There was a book a while back called Guns, Germs, and Steel that delves into this topic.

The root cause, as I understand it, is that Europe is on a continent oriented east-west instead of north-south. And Europe in particular is on the part of that continent that has a lot of easy access to the sea.

East-west orientation allows you to transplant plants and animals long distances and keep them at roughly the same latitudes, which means roughly the same climate. That is a big boon for spreading “civilized” agriculture, which is what creates surplus of labor, which creates non food jobs that advance technology.

Among the common 5-7 domesticated food animals people eat today, all but one or two were domesticated in Mesopotamia, but then spread all over Europe.

Access to the sea is the other component that turns tech advantage into colonialism, because it gives the transportation. Even today, China and Russia are great powers, but they are forced to be continental powers instead of maritime powers, because nearly all of their coast lines are hemmed in by narrow seas that are easy to blockade.

There are, of course, a bunch of other factors I’m not even thinking about and competing opinions. But I don’t for one second think that any of this has anything to do with European “innate intelligence” or skin color.

In this case, the defendant’s lawyer asked for and got a bunch of continuances presumably as a plea negotiation tactic.

He also tried to have his own client declared mentally incompetent to stand trial. The Speedy Trial Act clock was suspended during the time it took to evaluate that.

Finally there was an initial plea deal for 18 months that was agreed to by both sides. But it was rejected and thrown out by the judge as too lenient. After that, plea negotiation basically started over again.

The sentencing guideline for this charge was around 78 months, mainly because if the high dollar damage. The final sentence from the second plea deal was 40 months.

Here’s an update that will focus on Mr. Rockenhaus’s latest violation of the conditions of his supervised release.

Background: Mr. Rockenhaus was convicted of a serious computer crime, for which he completed a prison sentence. Before he was re-arrested on 4 Sept., 2025, he was serving supervised release. He also was ordered to pay $500k in restitution, as compensation for the business damage he admitted to causing.

#What’s happening to him now:

On 29 April, the government filed to revoke his probation. He was arrested on or about 5 May, ordered to appear for violation hearing on 13 May, and released on $10k bond. At the 13 May hearing, he was found in violation, but sentencing was adjourned to September. While out on bond, the government alleged an additional second set of condition violations, prompting his re-arrest 4 Sept. Bond has been revoked, and he remains imprisoned pending sentencing on the first set of violations, next month (this seems to indicate that the sentence will be > 1.5 month).

#Civil cases:

Mr. Rockenhaus and Mrs. Adrienne Rockenhaus filed separate civil rights lawsuits against Mr. Rockenhaus’s probation officer. Dockets are here for Mr. Rockenhaus and Mrs. Rockenhaus.

#Opinion:

I’ve read through the civil complaints, comments Mrs. Rockenhaus published on Hacker News, and the revocation docket. It seems to me that some fishy stuff is going on.

1. Mr. Rockenhaus requested to proceed in forma pauperis in his civil suit. This means he doesn’t have the money to pay the $405 filing fee. In that form, he claims to have exactly zero income, and zero assets.

2. Mrs. Rockenhaus just paid the $400 fee in her lawsuit.

3. Mr. Rockenhaus owes ~$400k remaining in restitution (in forma pauperis form). (Recall that’s paid down from $564k originally. There’s no interest.)

4. The original sentencing document states that he is to pay 10% of his income each month towards restitution. (final judgement)

5. The repayment amount was set to $800 in Jan., 2025. This would imply that the court thinks he has $8,000 in monthly income. (Revocation petition)

6. The probation office attempted to complete a financial investigation of Mr. Rockenhaus’s finances, that could have set the payment to a different amount, following the 10% rule. (Revocation petition)

7. Mr. Rockenhaus did not cooperate with the investigation. He also wasn’t paying $800 or any other amount since 2023. (Revocation petition)

8. At the 13 May revocation hearing, Mr. Rockenhaus admitted to the truth of the above allegations in the petition. (Minute entry near ECF 10)

#Okay, here’s where it starts getting weird:

9. Mr. Rockenhaus is employed by Mrs. Rockenhaus. (Mr. Rockenhaus complaint, allegation 2)

10. If Mr. Rockenhaus is an employee of his own wife, what is he getting paid? Apparently it’s $0 (#1). In my book, that’s not employment; it’s volunteer work.

11. If Mr. Rockenhaus is being paid by his own wife, then he should have income on his #1 form, and he should be paying 10% to restitution.

12. I also think the SSDI income if he has it probably counts as income toward the 10%.

#And now for weirder:

13. As part of the conditions of his probation, Mr. Rockenhaus must install probation office spyware on all of his computers and electronic devices, and submit to the monitoring. (Revocation petition)

14. The spyware does not work on iOS devices; consequently Mr. Rockenhaus may not possess an iOS device. (Various sources)

15. On two different occasions, Mr. Rockenhaus was found to be in possession of 2 different iPhones, and 1 Apple Watch. No spyware was installed. (Revocation petition 1 and 2)

16. All 3 devices, including the watch are actually work devices for the job he has with his wife. (Both civil complaints)

17. So, the claim is apparently that Mr. Rockenhaus is allowed to circumvent the monitoring condition by keeping and using his “work phones”, even after hours, and even in his home that he presumably shares with his wife.

18. Again, what kind of job is Mr. Rockenhaus doing where he needs to be issued a phone and a smart watch, but he doesn’t get paid?

#About the drugs:

19. Mrs. Adrienne Rockenhaus operates a business named “Cannabytes, LLC”. (Mrs. Rockenhaus complaint, allegation 3.3). This appears to be a marijuana business.

