The Outlast Trials isn't your usual horror game; rather it offers an extreme sensory deprivation chamber full of human darkness for players to endure. Three minutes in, and I felt as if I'd stepped straight into a nightmare: naked bodies sprawling everywhere were hidden by sheer horror... Sexual imagery? Check. Every form of abuse? Yep! These developers didn't hold back in throwing every insult at us to see which would stick - trust me; many do! 

An Unpredictable Reality 

It's a strange game. But here is the thing: it works. This barrage of depravity doesn't feel empty; rather it serves a greater purpose: creating an unpredictable reality where nothing makes any sense and paranoia reigns supreme. This is the way it goes and you should buy The Outlast Trials. Where no matter who we trust or what's real around the next corner it could lead to something truly horrific originating in twisted scientific experiments conducted by Murkoff Corporation during Cold War times - we were lab rats used as part of their experiments!

Nightmare Experiments

Paranoia runs deep; you never know who or what horror could spring forth next from the experiments by Murkoff Corporation during Cold War times with whom nobody trusted and never knowing who could trust or what could come out of scientific nightmare experiments in mind of Murkoff Corporation during that era Cold War times we saw some truly horrific things and monstrosities produced within, from scientific nightmare abound.

The First-Person Perspective

Its true charm lies in the first-person perspective: everything is seen through your character's terrified eyes as every creak of floorboards or flicker of fluorescent lighting could spell disaster for them. There's no Ramboing your way out here; survival relies upon cunning, resourcefulness, and remaining rational as soon as possible. It makes you feel the pain and scare... it feels personal. If you buy PS5 horror games, The Outlast Trials is there, at the top, with the best! Desperation can be palpable as other test subjects cling desperately to any hope Murkoff offers, even if that means participating in horrific "therapies". It's an unnerving commentary on human resilience - or lack thereof.

A Brutal Game for Horror Fants

The Outlast Trials may not be for everyone; its brutal, disturbing gameplay may leave you questioning both your own sanity and that of your character. But for horror enthusiasts looking for an immersive horror experience that forces them to confront humanity's darker forces head-on then this should definitely be played; just ensure your schedule allows enough playback time, or have someone on speed dial for assistance should something arise that may need therapy afterward.

A Haunting Atmosphere

Atmospheres of desperation reeks with fear, yet are haunted with longing. Acts so repugnant to our humanity make one part of ourselves recoil in horror while another part can't tear itself away, riveted to what's unfolding horrors around them. We stand witness to acts so revolting they bring tears of horror down on ourselves yet we still cannot look away; some things simply cannot be turned off our attention!

Conclusion

The Outlast Trials presents players with an unparalleled cinematic horror experience as they plunge headlong into their personal darkness, forcing them to explore every twisted corridor of human psychology and confront its shadowy depths head-on. There is no way fans of survival horror games will skip this game, even those who usually buy cheap PS5 games will have to consider playing it. A visceral encounter beyond mere entertainment; its unforgettable impact will remain with all brave enough to experience its dark depths.

Ah, the allure of RIDE 5, a siren's call to all those who crave the visceral sensation of hurtling down the asphalt at breakneck speeds. Whether it's the blinding rays of a scorching sun or the relentless barrage of raindrops, the visual spectacle is nothing short of jaw-dropping. In a game where every pixel matters, RIDE 5 delivers a sensory onslaught that's nothing short of breathtaking.

The thrill of jockeying for position, the satisfaction of overtaking a rival on that final lap—it's all here. If you like to buy cheap PS5 games, RIDE 5 is the best racing game you can find in that price bracket. Now, while RIDE 5 is undeniably a fantastic racing game, it's not without its share of challenges. Just like a daring rider on a hairpin turn, Milestone must navigate through some treacherous terrain to make this game truly flawless.

