of checks and balances that is easily abused when put in the wrong hands. As the dissenting opinions in the ruling openly state.

Ok yeah fair enough, that sounds reasonable. But to my knowledge the UMCJ is a federal law, not a state law, so how does that line of argument factor in there? You cited that as an example of checks and balances that would prevent people from following illegal orders, but it being a federal law still means the president could circumvent it with the official order plus pardon combo, at least if my understanding of this new supreme court ruling is correct.

IANAL, but there is the presidential power to pardon. So the president could in theory give an illegal order (as long as it is an official act they have immunity) and promise a presidential pardon once the order is fulfilled (therefore extending immunity to the perpetrator). Meaning the president can entirely circumvent the UCMJ.

(not actually everything, but I get your hyperbole)

How is it hyperbole? All artificial neural networks have “hallucinations”, no matter their size. What’s your magic way of knowing when that happens?

I’m involved in the development of an addon for the Classic WoW versions (Questie), and the thing I do there is such a convoluted process that not doing it feels like letting my fellow devs and the users down. But you can do development on the PTRs and beta servers, so I haven’t given money to Blizzard in a long time. Now you could argue that this is even worse in regards to supporting Blizzard than just paying for a game, but I rationalise it to myself with the fact that the newer clients will inevitably be used for private servers just like the old ones were (some already are actually).

Neither. Battle.net is Blizzards game launcher and store. They also own that domain, but the name usually refers to the binary.

The WINE_SIMULATE_WRITECOPY=1 %command% is the Steam launch option you set, with %command% meaning roughly “what Steam would do without any launch options set”.

The whole process was a bit finicky and I did it a few month ago, but from what I remember it went something like this:

• Download battle.net installer
• Add it as non-Steam game to run it
• Locate the newly created prefix in Steam directory
• Add the Battle.net.exe in it as a non-Steam game, then remove the installer (not the other way around or the prefix will be deleted)

Oh so that’s what you meant. Thought you meant don’t use Lutris at first because of how you worded it. That makes much more sense.

AFAIK you can set Lutris up to use GE or Proton builds.

Did that too a while back, but anecdotally it feels lees buggy through Steam, especially regarding updates.

Also clicking the Stop button in Steam doesn’t leave behind zombie processes off Battle.net.exe and Agent.exe, which I had to manually kill when using Lutris. Assume that’s due to Protons(?) pressure-vessel thingy.

there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.

Once upon a time in a messenger landscape far far away there lived a king called XMPP. It had a lot of powerful children, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google+, and even Skype amongst them. And they all worked together in a big federation towards the commonwealth of all, freely sharing their metadata. But then some of the children grew greedy, jealously guarding their own gardens behind higher and higher walls, breaking down the federation. And thus the era of the warring messengers began. But prophecy foretells of a prince to unite all the disparate standards in one big Matrix again, completing yet another revolution of the XKCD 972 wheel of time.

For real though it was phone numbers. WhatsApp always worked based off of phone numbers, which is an identity confirmation method that was immediately familiar to most people at the time, even more so than email.

Just highlighting the propaganda for those unfamiliar with it. Seemed à propos.

Agreed. And the (probably unintended) irony is that the Berlin Wall was ostensibly built in order to keep the capitalists out. Be careful what you wish for, especially when it’s a wall. They work both ways.

it’s definitely more pro-privacy than Brave or FireFox. I’ve never had to jump through a captcha to use Google in those browsers.

You have this backwards. Google showing you captchas is basically them saying they can’t match your browser to any know (shadow) profile they have already stored. So they aren’t sure you are a human and if so which one specifically. Getting harassed with a captcha is essentially like a badge of honour for your browsers privacy settings.

pandoc.org is probably what you are looking for, but you might have to create a custom reader/writer or find one on the internet.