Tuesday Tunes
I keep feeling better and better. We are in day 7 of Trump 2.0 and it keeps getting better.
Watching the left melt down just feels good.
SCOTUS Watch: Snope and Ocean State Tactical
We are still in a holding pattern. At this instant, the January 27th order list has been released. Neither case is on it.
This means that neither case has been summarily denied certiorari.
They were not granted certiorari, either.
Later today, the dockets should be updated.
If they are relisted, we still have a chance of a decision in the 2024 term.
If they are not relisted, it suggests that there was a denial of cert and one or more of the justices are writing a “statement” dissenting with the denial.
Perspective. A case was conferenced on the 10th, 17th, and 24th. Today they issued the denial of cert. Thomas wrote a dissent, joined by Alito.
This is the same pattern as Snope and Ocean State Tactical.
I do not believe that certiorari has been denied.
If it is granted next week, the Petitioner’s briefs will be filed by March 12, 2025. This still gets us to oral arguments for the 2024 term.
According to my brief research, We are pushing oral arguments into May at this point. The Court doesn’t often hear cases in May.
Having said this, the Court sets their own rules. If they don’t set oral arguments soon, they will likely hear the cases in early October with an opinion out December 2025 or January 2026.
This and That
Happy Birthday(ish) Ally!
It was her birthday, very recently, send her a Happy Birthday!
I am SOOOO upset
Here is the item description:
- [Support Mini ITX Motherboard] ITX Motherboard dimension 6.7*6.7in (17*17cm).
- [Support Flex Power Supply Unit] Flex PSU dimension 3.21*1.59*5.91in (81.5*40.5*150mm).
- [Support 1 Single Slot Full Height PCI-e Expansion Card] To add video card or network card or more.
- [Come With 1 Front USB 3.0 or 2.0 Port] 2 in 1 cable only plug one connector to motherboard.
- Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
- On Monday, the State Department convenes an interagency task force with DoD, NSC, DEA, INS, ICE, Commerce, Treasury and Homeland Security.
- The task force meets for four days and develops a position paper.
- The position paper is rejected by the Secretary of State, who is unhappy that insufficient equity considerations are built into the process.
- The task force reconvenes a week later to redevelop three new, equity-centric courses of action and create a new position paper.
- The process is delayed a week because Washington DC gets three inches of snow.
- SecState approves the new position paper for interagency circulation, and considerable input is received from the heads of other departments so the task force must reconvene.
- The original three proposed responsive courses of action are scrapped in favor of a new, fourth course of action that achieves the worst aspects of the three prior courses of action but satisfies the interagency.
- Someone in State who disagrees leaks to the Washington Post, who writes a story about how ineffective the Presidential administration is.
- The White House Chief of Staff sets up a session three days later to brief the President, who approves the new fourth course of action.
- Over a month after the issue is first raised, the State Department Public Affairs Officer holds a press conference announcing that Colombia has agreed to try to send fewer criminals into the US and everyone declares victory.
- Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
- After a par-5 third hole where he goes one under par, Trump uses his iPhone to post on social media as to how the USA will destroy Colombia’s economy if they do not do what the USA demands.
- By the time Trump gets to the par-4 sixth hole, Colombia’s President has agreed to repatriate all the illegal Colombians in his own plane, which he will pay for.
- Trump finishes three under par and goes to the clubhouse for a Diet Coke where he posts a gangsta AI image of himself and the new FAFO Doctrine.
- Winning.
Two MAJOR issues for me. First, it doesn’t support a 170x170mm motherboard. No, it supports a 170x167mm motherboard. If you put a 170×170 in the case, there is not enough room to put the cover on.
That lead to time in the shop grinding off the offending metal.
The clearance for the board is very tight under the four disk bays. I had to get a different CPU cooler that was low profile. That’s ok. Everything went together once I got the fan in place.
Then I went to install the PCIe 10G SFP+ card. There is no space in the back for that card! They put the damn full height opening in the worng place.
FAFO
I’m stealing this from X. I was going to write about this, I had multiple sources. I was going to quote published documents. Instead, I’ll let this stand for itself.
