CleoTheWizard
Let me clarify: We have a certain amount of latency when streaming games from both local and internet servers. In either case, how do we improve that latency and what limits will we run in to as the technology progresses?
I’ve used both Apple Music and Spotify in recent years and while their discovery is okay, it always plays it safe. As if they’ve made a genre that is just for me and won’t play anything outside of that. How do I expand my music horizons?
Finally getting around to checking out Fallout 4. I played it through without the DLC a while back but I think it’s about time I get down to it on my list and play through the DLCs. I wanted to do it on the survival difficulty or one of the harder ones at least. That led to me checking out the achievements. I don’t keep up with newer games but I didn’t realize achievements have gotten quite this bad. Most of the achievements are ones you get from the story itself, no challenge there. Then I found out there is no achievement for higher difficulties. I enjoy a challenge, it’s why I go back and play games that I enjoy. And I know it’s a reward in and of itself to beat it, but it feels less validating to not have an achievement. Especially in an open world game where people will want to experience more of it.
It’s not even that games have gotten easier per se, but more than they don’t reward playing on harder difficulties and skimp on challenges like achievements. I like harder difficulty because it encourages me to engage with every system I can. So what gives? Is this just me or has everyone else noticed how phoned in most achievements and difficulty options are these days?
Former President Donald Trump’s legal defense against federal criminal charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election is beginning to take shape.
During a speech in New Hampshire Tuesday, Trump argued, as his lawyers have in recent days, that his statements about the election were constitutionally protected speech. He claimed that his First Amendment rights are under attack — not just because he was indicted in connection to his repeated lies that the election had been stolen from him, but also because prosecutors are seeking a protective order preventing him from speaking publicly about evidence revealed as part of the discovery process in the case.
“I’ll be the only politician in American history not allowed to speak because of our corrupt system,” he told the crowd.
John Lauro, a member of his legal team, argued on CNN earlier this week that Trump “had every right to advocate for his position” — including when he “asked” Pence to throw out Electoral College votes from certain states on January 6, 2021 — and that his advocacy is now “being criminalized.”
And Trump pushed back Tuesday on the notion that he knew he had lost the election but sought to overturn the results anyway — what may become a sticking point as prosecutors attempt to convince jurors that he had criminal intent.
Altogether, those statements suggest that Trump’s team appears to be currently pursuing three lines of legal defense: that his speech is protected under the First Amendment, that he didn’t order Pence to participate in an illegal scheme to stop the certification of the election results, and that he couldn’t have criminal intent if he didn’t truly understand he had lost. It might be too early to tell whether those defenses will prove enough to acquit Trump. And we still don’t know the full breadth of the evidence that Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has in his possession, though many legal experts say the indictment is well-drafted and the most serious of the three levied against Trump so far. We asked legal experts how strong they think these three defense strategies are. Here’s what they said.
Defense strategy 1: Trump’s statements about election fraud were protected as free speech under the First Amendment Smith acknowledges in the indictment that Trump had every right under the First Amendment to protest the results of the election, as the former president and his lawyers have claimed. “They don’t want me to speak about a rigged election. They don’t want me to speak about it. I have freedom of speech, the First Amendment,” Trump said Tuesday.
But Smith argues that what Trump wasn’t allowed to do was urge others to form an illegal plan to undermine the results.
The indictment describes that plan as involving a prolonged pressure and influence campaign that targeted state politicians in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona. When no politician would help him overturn the election, the indictment says Trump went on to use “Dishonesty, Fraud, and Deceit” to assemble a slate of unlawful Electoral College electors in seven states, and that he and his allies lied to many electors to get them to go along with the plan. Then, Trump tried to use the powers of the executive branch — those given to the Justice Department and the vice president — to stay in power. Finally, the indictment places at Trump’s feet the violence of January 6 and a plan to stop the certification of the vote.
All of those actions go far beyond simply protesting the results.
What do legal experts think of this defense? “You don’t have the First Amendment right to solicit a crime or to pressure other people to take illegal action,” said Cheryl Bader, a professor of criminal law at Fordham Law. “The speech here is both the evidence of the engineering of overturning the results, and it’s also the vehicle that he used to solicit the action.”
The question is whether Smith has the evidence to support the fact that Trump did exactly that, and we don’t yet have a full picture of how strong that evidence might be. Trump’s legal team only needs to plant enough doubt of that in jurors’ minds for them to acquit him. That’s why, at this early point in the case, the First Amendment defenses put forth by Trump “aren’t irrational or absurd and may have some basis,” said Kevin O’Brien, a former assistant US attorney in New York who specializes in white-collar criminal defense. “I don’t think the First Amendment argument is a bad argument at this stage.”