Difficulty Balancing: A Slippery Slope

One area that calls for immediate attention is the difficulty balancing. At times, it feels like a rollercoaster with abrupt ups and downs. While a certain degree of challenge is expected and even welcome, RIDE 5 occasionally teeters on the precipice of frustration. Still, I was happy to buy RIDE 5 for PlayStation. The potential is clearly there, there is no doubt about it, and the game is already at a very high level, even if not yet the best. With a few tweaks and adjustments, I believe that RIDE 5 could shoot for the first position, or at least move up to even greater heights than now.

AI Adaptability: A Stumbling Block

While they provide a decent challenge, there are moments when their behavior feels a tad too predictable. Racing against AI should be a dynamic and unpredictable experience, but in some races, it feels like I'm racing against a well-programmed script rather than sentient competitors. Injecting more variability and unpredictability into AI behavior would add a layer of excitement that's currently missing.

Challenges Await

Imagine facing off against a formidable opponent in a head-to-head race, both of you pushing your bikes to the limit. Do you want to buy PS5 racing games and race against human opponents in multiplayer mode or against AI in single-player mode? The tension in the air is palpable as you jockey for position, each twist and turn a calculated move in this high-stakes ballet of speed and strategy. Single-player challenges, a plethora of them in RIDE 5, will push your skills to the edge, making every victory a sweet symphony of triumph.

Career Celebrations: A Missed Opportunity

As I progress through my virtual racing career in Ride 5, there's a sense of accomplishment that accompanies each victory. However, this triumph is somewhat dampened by the game's approach to career celebrations. Instead of immersive post-race celebrations or podium moments, Ride 5 opts for static images of your in-game character, robbing you of the visceral satisfaction that comes with a hard-earned victory.

A Glimpse into the Future: The Potential of RIDE 5

Despite these minor hiccups, RIDE 5 is a testament to Milestone's commitment to delivering a top-tier motorcycle racing experience. Picture the thrill of crossing the finish line first, the crowd roaring in approval, and the taste of victory sweet on your lips. Unfortunately, Ride 5's career celebrations lack this sense of immersion and spectacle. With plenty of "pros" and a few "cons", this motorbike racing game should be on many players' radars. RIDE 5 is like a high-performance bike with a few scuffs that need buffing out. So, gear up, race on, and let the roar of the engine guide you through this high-speed journey.

This week, a federal judge ruled that a major provision of New Jersey's "assault weapon" ban is unconstitutional, but he was not happy about saying so. The decision illustrates how the Supreme Court's Second Amendment precedents have constrained the discretion of judges who are personally inclined to support gun control.

New Jersey's Assault Firearms Law—which the state Legislature approved in 1990, responding to a mass shooting at a Stockton, California, elementary school the previous year—bans a list of specific rifle models, along with "any firearm manufactured under any designation which is substantially identical to any of the firearms listed above." According to guidelines that New Jersey Attorney General Peter Verniero issued in 1996, the latter description encompasses semi-automatic rifles that accept detachable magazines and have at least two of five features: a folding or telescoping stock, a pistol grip, a bayonet mount, a flash suppressor or threaded barrel designed to accommodate one, or a grenade launcher. Illegal possession of "assault firearms" is a second-degree crime punishable by five to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $150,000.

In separate lawsuits that U.S. District Judge Peter Sheridan considered together, several gun owners and two gun rights groups, the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) and the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs (ANJRPC), argued that the rifle ban is unconstitutional. Sheridan's decision in ANJRPC v. Platkin focuses on the Colt AR-15, one of the specifically banned rifles, because it was the model mentioned most frequently by the plaintiffs and the state.

"The information presented to the Court focuses largely on one specific type of firearm: the AR-15," Sheridan writes. "And given the variety of firearms regulated in the Assault Firearms Law and the nuances that each individual firearm presents, the Court's analysis of the Assault Firearms Law is limited to the firearm with which the Court has been provided the most information: the AR-15."