To fully understand just how remarkable today’s exchange with Colombia was, you need to understand how Washington DC has traditionally worked through these sorts of issues, and the different way it works now under Trump.
I’ll illustrate.
Traditional Approach:
Trump Approach:
See the difference? It’s called LEADERSHIP.
For a little bit of clarity on how heavy handed Trump 2.0 was, Colombia exports around a billion dollars worth of roses every year to America. In order for those roses to be sold, they have to get expedited inspections. They also have to be reasonably prices.
With the 25% tariffs, Trump was going to put the hurting on 31% of their economy. But it is better. If Colombia had not caved, the tariffs were going to go up to 50%.
In addition, Trump ordered full inspections of everything being imported from Colombia. That means that many of those roses would have wilted in transit.
Oh, did you remember that Valentine’s Day is coming up? And that is the biggest sales day in the country for roses.
Whining on X
I could write a dozen articles about whining liberals over on X. The most common whine is, “a bad thing is going to happen. This is what you morons voted for. Don’t you feel stupid now?”
One Step Forward n Steps Back (geek)
I’ve known about “System On a Chip” and “System On a Board” for many years. I have one of the early embedded software development kits, including some TI chipset.
The most common style of these today is likely the Arduino class of SoC. These things are incredible.
An idea I pitched years ago, for potential military use, was a swarm of small single purpose computers that could be dropped in mass from an aircraft.
Something about the size of a quarter with one or two sensors, a mesh Wi-Fi system, GPS, and a battery. These would drop like the “helicopter” seed pods, scatter over an area, then set up a monitoring network. Using spread spectrum, low power, and burst transmissions, the network might be difficult to detect.
As the sensors detected “things”, they would report to a transmission unit, which would then send a report to home base.
This was all based on a small battery. We figured we could get these things in mass and get them ready to toss out the back of a C130 for less than $100 each.
Today, I can buy a chip that will do that, put it on a custom board with all components for less than $20 in low unit counts.
So SoC, way cool.
The other thing that has been happening is that the physical size requirements for a personal computer have gone way down. Whereas the original XT motherboard was 8.5×11 and the AT was 12×13, we are now seeing Mini-ITX at 6.7×6.7 and even Nano-ITX at 4.7×4.7.
My son found the Mini-ITX form factor computer a few years ago. A full computer that was the size of 3 boxes of .45cal. It weights less.
His computer came with 2 HDMI ports, 4 USB3.2 ports, a headphone jack, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 1Gb Ethernet. It had upgradable memory and at least one M.2 port. This thing just works.
What is cool about it is that it mounts to the back of a monitor. He needs his keyboard and two power supplies.
It is what I got my lovely wife for Christmas this last year.
Can I ditch the big boxes?
Things go in circles. My primary machine lives in a case I purchased almost 20 years ago. It has a new power supply, an extra video card, and a SAS controller. It is designed to handle 9 internal drives plus the optical drive. It can connect to external SAS cabinets.
It was designed to have 36 TB of storage in a ZFS pool. It is heavy. It requires big fans. It is a workhorse.
But, I’m moving away from ZFS. It is a great system, I love it. It just does not meet my current needs. I’ve moved to ceph, a distributed system.
Ceph does not use raid technology the same way that ZFS does. Instead, it depends on having many nodes with lots of redundancy.
With ZFS, my normal was one parity drive for every 4 data drives. So a 20% overhead.
In its fast mode, ceph has a 200% overhead. For every block of data stored, it requires two copies. There are modes that are more optimized, but they all seem to have higher overhead than a raid system.
But because I don’t need to create 5 drive pools, I can do something different. More boxes with just a few drives in each.
I don’t need all that motherboard. I don’t need all that memory. I don’t even need all that much CPU.
Some of the servers I’m using only support two SATA drives, but have an NVMe slot. Still, it is a big box.
My answer was to go looking. I found a cheap ITX-Mini motherboard. It would have been cheaper off the boat, but I found it on Amazon. A used i5 CPU. It will handle an i7 and maybe an i9. A cheap 128GB NVMe, and some DDR3 ram. Toss in a CPU cooler and it is a fully functional system.
It only has a Gigabit Ethernet, but it has a PCI slot. It has four SATA ports.