Defense strategy 2: Trump was “aspirational” in his request that Pence not certify the election results Lauro has argued that Trump was “aspirational” in asking (rather than ordering) Pence not to certify the election results. “What President Trump did not do is direct Vice President Pence to do anything. He asked him in an aspirational way. Asking is covered by the First Amendment,” he told CNN.
What do legal experts think of this defense? That defense might seem a bit absurd on its face. But O’Brien said it’s “not a stupid claim” and “points out something interesting about the way Trump works” that may help protect him in this case. “Trump oftentimes doesn’t finish things. He sort of encourages people to go storming the Capitol, and then he gets in a limo and goes home,” O’Brien said. “He’s never out front. He never has the courage of his convictions, if he has any convictions. He has other people doing the dirty work. And at some point, he just walks away.”
At the same time, John C. Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University, pointed out that Pence is likely to testify as to whether he understood Trump’s language as aspirational or a demand. “Remember, too, that Pence has stated that Trump told him that his problem was that he was just ‘too honest.’ That does not sound like an aspirational request, but a request to follow his direction,” he said.
Coffee also noted that there were other points where Trump seemed to explicitly demand that fellow Republicans join his cause, including when he pressured officials in Georgia to “find” the votes necessary for him to win the state. “I think we see a lot of very heavy-handed bullying conduct that cuts against this idea that his words were aspirational,” Bader said. Defense strategy 3: Trump always believed that the election was fraudulent To convict Trump, prosecutors will need to show that Trump had criminal intent. Trump’s lawyers have suggested that he couldn’t have criminal intent because he was reacting to what he believed was legitimate election fraud, despite many people around him telling him otherwise.
Trump has maintained that he believes the election was rigged against him: “There was never a second of any day that I didn’t believe that the election was rigged,” he told the crowd Tuesday.
What do legal experts think of this defense? Legal experts said that prosecutors may not need to necessarily prove that Trump knew he lost the election, only that he knew he was using possibly unlawful means to reach the end he believed was right: another four years in the White House.
“Even if he believed he had won the election and it had been stolen from him, if he then went out and formulated a plan to prevent the legitimately elected electors of various states from voting and having the results certified, that would probably satisfy the intent standard,” O’Brien said.
Bader said that Smith is likely going to argue that Trump took illegal actions that “transcend what his personal motivation is for engaging in this conduct.” But he’s also likely going to argue that Trump is lying when he says he always believed that the election was stolen from him.
“There’s so much evidence that this was just a fantasy and that this was all pretext,” she said. “Smith is going to focus on the evidence of all the instances where advisers, staffers, court decisions, intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice are all telling him that there’s nothing there, that the emperor has no clothes. And yet, Trump persisted and actually ramped up the pressure campaign.”
Donald Trump has been indicted by a federal grand jury on four criminal counts in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
“Shortly after election day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results,” the indictment states.
The newest case against Trump strikes at what’s seen as the former president’s most serious betrayal of his constitutional duties, when his efforts to remain in the White House after losing the 2020 election sought to undermine US democracy and the long-held American tradition of a peaceful transfer of presidential power.
The plot to overturn the 2020 election shattered presidential norms and culminated in an unthinkable physical assault on the Capitol on January 6, as Congress met to validate President Joe Biden’s victory. Even before that, Trump engaged in an unprecedented pressure campaign toward state election workers and lawmakers, Justice Department officials and even his own vice president to persuade them to throw out the 2020 results.
Trump has been summoned to appear before a magistrate judge in Washington, DC, federal court at 4 p.m. ET on Thursday, the Justice Department announced.
The four counts are: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.
Six unindicted co-conspirators were included. Among the six are four unnamed attorneys who allegedly aided Trump in his effort to subvert the 2020 election results. Also included is one unnamed Justice Department official who “attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud.”
Smith also mentions an unnamed “political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”
Smith’s move to bring charges will test whether the criminal justice system can be used to hold Trump to account for his post-election conduct after he was acquitted in his impeachment trial related to his actions that day.
The indictment is the second time in two months that Smith has brought charges against Trump. In June, Trump was charged with retention of classified documents and conspiracy with a top aide to hide them from the government and his own attorneys. And separately in March, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Trump on state charges of falsifying business records.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in both cases – and is likely to do so again when he’s arraigned on the latest charges.
The new special counsel indictment comes as Trump remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The first two indictments have done little to impact his standing in the race.
Trump’s March indictment marked the first time in US history that a former president had faced criminal charges. Now there are three separate, concurrent cases where the president is facing felony allegations, which are all going to play out as Trump seeks to return to the White House in 2024 following his loss to Biden in 2020.