Sheridan, a senior judge who was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey by George W. Bush in 2005, repeatedly refers specifically to "the Colt AR-15." But he also notes that "the AR-15 is produced by several different manufacturers," including FN, Ruger, Remington, Bushmaster, Rock River Arms, Wilson Combat, Barrett, Panther Arms, H&K, Lewis Machine, Olympic Arms, Palmetto State Armory, and Mossberg. So his conclusion that "the AR-15 Provision is unconstitutional" evidently applies to all AR-15-style rifles, regardless of who makes them or what they are officially called.

Before explaining his reasoning in reaching that conclusion, Sheridan expresses his dismay at the Supreme Court precedents he is required to follow. "It is hard to accept the Supreme Court's pronouncements that certain firearms policy choices are 'off the table' when frequently, radical individuals possess and use these same firearms for evil purposes," he says. "Even so, the Court's decision today is dictated by one of the most elementary legal principles within our legal system: stare decisis. That is, where the Supreme Court has set forth the law of our Nation, as a lower court, I am bound to follow it. This principle—combined with the reckless inaction of our governmental leaders to address the mass shooting tragedy afflicting our Nation—necessitates the Court's decision."

Despite his personal policy preferences, Sheridan thinks it is clear that the AR-15 qualifies as a weapon "in common use" for "lawful purposes like self-defense"—the sort of arms that the Supreme Court has said are covered by the Second Amendment. He notes a 2022 estimate that Americans owned about 24 million "AR-15s and similar sporting rifles," and he highlights testimony that such guns are useful for home defense.

"Plaintiffs have shown that AR-15s are well-adapted for self-defense," Sheridan writes. "Evidence has been presented to the Court that the build of the AR-15 makes it well-suited to self-defense because it is 'light weight, [has] very mild recoil, and [has] good ergonomics'; it is a weapon which is 'well suited to younger shooters, female shooters, and other shooters of smaller stature.'" He adds that "the AR-15's design features—including the effectiveness of its cartridge for self-defense use and its better continuity of fire when used with available magazines—make the AR-15 a good choice for self-defense." And he notes that "the AR-15 has been used recently in several, relatively high-profile self-defense events in Florida, Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma."

Those points should be disregarded, the state argued, because handguns are a more popular choice for self-defense and one that New Jersey allows. But as Sheridan notes, the Supreme Court's decision in the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, which overturned a local handgun ban, explicitly rejected that sort of argument. "It is no answer to say…that it is permissible to ban the possession of handguns so long as the possession of other firearms (i.e., long guns) is allowed," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion. "It is enough to note, as we have observed, that the American people have considered the handgun to be the quintessential self-defense weapon."

Like the law at issue in Heller, "the Assault Firearms Law's AR-15 Provision acts effectively as the total prohibition on a commonly used firearm for self-defense—AR-15s—within the home," Sheridan writes. And under Heller, "a categorical ban on a class of weapons commonly used for self-defense is unlawful." Given "the Supreme Court's clear direction on this point," Sheridan says, "the AR-15 Provision of the Assault Firearms Law is unconstitutional" as applied to "the Colt AR-15 for use for self-defense in the home."

Sheridan reached a different conclusion regarding another provision of New Jersey's Assault Firearms Law that the plaintiffs also challenged: the ban on "large capacity magazines" (LCMs). Legislators originally defined LCMs as magazines that hold more than 15 rounds but reduced the limit to 10 rounds in 2018. That restriction, Sheridan says, is "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation"—the test established by the Supreme Court's 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Sheridan acknowledges that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, which includes New Jersey, has recognized ammunition as "arms" within the meaning of the Second Amendment. But he thinks the LCM ban differs from the AR-15 ban in a crucial way.

"The LCM Amendment passes constitutional muster because although the Second Amendment right is implicated, this regulation is in line with the historical regulations within the tradition of our Nation," Sheridan writes. "Put more precisely, the reduction of capacity is a limitation on firearms ownership. It is not a categorical ban preventing law-abiding citizens from exercising their Second Amendment rights [with] a weapon that is in common use for self-defense."