The cheap case I found has four hot swap bays for SATA drives. It takes a Mini-ITX motherboard. This thing is perfect for what I require.
So yes, this can do the job. I can downsize.
What else is cool about these Mini-ITX boards?
They really are designed with specific markets in mind. I found one with 2 2.5Gb RJ45 and 2 10Gb SFP+ ports. It has GPIO ports, comes in an extruded aluminum heat sink/case. It replaced the old router and everything got faster.
There are versions with multiple RJ45 ports. Different layouts. Different CPU designs. Some come with a CPU on the board, making them a SoB. Some are AMD, some are Intel based.
What I couldn’t find is a board with four SATA ports, a PCIe slot, and GPIO.
Which brings me back to PI
The board I want needs to have hardware-driven Ethernet, GPIO pins, and serial IO. It also has to be cheap. I think I found it in the Banana PI M2 Ultra.
It has everything I need, it was very cheap, less than dinner for three at the fast food joint.
My step backward? It requires power that I can’t give it. GRRR. So it requires a dedicated power supply.
Oh well, my NTP server is almost here.
It’s the Little Things, ICE at work
For the last 4+ years, I’ve been hearing about the horrible things that illegal aliens have been doing. Rape, murder, kidnapping, child rape, taking over apartment complexes.
The “eating the pets” might be true, or it might not.
The joke of “there are no stray cats near the Chinese Restaurant” has a reason.
What made me sick was the lack of response by law enforcement. There were politicians who showed up to say, “Nothing to see here.” There were politicians who showed up to beg law enforcement to do something.
What didn’t show up were the cops.
Three days into Trump 2.0 and it is obvious that ICE knew where to go and whom to pick up. Outstanding!
Listening to neighbors expressing loud gratitude to the cops is another good sign. They would not be making a sound if they thought those illegals would be back before dark.
I’m liking Trump 2.0.
The Fourteenth Amendment
Section 1
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This is the section of the 14th Amendment which says that the children of former slaves and former slaves are citizens of the United States.
This needed to be done because before the slaves being freed, they were not citizens. The defeated southern states were investigating how to disenfranchise former slaves.
It was ratified on July 9, 1868.
Text and this Nation’s historical tradition of regulation
When evaluating a modern regulation, when the Constitutions plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.
In this case, “Is the child of an illegal alien born in the United States a United States citizen?”
The plain text of the Constitution clearly covers the individual’s conduct, becoming or acting as a US Citizen.
Since the plain text covers the conduct, the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of regulation.
What is the regulation?
Sec. 2. Policy. (a) It is the policy of the United States that no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship, to persons: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
— Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, Executive Order, whitehouse.gov
— Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, Executive Order, whitehouse.gov
This is fairly simple. You are a US Citizen if your mother or father is a US Citizen. You are a US Citizen if your mother or father is a lawful permanent resident when you are born.
Being whelped on US grounds does not make you a citizen.
Is this interpretation consistent with giving former slaves citizenship?
Yes. Former slaves were naturalized (I Believe). So they were citizens.
Their children were born to citizens or lawful permanent residents.
What does “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” mean?
We know what it meant in 1898. In March of that year, the Supreme Court issued their opinion in —United States V. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898). This is barely 30 years from the ratification of the Amendment.
Wong Kim Ark was the child of Chinese parents. Those parents were NOT naturalized and were subjects of the Emperor of China.
When Wong Kim was 17 years old, he took a trip to China. He returned with no issues. He claimed to be a US Citizen.
In 1894, four years later, he took another trip to China. This time, when he returned, he was not allowed to disembark. Instead, he was detained.
The District Court for the Northern District of California found that Wong Kim Ark was a US citizen by virtue of his birth and had him released. The government appealed to the Supreme Court.
The question presented by the record is whether a child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicil and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China, becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States, by virtue of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
—id.
—id.
This is preciously the question the new EO brings forth.
In construing any act of legislation, whether a statute enacted by the legislature, or a constitution established by the people as the supreme law of the land, regard is to be had, not only to all parts of the act itself, and of any former act of the same law-making power, of which the act in question is an amendment; but also to the condition, and to the history, of the law as previously existing, and in the light of which the new act must be read and interpreted.