20. It seems to me like a terminally bad idea for a federal probationer and convicted felon to work at a marijuana business, when marijuana is federally illegal.

#Some other stuff:

21. Various sources provide clues that the combined Rockenhaus household seems to enjoy a middle-class-ish standard of living. Mr. Rockenhaus drove a car that had an active OnStar subscription; they procured a new iPhone after the first one was seized; etc. etc.

22. Yet Mr. Rockenhaus has no money to pay restitution.

23. It seems to me like the household may be structuring things so as to hide marital income and assets from the probation office, to avoid the restitution. If I were a probation officer, that might piss me off.

24. Even still, I don’t know what the law is on this topic with respect to criminal restitution.

25. On Hacker News, Mrs. Rockenhaus made various defenses to the allegations in Revocation Petition #1. For instance, the 7 lines of credit without permission were all identity theft.

26. Even still, the time and place to make those defenses was at the 13 May revocation hearing. In court. Not several months later on the Internet. That hearing was the due process that Mr. Rockenhaus is entitled to under the 5th amendment. There is no indication in the record that any defense was made at the hearing.

Here’s the court docket .

It’s not very clear from the post: Rockenhaus was convicted on a CFAA charge in Texas in the 2019-2022 time frame. The Michigan case is to revoke supervised release on the CFAA conviction.

I don’t have time to get into any of the filings now, but I’ll try to get back to it later.

The Federal gov in the US has a “road legal” standard for commercial motor vehicles like trucks and buses. The feds also have minimum rules for headlights, brake lights and turn signals on passenger cars.

Everything else in terms of road legality is a state law in each of the 50 states.

The reason is the Constitution gives the feds power to regulate interstate commerce (i.e. big commercial vehicles that frequently cross state lines). The feds do not have the general “police power” that states have to pass laws on whatever.

I gave you the downvote because I once attended a public lecture by Stephen Hawking, near the very end of his lifetime. It had to be one of the few, very last, public lectures that Dr. Hawking had in him. And the topic of that lecture was the nature of time, and how all of the equations of motion are fully reversible, etc, etc etc.

Out of all of the topics Dr. Hawking could have discussed, that one is the one he chose. And to me, that means that the nature of time was interesting enough to him to spread around to the public. That there are live issues that are not well settled. And so on.

Since that time, I’ve not seen any major developments in theoretical physics or philosophy to shift the status quo to an appreciable degree.

This leads me to the final judgement on your comment: You are wrong. There are live issues to discuss here, and OP deserves to further explain, defend, and debate their philosophy.

I need to get you to sit down for a philosophical discourse with the Time Cube guy.

I went to Paperclip because of the connection to Huntsville specifically with Redstone and NASA.

Well if you’re saying he was in paperclip, paperclip has been mostly declassified. You can look him up in the rolls here. Not a lot of Russian names on that list, but there might be a few.

At first I thought you were implying the dad was a part of Operation Paperclip. But that would require Nazis to have recruited an ethnic Slav for missile work.

Then I wonder if you’re implying dad might have been a Soviet spy targeting the stuff in Huntsville. And that seems more plausible. Under that scenario it is likely that significant parts or all of the refugee story are real, and that can be fashioned into decent cover.

And then it’s also plausible that there is no meaning, and a refugee settling in Huntsville is mere coincidence.

Beer is mostly water, and the water freezes before the alcohol does. This fact is used in freeze distillation to make “ice beers” that are stronger than what you get from the initial fermentation.

And as per usual, VLC seems to somehow have all the codecs already.

Yes, but you won’t be okay with the two hour treadmill sessions after drinking 100 beers.

Oh yeah. The starburst patterns absolutely are an unavoidable artifact of the axis correction in the lens. They are the result of diffraction doing Fourier optics on point light sources through an anisotropic (non-directionally symmetric) lens system.

As an example, here’s the James Webb Space Telescope, which has a hexagonal starburst pattern because its primary mirror is composed of hexagons (I believe the smaller horizontal spike is from the secondary mirror support strut):

The vacuum is only ≈3K, or -270.15° C, but a vacuum is not particularly receptive to heat dispersal.

This is true for all of the black parts of the sky.

It is not true for that big yellow ball that shines on the space station half of the time. That big yellow ball is as bright and hot as a hot desert day on the surface. Daylight can raise the vacuum temp up to +250 or +300 C. And it also means that the night time temps don’t cool down all the way to 3K.

So the ISS is continuously exposed to these thermal cycles on the outside. As a heat load these should dwarf any marginal heat loads introduced by whatever recreational drugs. And the station has to have radiator capacity handle it all plus margin. Remember, too, that the ISS crew also has to do hard exercise 2 hours per day.

Given it’s private equity, my guess would be both.

To correct any possible astigmatism, it would require an infinite sum of series of correction terms at different angles and strengths.

But every glasses prescription I’ve ever gotten in the United States cuts that series off at one term. I’ve never seen nor heard of anyone getting custom lenses with two or more axes. It seems like it should be theoretically possible, but I also know very little about the process of lens grinding.

If we’re using NASA as a reference Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were in space for 286 days instead of a planned week long mission.

They did get resupplied with additional clothing and personal effects after a few weeks.

Coincidentally, there is no laundry or shower on the international space station.

I’m addition to removing the cartoon old man and barrel iconography, Cracker Barrel is reducing the amount of random junk on the walls, and painting the bare wooden walls white. (Select stores only, not everything gets remodeled all at once). Probably they’re trying to appeal more to a younger generation or something.

Eyeglass prescriptions that correct for astigmatism have one “axis” or direction that can be specified. Real astigmatism can be vastly more complex than a single diopter adjustment in one direction. This makes many real astigmatism cases effectively uncorrectable.