Sheridan notes that "detachable magazines did not exist in the Founding period" and that "it was not until the mid-l800s that patents for magazines falling within the definition of the LCM Amendment began appearing in the historical record." While "rifles capable of holding more than ten rounds became available" in the 1860s, he adds, "the magazine was fixed." And "despite the issuance of a patent for detachable magazines in 1864, firearms with detachable magazines were not widely available until the end of the Nineteenth Century."

Magazines that could hold more than 10 rounds, Sheridan notes, "did not exist in 1791," when the Second Amendment was ratified, and "were not widely available in 1868," when the 14th Amendment required states to respect the right to arms. He says it therefore would be plainly unreasonable to demand that New Jersey "locate a statute or regulation from that time" that closely resembles its LCM ban.

In Bruen, Sheridan writes, the Supreme Court "noted that current regulations may implicate either 'unprecedented societal concerns' or 'dramatic technological changes' different from those that existed when the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791 or when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868. In those circumstances, 'a more nuanced approach' to determine if historical regulations are 'relevantly similar' to the currently challenged regulations must be utilized based on two measurements: 'how and why the regulations burden a law-abiding citizen's right to armed self-defense.'"

Sheridan thinks the LCM ban's "how" is "relevantly similar" to the scope of historical restrictions on pistols and Bowie knives. "The LCM Amendment places a burden on self-defense that is comparable to the burden imposed by the historical analogues," he says. "Like these restrictions, the LCM Amendment is…a restriction responding to safety concerns present in our time."

As for the LCM ban's "why," Sheridan says, there is evidence that LCMs "increase the lethality of mass shooting events." In recent years, he notes, magazines holding over 10 rounds often have been used in mass shootings, including "all" such crimes from 2019 through 2022.

The "stated purpose" of New Jersey's LCM ban, which is to "effectively slow down a mass shooter," is "well-served" by that restriction, Sheridan writes. "A limitation on magazine capacity stops the rate at which victims can be injured," he says, and "allows for time during which a shooter may be intercepted, interrupted, or hopefully, stopped." While "such a problem" may be "new to us," he adds, it is "analogous to other safety issues presented by [weapons] commonly used…for lawful purposes confronted by our Nation in the past."

Sheridan, who decries the "alarming frequency" of mass shootings, never acknowledges that they remain rare compared to other kinds of lethal crime. Based on the commonly used definition of mass shootings as public attacks that kill four or more people, they account for around 1 percent of homicides committed with guns. And while Sheridan implies that mass shootings are on the rise, the RAND Corporation notes that "chance variability in the annual number of mass shooting incidents makes it challenging to discern a clear trend" and that "trend estimates are sensitive to outliers and to the time frame chosen for analysis."

Sheridan nevertheless decries the "reckless inaction of our governmental leaders to address the mass shooting tragedy afflicting our Nation," which both exaggerates the frequency of these crimes and takes for granted that they could be prevented if only politicians tried hard enough. In addition to a lack of political will, Sheridan implicitly blames the Supreme Court for saying that the Second Amendment puts some gun restrictions "off the table." Yet despite these views, he felt constrained to reject New Jersey's AR-15 ban.

At the same time, Sheridan was curiously reticent to extend his analysis by considering the illogic of banning "substantially identical" rifles and defining that category based on an arbitrary set of features. With or without those features, a rifle fires the same ammunition at the same rate with the same muzzle velocity. Does it make any sense, for example, to expect that banning rifles with both folding stocks and threaded barrels would have any noticeable impact on mass shooting deaths, let alone homicide generally?

While Sheridan's concern about the use of LCMs in mass shootings is more plausible, it is based on an inconclusive correlation. The public safety benefit of banning them is speculative, and Sheridan did not even consider the argument that the ability to fire more than 10 rounds without changing magazines can be important in some self-defense situations—a point that legislators take for granted when they exempt current and former police officers from magazine restrictions.