—id.
—id.
That’s old time speak for “plain text” and “historical tradition of regulation”.
To create allegiance by birth, the party must be born, not only within the territory, but within the ligeance of the government. If a portion of the country be taken and held by conquest in war, the conqueror acquires the rights of the conquered as to its dominion and government, and children born in the armies of a State, while abroad and occupying a foreign country, are deemed to be born in the allegiance of the sovereign to whom the army belongs.
—id. quoting Chancellor Kent, Kent Com. (6th ed.) 39, 42
—id. quoting Chancellor Kent, Kent Com. (6th ed.) 39, 42
So a child must be born not only within the country, but within the “ligeance” of the country. If they are born of an occupying entity, then they are citizens of the occupying entity, not the country within which they are born.
The real object of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, in qualifying the words, “All persons born in the United States,” by the addition, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” would appear to have been to exclude, by the fewest and fittest words, (besides children of members of the Indian tribes, standing in a peculiar relation to the National Government, unknown to the common law,) the two classes of cases children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation, and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign State both of which, as has already been shown, by the law of England, and by our own law, from the time of the first settlement of the English colonies in America, had been recognized exceptions to the fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the country. Calvin’s Case, 7 Rep. 1, 18b; Cockburn on Nationality, 7; Dicey Conflict of Laws, 177; Inglis v. Sailors’ Snug Harbor, 3 Pet. 99, 155; 2 Kent Com. 39, 42.
—id.
—id.
Upon the facts agreed in this case, the American citizenship which Wong Kim Ark acquired by birth within the United States has not been lost or taken away by anything happening since his birth. No doubt he might himself, after coming of age, renounce this citizenship, and become a citizen of the country of his parents, or of any other country;
—id.
—id.
When everything is said, the Supreme Court in 1898 found that if you were born of parents that were here legally, you were an American citizen.
Is that the end?
Not really, the issues are that of an invading force, or people that are here illegally. Do they have the same birth right as a child born of people here legally?
There is a strong argument to be made that illegal aliens do not gift their whelp with American citizenship merely by pushing them out while on US soil.
It is clear that if they were members of an invading army, their children would not be American citizens.
Standing
Mr. Wong Kim Ark was a person who claimed to be a US Citizen by birth. When the state refused him entrance to the United States, he was able to file a case arguing that he was a citizen and should be granted internee.
The state argued against him.
This means that Wong Kim had standing. The case was about him.
Now consider the current situation. Jose sneaks across the border with his wife Maria. Maria got knocked up by somebody, either north or south of the border, it doesn’t matter.
Maria and Jose show up at the hospital emergency room, where they are given “free” health care because they have no intention of paying for it.
Maria whelps Jose Jr.
Jose and Maria are handed a birth certificate for Junior. They are told they are the proud parents of an American Citizen.
You’re in the next bed and you hear that another illegal has their anchor baby.
You file suit claiming that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t grant citizenship to foreign invaders.
The case is dismissed. You have no standing.
This is correct.
Who has standing?
The child, the parents, and the state.
If the state isn’t challenging the granting of citizenship and the parents are not, and the child isn’t, then there is no suit.
What does the EO change?
The EO says that if you are not here legally, whelping a child here doesn’t grant that child citizenship.
If Jose wants Junior to be a citizen, he needs to file suit. The state can now argue against birthright for invaders.
If Jose loses, he better stop. If he appeals, then the circuit court will hear the case. And the state will again argue invaders don’t get to make citizens.
If the loser of that case appeals again, it will be before the Supreme Court.
At which point we will have our second opinion on birthright citizenship being granted by the 14th. It might not turn out the way that the left thinks it should.
A Little Shake of Pepper (what is a nanosecond)
Correction(s):
I made the mistake of trusting Google’s AI answer.
Speed of light:
| Time | Distance |
|---|---|
| 1s | 299,792,458m |
| 0.001s(1ms) | 299,792.458m |
| 0.000001s(1us) | 299.792m |
| 0.000000001s(1ns) | 0.2997m (299.7mm) |
| 0.000000000001s(1ps) | 0.0002997m (0.2997mm) |
Sorry for that. A pepper grain is the size of a picosecond. A nanosecond is around 11.7 inches, which makes much more sense.
