I’m pretty sure nobody registers their personal smartphone and laptop every time they leave the US for a vacation.

I agree with you on this, but CBP is certainly within their legal rights to interrogate you on the origins of your personal electronics, and they can make a determination that your stuff is subject to duty if it’s over the limit and they don’t believe you are reimporting.

For residents of the United States the duty free limit when returning is 800 dollars worth of stuff. I believe that’s every thirty days. You usually have to answer whether you exceed this limit in the declaration.

So you just go to Canada, buy the thing, unpack it from the packaging, and pretend like its just personal items. Just like a smartphone.

If tariffs become a big thing, this will definitely happen more, but it will also get a lot more scrutiny from customs as well.

AFIAK, border agents usually don’t ask if you bought your phone in the US or from outside, they shouldn’t ask about other personal electronics, right?

Stuff that you exported and reimported for personal or business use, but not for resale, is exempt from duty with no dollar limits. If you want documented proof that you are reimporting, you can register the stuff at a customs office in the United States before you leave.

Xkcd comics are published under one of the CC licenses (forget which one). It’s arguable this kind of thing may be an intended reuse.

So anything that NASA produces alone with public money is for the public by default ?

Anything that NASA civil servants produce and publish is in the public domain by default. NASA can spend public money on contracts that don’t result in public domain information.

In this case, if NASA spends public money to buy (license) a commercially available compiler from PGI, that compiler doesn’t magically become open source just because NASA is a paying customer.

Works, reports, and software that NASA produces itself are “works of the United States”, so they are in the public domain by law.

However, not everything NASA does is a published work, such as the classified GPS encryption modules on the shuttle or private medical conferences with ISS crewmembers. Additionally, a lot of stuff is actually done by contractors, such as SpaceX or Boeing, and those may or may not be required by contract to release various amounts of data to the public.

I did a quick Google search, and I was unable to find anything contemporary where NASA is maintaining or developing an in house Fortran compiler.

Central Texas barbecue places will usually do them in 8 hours, which is a lot faster than the brisket (26 hours).

Within section 2.1 choose only one subsection to follow. Those are all alternative bootloader options.

The bootloader subsection chosen in 2.1 on this page should match what is done in Configuring the Bootloader. The default path on that page is GRUB, which does not require any systemd components.

If following the GRUB path, follow instructions in 2.1.1 and skip the rest of 2.1. This is not at all clear in the handbook.

I believe that sys-kernel/installkernel is a utility script internal to the Gentoo project that can be configured to work with various bootloader solutions, including (optionally) systemd, and that is what this section 2.1 is talking about.

This appears to be an out of order dependency in the handbook

Companies used to (and some still) transfer profits to shareholders by paying periodic dividends. The stock buyback transfers profits to shareholders by raising the stock price. It became popular because capital gains are taxed at a lower flat rate than dividends.

Also, dividends are taxed when they are paid, but gains are taxed when the stock gets sold. Wealthy shareholders can sit on unrealised capital gains for years or decades, pay no taxes, and still access the wealth by putting the shares up as collateral for personal loans.

Stock buybacks are certainly popular with big and wealthy investors.

The two words by themselves are not very good English, or any slang idiom I know about.

I agree this sounds threatening, however.

Also beans. Can we bring back the beans, you know, for the newbies?

Guy looks kinda like he’s wearing a jacket with a gap at the waist. That would totally not work. You can’t have a gap that lets air out. The Apollo suits were one piece designs; two piece with a hard shell locking waist ring came later.

We’re talking nowadays about compression suits that are only inflated around the head and maybe some upper body. Those would help a lot with mobility, but nothing like that has been deployed yet.

Even if you never plan to return, you are still (legally) on the hook to file a 1040-NR form with the IRS every year.

There’s a foreign earned income tax credit: this reduces your US tax bill by any income tax you paid to your residence country. For many expat working stiffs, this means they don’t have to pay anything to Uncle Sam, but they still have to file a tax return.

Windows was never oriented around “just works”. That was Mac. Windows’s main selling point is that it never becomes incompatible, and that has largely stayed true. You can still to this day insert the disk for some proprietary application from Windows 2.0 and it will still install and run. Try that with another operating system!

Comparing national militaries is a complicated and tricky business. I would like to recommend Perun on YouTube. Usually pretty good defense economic analysis in digestible one-hour PowerPoint presentations. Some comparative material.

• “Case law,” meaning deciding court cases by referring to the results of previous cases, is much less important in Louisiana. Courts of appeals and the Louisiana Supreme Court are more liable to go against previous precedents than they might be in common law states.
• A lot more basic stuff in Louisiana is written into law statutes. The Louisiana constitution was completely rewritten in the 1970s, but today it is still the size of one of those old fashioned phone books.
• Louisiana has parishes instead of counties.
• In a criminal case, the Louisiana constitution does not guarantee defendants the right to trial by jury. That’s an English law tradition thing, not French (or “continental European”). Louisiana criminal defendants do get a right to jury guaranteed by the US constitution and by Louisiana statutes.
• Louisiana is (basically) the only state in the Union that doesn’t require a unanimous jury verdict in criminal cases. They got partially overruled by the feds on this recently, though.
• Louisiana does not participate in the Multistate Bar Exam. The Louisiana bar exam is the longest one to sit in the Union.
• You cannot disinherit any of your children. All children are entitled to a minimum fractional share of your estate. This is a reform actually from Napoleon, getting rid of “primogeniture” that was all the rage in England.
• Louisiana has a thing called “usufruct” that could be used to, say, let your spouse keep using your assets after you die (and your assets were force-inherited to your children).
• The governor of Louisiana is required to recite the oath of office twice, in English and French.

We adopted a lot of the English legal system since a lot of the same courts were still operating before,

Except Louisiana. Louisiana is instead gifted with laws from Napoleonic France.

Cue up Pulp Fiction conversation about foot massage.

At ISS altitude, it’s probably not decades to decay, but a few years instead.

Rockets do not aim straight up when they are leaving. They go straight up for a few seconds, and then they tilt over in the desired direction to pickup speed.

They don’t burn up on the launch because they time the tilt over maneuver so that they get above nearly all of the atmosphere before they start picking up serious speed.

The energy that makes you burn up is your own kinetic energy. The “small” deorbit burn slows you down just enough to touch the atmosphere, but you’re still going nearly full speed: 7200 m/s. Around 30,000 km/hr.

If you slow down more in space, so that you enter the atmosphere at low speed, you don’t burn up. But you need a whole lot more backpacks to handle the full speed. It’s cheaper and burns less gas if you use the air to slow down.