The FPC plans an appeal to the 3rd Circuit, which it wants to "address legal deficiencies in [Sheridan's] opinion," and "seek the full relief" that the plaintiffs requested. "Bans on so-called 'assault weapons' are immoral and unconstitutional," says FPC President Brandon Combs. "FPC will continue to fight forward until all of these bans are eliminated throughout the United States."

The post A Federal Judge Reluctantly Concludes That New Jersey's AR-15 Ban Is Unconstitutional appeared first on Reason.com.

So I'm trying to create a zoom function for my 2D camera.

The best result I've got so far is:

But something still feels off, and I just can't seem to pinpoint it.

My code currently, which simply takes the substraction between before and after zoom:

void Zoom(float value, float mx, float my, float w, float h) {
    float bmwx = (w - (w - mx)) * this->zoom, bmwy = (h - (h - my)) * this->zoom; // before
    if (value < 0.0f) this->zoom *= 0.9f;
    if (value > 0.0f) this->zoom *= 1.1f;
    float amwx = (w - (w - mx)) * this->zoom, amwy = (h - (h - my)) * this->zoom; // after
    
    this->center.x += amwx - bmwx;
    this->center.y += amwy - bmwy;
}

My other function, for matrix construction:

void Update(float mx, float my, float w, float h) {
    float hw = w * 0.5f, hh = h * 0.5f;
    float left = -hw + this->center.x;
    float right = hw + this->center.x;
    float top = -hh + this->center.y;
    float bottom = hh + this->center.y;

    this->ortho.InitOrthographic(drx::gfx::ogl::n, drx::gfx::ogl::f, left, right, top, bottom);
    this->mZoom.LoadIdentity();
    this->mZoom.Scale(this->zoom, this->zoom, this->zoom);
    this->matrix = this->ortho * this->mZoom;
}

Update, to current code (Update: which also fails if I move the central point):

void Zoom(float value, float mx, float my, float w, float h) {
    this->os.x += mx * this->zoom;
    this->os.y += my * this->zoom;
    if (value < 0.0f) this->zoom *= 0.75f;
    if (value > 0.0f) this->zoom *= 1.25f;
    this->os.x -= mx * this->zoom;
    this->os.y -= my * this->zoom;

}

void Update(float mx, float my, float w, float h) {
    float hw = w * 0.5f, hh = h * 0.5f;
    float left = -hw + this->center.x;
    float right = hw + this->center.x;
    float top = -hh + this->center.y;
    float bottom = hh + this->center.y;

    this->ortho.InitOrthographic(drx::gfx::ogl::n, drx::gfx::ogl::f, left, right, top, bottom);
    this->mZoom.LoadIdentity();
    this->mZoom.Scale(this->zoom, this->zoom, this->zoom);
    this->mZoom.Translate(this->os.x, this->os.y, 0.0f);
    this->matrix = this->ortho * this->mZoom;
}

A federal law that Congress enacted in 1994 prohibits gun possession by people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. Since that seems like a no-brainer, many people were dismayed when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit deemed that provision unconstitutional last year in United States v. Rahimi. But as anyone who reads the majority and concurring opinions in that case can see, there is a striking problem with 18 USC 922(g)(8): It disarms people even when there is little or no evidence that they pose a danger to others.

In an 8–1 decision today, the Supreme Court avoided that issue by noting that the man who challenged his prosecution under Section 922(g)(8), Zackey Rahimi, is a bad dude with an extensive history of violence, including violence against his girlfriend. As applied to people like Rahimi, Chief Justice John Roberts says in the majority opinion, the law is "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation"—the constitutional test that the Court established in the 2022 case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

"When a restraining order contains a finding that an individual poses a credible threat to the physical safety of an intimate partner, that individual may—consistent with the Second Amendment—be banned from possessing firearms while the order is in effect," Roberts says. The decision does not address the question of whether it is consistent with the Second Amendment to disarm someone without such a judicial finding.