Fake electors plot hatched after 2020 election was unprecedented attempt to subvert Electoral College The so-called fake electors plot was an unprecedented attempt to subvert the Electoral College process by replacing electors that Biden had rightfully won with illegitimate GOP electors.
Trump supporters in seven key states met on December 14, 2020, and signed fake certificates, falsely proclaiming that Trump actually won their state and they were the rightful electors. They submitted these fake certificates to Congress and to the National Archives, in anticipation that their false claims would be embraced during the Electoral College certification on January 6, 2021.
At the time, their actions were largely dismissed as an elaborate political cosplay. But it eventually became clear that this was part of an orchestrated plan.
Senior Trump campaign officials orchestrated the fake electors plot and directly oversaw the state-by-state mechanics – linking Trump’s campaign apparatus to what originally looked like a hapless political stunt by local Trump supporters.
Federal investigators have subpoenaed the fake electors across the country, sent FBI agents to interview witnesses about their conduct, and recently granted immunity to two fake electors from Nevada to secure their grand jury testimony.
In Michigan, the state’s attorney general charged the 16 fake electors who signed certificates falsely claiming Trump won Michigan in the 2020 election with multiple felonies. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is also expected to ask a grand jury this month to bring charges related to efforts in Georgia to subvert the election results.
Gene X Hwang knew his days on Twitter as @x were numbered.
"Elon had been kind of tweeting about X previously," Hwang said. "So I kind of knew, you know, I had an inkling that this was going to happen. I didn't really know when."
Since 2007, Hwang's username on the site was @x — but after Elon Musk renamed the social media platform to X earlier this week, it was only a matter of time before the company commandeered the handle.
The news came shortly after Hwang had competed in a pinball tournament in Canada. "So when I landed and fired up my phone, I just got all these messages and I was like: 'What is what is going on?' "
Hwang received an email from the company explaining that his account data would be preserved, and he'd get a new handle. It offered Hwang merchandise, a tour of its offices and a meeting with company management as compensation.
Hwang's account is one of the latest casualties in the chaos following Musk's takeover of the social media company. On Monday, Twitter's iconic blue bird logo was replaced with the letter "X."
The rebrand is the company's next step in creating what Musk has called "the everything app." Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino envision the platform becoming a U.S. parallel to WeChat — a hub for communication, banking and commerce that's become a part of everyday life in China.
But experts are skeptical X will be able to become an "everything app." "I'm not sure he has enough trust from his user base to get people to actually exchange money or attach any type of financial institution to his app," Jennifer Grygiel, a professor at Syracuse University, told NPR.
Hwang is among those who have been looking for Twitter alternatives. "I've been checking out, you know, other options like Threads and Mastodon and Bluesky," he said. "I'm still on Twitter for now, but ... it's changed a lot. So we'll see how much longer I'm on there." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.
I’m here to give an update to my journey from an Android to an iPhone after much debate in a previous post (from a different account). TLDR at the bottom.
If you’d like to see the old post: Click Here
For those wondering on details, I switched from a Galaxy Note 10+ to an iPhone 12 Pro Max. I won’t explain my reasons for model choice but it was a balance of price, size, and features in that order.
I’ll discuss my main pros and cons in sections here, going from what is most important to me to least important.
USER INTERFACE The user interface and experience on android isn’t awful, but I don’t think there’s much contest here. I said in my other post that apple has an advantage here and I was absolutely right. iOS has smooth animations for everything, is quicker for searching and finding apps, and just plain looks better to me. And while the android toolbar provides many more buttons for quick actions, I never used many of them. Most of the usable settings are here on iPhone in that easy drop down menu. Even long presses on icons to quickly change settings is here. And the mute button on the side is and has always been a no brained for me, should be standard on every phone.
I come from Samsung and their OneUI so I recognize this could be better on other phones, but I was plagued with some stutter in animations and slow app indexing through their search bar. The UI always felt a little clunky and that’s clear with how much was changed in OneUI versions. Things were often easier to access, sure, but the common actions I was taking reduce to simpler menus. Not only that but scaling is very wrong on android phones for some reason. I had my text somewhat smaller because if I blew it up, it looked very strange to me.
iMESSAGE AND FACETIME This was another big reason to switch because a lot of my friends have iPhones and use iMessage frequently. I can tell you that this is a problem specific to the US but so far I do enjoy the maturity of having a put together messaging app. Only recently has Google created something even close where before each android phone had their own app and it was a massive headache. As I stated, having RCS on android and iOS communicate would be big in bringing me back to android but until that happens, the social cost is not worth it to me. I know other apps fill that void in other countries but I couldn’t get my friends to migrate. Aside from that though, it’s one of the best messaging apps I’ve used and FaceTime seems more stable than most video apps.