My mentor, Mike, had so much to teach me. Coming from University, I knew I was the best programmer on campus and better than anybody I had met.
That changed the day I met Mike. After being introduced to him, I went to my boss and said something like, “That is the most arrogant man I’ve ever met.”
Greg replied, “He’s earned it.”
When I had an opportunity to work with him, I found that yes, he was that good.
He was the first person to stretch my abilities in computer science. I will forever be thankful to him for that.
He had the privilege of meeting Admiral Grace. He was one of the many that were handed her “packet of Nanoseconds”.
This was Grace’s way of getting across to people just how fast computers were running.
In 1 ms, light will travel 299.79 meters. This is a reasonable rifle shot.
In 1 us, light will travel 0.2998 meters (299.8mm), or about 1.2 inches.
In 1 ns, light will travel 0.2998 mm. This is about the size of a single grain of ground pepper.
Just how fast?
My Cray X-MP/48 had a memory bank cycle time of 38ns. This means that light would be able to travel about 10mm or a little less than 0.5 inches.
My memory said that we had a 85ns wait time from accessing memory to having loaded that word into a register.
Your PC likely runs faster than that X/MP. It surely has more memory.
Frames of Reference
As stated above, my world was baby sitting a Cray Super Computer. We worked in nanoseconds. We were trying to optimize code to shave a few nanoseconds out of a loop.
Saving grains of pepper.
When I purchased some study lights for doing photoshoots, I didn’t buy the fancy radio controllers. Instead, I bought “slave” style lights.
With the slave style, you could tell your study light to fire when it detected the flash of another strobe.
Before I purchased these study lights, I went to Mike with concern. I had done the math.
From the moment my flash fired, a long sequence of things had to take place. The light had to travel from my strobe to the detector on the study light. There was a delay while the photoreceptor energized and “fired”. There was still more time as that signal propagated through the circuitry, and finally that light would fire.
My studio lights would be at different distances, we couldn’t even predict the sequence that they would fire.
According to my simple calculations, we could be talking as much as 2ms from the time my light fired until the last study light fired.
Mike pulled me back to the ground. My shutter speed would be set to 1/60 of a second. That is 16.6ms. If the study lights fired anytime while the shutter was open, I would get a good photo.
I was so focused on my reference frame, nanoseconds, I lost sight of the real-world application that was running in 10s of milliseconds.
pkoning Brings Reality to the Clocks
Here is the magic of GPS. It works by knowing the time and then calculating the distance to different satellites.
The more accurate the clock, the more accurate the location.
Communicating that time to an external device is where it gets interesting. The definition of NMEA tells use exactly when the second mark occurs during the transmission of the NMEA message.
Most GPS units default to transmitting at 9600 baud. Which for us is the same as 9600 bits/second. Each 8 bit byte sent requires start and stop bits. My rule of thumb is 10 bits per byte.
This means that it takes around 83ms to transmit one 80 character NMEA sentence from the GPS to the computer.
The instant when the second starts aligns with the edge of a signal of one of the characters in that sentence.
Now my issue was that I thought that the GPS unit had time that was “wrong” it was offset from the real world.
This is not the case. The real reason for the delay is in the time it takes to process the sentence. That should be fixed to the computer, not to the GPS unit.
Which brings us to PPS, or Pulse Per Second. This is a signal that indicates the start of a second. Depending on the GPS unit, this can be at ns accuracy. Even cheap units will get you sub us accuracy.
The processing time to handle the pulse is much lower than to handle a full NMEA sentence.
A PPS can be treated as the “real” time, without fear of being too far away from reality.
A couple of grains of pepper.
SCOTUS watch (Updated)
As of 1100 Tuesday, we have heard that cert was NOT denied in Snope nor in Ocean State Tactical.
This means that when the dockets are updated later today, we are likely to see them Distributed for Conference of 1/24/2025.
This is as expected. NEXT Monday is when I become concerned, if the cases are relisted.
They have relisted both cases for 1/24/2025.