Noting that Rahimi raised a facial challenge, Roberts faults the 5th Circuit for focusing on "hypothetical scenarios where Section 922(g)(8) might raise constitutional  concerns" instead of "consider[ing] the circumstances in which Section 922(g)(8) was most likely to be constitutional." That error, he says, "left the panel slaying a straw man."

As 5th Circuit Judge James Ho emphasized in his Rahimi concurrence, that "straw man" is not merely hypothetical. The "constitutional concerns" to which Roberts alludes derive from the statute's loose requirements for court orders that trigger the gun ban. Under Section 922(g)(8), a restraining order must include at least one of two elements, one of which sweeps broadly enough to encompass individuals with no history of violence or threats.

The first, optional element—a judicial finding that the respondent "represents a credible threat to the physical safety" of his "intimate partner" or that person's child—provides some assurance that the order addresses a real danger, especially since the law requires a hearing in which the respondent has "an opportunity to participate." As Roberts notes, the order against Rahimi included such a finding. But the second, alternative criterion—that the order "by its terms explicitly prohibits the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against such intimate partner or child that would reasonably be expected to cause bodily injury"—can be met by the boilerplate language of orders that are routinely granted in divorce cases, whether or not there is good reason to believe the respondent is apt to assault anyone.

In his Rahimi concurrence, Ho noted that protective orders are "often misused as a tactical device in divorce proceedings" and "are granted to virtually all who apply." They are "a tempting target for abuse," he said, and in some cases have been used to disarm the victims of domestic violence, leaving them "in greater danger than before."

In the lone dissent from today's decision, Justice Clarence Thomas likewise notes how easily someone can lose his right to arms under Section 922(g)(8). The provision "does not require a finding that a person has ever committed a crime of domestic violence," he writes. It "is not triggered by a criminal conviction or a person's criminal history." And it "does not distinguish contested orders from joint orders—for example, when parties voluntarily enter a no-contact agreement or when both parties seek a restraining order."

Furthermore, Thomas says, the law "strips an individual of his ability to possess firearms and ammunition without any due process," since "the ban is an automatic, uncontestable consequence of certain orders." The Cato Institute made the same basic point about due process in a brief supporting Rahimi's challenge.

Although a hearing is required for the restraining order itself, Thomas notes, "there is no hearing or opportunity to be heard on the statute's applicability, and a court need not decide whether a person should be disarmed under §922(g)(8)." He also points out that the penalties for violating the provision are severe: up to 15 years in prison, plus permanent loss of gun rights based on the felony conviction.

Roberts, who criticizes the 5th Circuit for requiring a "historical twin" rather than a "historical analogue" under the Bruen test, sees precedent for Section 922(g)(8) in "surety" laws that required threatening people to post bonds, which they would forfeit if they became violent. But Thomas does not think those laws are "relevantly similar" to the provision that Rahimi violated.

"Surety laws were, in a nutshell, a fine on certain behavior," Thomas writes. "If a person threatened someone in his community, he was given the choice to either keep the peace or forfeit a sum of money. Surety laws thus shared the same justification as §922(g)(8), but they imposed a far less onerous burden."

In particular, Thomas says, "a surety demand did not alter an individual's right to keep and bear arms. After providing sureties, a person kept possession of all his firearms; could purchase additional firearms; and could carry firearms in public and private. Even if he breached the peace, the only penalty was that he and his sureties had to pay a sum of money. To disarm him, the Government would have to take some other action, such as imprisoning him for a crime." Thomas thinks the government "has not shown that §922(g)(8)'s more severe approach is consistent with our historical tradition of firearm regulation."

Roberts, by contrast, says a prosecution under Section 922(g)(8) can be consistent with that tradition, at least when a judge concludes that someone "poses a credible threat to the physical safety of an intimate partner." The constitutionality of applying Section 922(g)(8) in cases where there was no such finding remains uncertain. Some Second Amendment scholars, such as the Independence Institute's David Kopel, argue that the provision would be constitutional if it were amended to require a finding of dangerousness.