APPLE ECOSYSTEM
Now look, I know how it works and they stock you in a walled garden. But consider that other companies do the exact same and *sometimes * the benefits can be worth it. For instance, my partner has an Apple HomePod speaker. It’s incredibly easy to stream music to it and as a plus, the Siri assistant has gotten much better. I can’t pick this apart by each strand, but the smoothness of the connections to my devices has definitely improved. I used to fail just to cast YouTube to my Tv on android for random reasons. It would take a couple tries. Now, first try every time. Same with the speaker. No fiddling with Bluetooth with this one. And the menu to change what device is playing sound is miles better than on my android phone.
VOICE ASSISTANT
This one is unexpected, but I’ve enjoyed the voice assistant a lot more. This is something that should be current across android phones so I feel comfortable speaking on it. If you’ve used SIRI previously, it used to suck. Like a lot. Google was miles ahead by every metric. Now though? I can ask Siri to play music and it knows what app Im asking for and doesn’t take up to 15 seconds to phone home and do the task. It’s faster. Much faster.
The only area in which Siri suffers is when asking for web based questions. Other than that, it works better for the much more common tasks I do.
RANDOM OBSERVATIONS
I mentioned Siri but the real benefit is with CarPlay. Where to start? CarPlay is quite a bit ahead here as well. It starts up on my head unit in about 1/5th the time before the warnings even disappear. And the interface is simple and knows where to put things. Putting the time near the driver and putting the app bar on the left near where I sit just seems like the way to go. So yeah, CarPlay is smooth and even has easy ways to make it wireless with unofficial dongles. Can’t say the same for android auto.
Charging times are worse on the iPhone but it’s not that bad and the phone does last me longer. My battery in my old phone was a bit older though, so I’ll call it even.
Grudges
I hate the lightning connector, it’s a PITA compared to UsbC but I don’t interact with it often, only for charging. And MagSafe would solve most problems and can be used with cases unlike my android phones wireless charging.
The Home Screen is a sticking point as well but mostly just for app arrangement. Otherwise, the widgets are perfectly fine. Better than fine actually because the Home Screen implements the widgets well even if space is limited. I’ve noticed that the apps that I use frequently also have more and better widgets on iOS than on android. I noticed it specifically with TickTick but overall the systems are fairly similar but with less customization of widget size and placement on iOS.
Last comment is that I understand this isn’t for everyone, we all have our own use cases. This isn’t a phone war, just here as reference for those wanting to switch or considering it. If you haven’t used iOS for a sustained period in recent years, understand that your perspective may be out of date because mine certainly was.
Thanks for reading!
TL;DR iOS has its ups and downs but from my perspective, most of what I said in my original post stands as good reasons to buy an Apple device. My main sticking points are repairability, walled garden apps, and initial price. Other than that, I’ve converted to iOS and I don’t miss many features of Android and I suspect that for all but the tech tinkerers, an iPhone is the way to go in the US.
A grand jury in the Southern District of Florida has charged former President Donald Trump with a new count of willful retention of National Defense Information in the case related to his handling of classified documents. The new charge stems from a top-secret presentation Trump waved at aides at his Bedminster, N.J., resort.
A new defendant was also added to the indictment against Trump and his aide Walt Nauta. Carlos de Oliveira, 56, of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., was added to the obstruction conspiracy charged in the original indictment.
The superseding indictment charges Trump, De Oliveira and Nauta with two new obstruction counts based on allegations that they instructed an unnamed, fourth worker to delete surveillance video footage at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence last summer "to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury."
The indictment charged De Oliveira with false statements and representations made in a interview with the FBI on Jan. 13, 2023. He is expected to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami on July 31. His lawyer John Irving declined comment.
Trump faces more than three dozen counts, including more than 30 violations of the Espionage Act, over allegations of withholding documents related to national security. He's also charged, along with Nauta, with making false statements and conspiring to obstruct justice. The trial is set for May 20, 2024. That schedule puts the trial at the tail end of the Republican presidential primary process. Trump is currently the front-runner for the GOP nomination and already may have become the nominee by that time.
"This is nothing more than a continued desperate and flailing attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their Department of Justice to harass President Trump and those around him," the Trump campaign said in a written statement following the new charges.
The White House has consistently denied any involvement or coordination in the special counsel probes of Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith last winter to emphasize the independence of the probe.