The Court did clarify an important point in a way that could bode well for other challenges to the broad categories of "prohibited persons" who are not allowed to possess firearms, such as cannabis consumers and other illegal drug users. The majority rejected the Biden administration's position that only "responsible" people qualify for Second Amendment rights.

"We reject the Government's contention that Rahimi may be disarmed simply because he is not 'responsible,'" Roberts writes. "'Responsible' is a vague term. It is unclear what such a rule would entail. Nor does such a line derive from our case law."

In Bruen and in District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 case in which the Court first explicitly recognized that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to armed self-defense, Roberts notes, "we used the term 'responsible' to describe the class of ordinary citizens who undoubtedly enjoy the Second Amendment right….But those decisions did not define the term and said nothing about the status of citizens who were not 'responsible.' The question was simply not presented."

The post SCOTUS Dodges a Crucial Problem With Disarming People Based on Restraining Orders appeared first on Reason.com.

This month, the Supreme Court refused to consider a request by anti-abortion groups to impose nationwide restrictions on mifepristone, a safe medication used in most U.S. abortions and for miscarriage care. Without addressing whether mifepristone should be further restricted, the court found that these anti-abortion plaintiffs lack “legal standing” – meaning they do not have a sufficient connection to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulation of mifepristone to be able to challenge the agency’s decisions in court.

The court’s decision is a relief, but we should not be dazzled by the fact that the justices did the right thing based purely on a legal technicality. While the Supreme Court refused to allow these particular anti-abortion groups to bring this case, extremist politicians have vowed to continue to use the courts and the law to strip away access to medication abortion nationwide. Below, we break down why this case matters, and what happens next.

The plaintiffs in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA are organizations and doctors who want to see all abortion banned nationwide. To further their agenda, they used junk science to target access to mifepristone, a medication used in most U.S. abortions. They filed this lawsuit in Amarillo, Texas, where they could guarantee it would be heard by a Trump-appointed district court judge with a record of hostility to abortion. That district judge rubber-stamped all of their requests, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals largely did the same – overriding the consensus of the FDA and every leading national medical authority in order to impose medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone.

In its decision, the Supreme Court did not address the plaintiffs’ arguments that mifepristone should be severely restricted. The court found that the lawsuit suffered from a critical defect: the anti-abortion groups and doctors who brought the case lack legal standing. As the court explained, these anti-abortion plaintiffs don’t prescribe mifepristone and have no actual connection to the FDA’s regulation of the drug. Instead, “the plaintiffs want [the] FDA to make mifepristone more difficult for other doctors to prescribe and for pregnant women to obtain.” But under the Constitution, “a plaintiff ’s desire to make a drug less available for others does not establish standing to sue.”

For now, the court’s decision preserves the state-level patchwork access to medication abortion that has existed since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in 2022. That means that, for the time being, people across the United States can continue to fill their mifepristone prescriptions through mail-order and retail pharmacies, just as they would for any other similarly safe medication – without having to travel, sometimes hundreds of miles, just to pick up a pill. Health care professionals with specialized training, like nurse-practitioners, will also maintain the ability to prescribe mifepristone where state law allows. Furthermore, in the U.S. nearly 1 in 5 abortions relies on telemedicine. For many people – including low-income patients, people of color, folks in rural areas, and women in abusive households – retaining accessibility options, such as telemedicine, is essential – especially when it may be impossible to arrange and afford lengthy transportation and childcare, to secure time off work, or to escape the surveillance of an abuser in order to access time-sensitive care.

The court’s order also forestalls the dire consequences the American Cancer Society and many other patient advocacy groups warned of should the court override the FDA’s actions and undermine drug development and impede access to critical medications well beyond reproductive health care.

There is no credible dispute about mifepristone’s safety. The nation’s leading medical associations describe the science confirming its safety as “overwhelming.” While all drugs carry risks, medical experts have explained that mifepristone is among the safest medications used in medical practice today – safer than Viagra or penicillin – with serious complications experienced by fewer than 1 percent of patients.

By contrast, the plaintiffs’ evidence rested on testimony and research from a few anti-abortion doctors who travel the country peddling junk science about abortion safety. As the ACLU explained in a friend-of-the-court brief, when other courts have heard these folks testify, time and again, they have discredited them. For instance, Dr. Ingrid Skop – cited 17 times in the appellate court’s ruling– had her testimony on abortion thrown out by a Florida court two years ago for being “inaccurate.” Dr. Skop admitted under oath in 2020 that she is “not a really good researcher,” so it’s no surprise that her research on mifepristone was published by a fringe advocacy group known for promoting blatantly false conspiracy theories, such as that President Barack Obama hypnotized listeners with his speeches. Several of the studies relied on by these plaintiffs have been retracted because they are so profoundly flawed. Another study is based on 98 anonymous blogs.

Maintaining access to mifepristone has never been more crucial. Since it was approved in 2000, nearly 6 million people in the United States, and millions more globally, have used this medication. Today, medication abortion comprises almost two-thirds of all abortions in this country.

Play the video

The Supreme Court refused to allow these particular anti-abortion groups to bring this case, but extremist politicians are waiting in the wings to continue this campaign to strip away access to medication abortion nationwide. Indeed, the same Trump-appointed district judge in Texas has already permitted Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri to intervene in the district court proceedings on the same side as the anti-abortion groups. And these extremist politicians have said that they will try to continue this case in Texas – even though the Supreme Court just found that the original plaintiffs lack standing – or else bring copycat lawsuits in other jurisdictions.

Moreover, in the coming weeks, the Supreme Court will decide another abortion case that will determine whether politicians can force doctors to withhold emergency room care from their patients suffering severe pregnancy complications. These cases show how far politicians will go to prevent people from getting the reproductive health care they need.

Since Roe was overturned, every time an abortion issue has been put to the ballot, the people have voted in favor of access. Politicians are relentless in their attacks, but a majority of this country believes that people must have the power to make personal decisions during pregnancy. We’ll continue using every tool at our disposal to fight back against these cruel and deeply unpopular attacks on our health, our futures, and our bodily autonomy.

Join us in this fight to expand and restore our rights by urging legislators to pass federal legislation that safeguards our reproductive freedom – including abortion, birth control, AND IVF care.

In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman scrutinize President Joe Biden's executive order updating asylum restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border in response to illegal border crossings.

01:32—Biden's new asylum restrictions

21:38—The prosecution of political opponents: former President Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, and Steve Bannon

33:25—Weekly Listener Question

39:56—No one is reading The Washington Post

48:09—This week's cultural recommendations

Mentioned in this podcast:

"Biden Announces Sweeping Asylum Restrictions at U.S.-Mexico Border" by Fiona Harrigan

"Biden's New Asylum Policy is Both Harmful and Illegal" by Ilya Somin

"Travel Ban, Redux" by Josh Blackman

"Immigration Fueled America's Stunning Cricket Upset Over Pakistan" by Eric Boehm

"Libertarian Candidate Chase Oliver Wants To Bring Back 'Ellis Island Style' Immigration Processing" by Fiona Harrigan

"Donald Trump and Hunter Biden Face the Illogical Consequences of an Arbitrary Gun Law" by Jacob Sullum

"Hunter Biden's Trial Highlights a Widely Flouted, Haphazardly Enforced, and Constitutionally Dubious Gun Law" by Jacob Sullum

"Hunter Biden's Multiplying Charges Exemplify a Profound Threat to Trial by Jury" by Jacob Sullum

"The Conviction Effect" by Liz Wolfe

"Laurence Tribe Bizarrely Claims Trump Won the 2016 Election by Falsifying Business Records in 2017" by Jacob Sullum

"A Jumble of Legal Theories Failed To Give Trump 'Fair Notice' of the New York Charges Against Him" by Jacob Sullum

"Does Donald Trump's Conviction in New York Make Us Banana Republicans?" by J.D. Tuccille

"The Myth of the Federal Private Nondelegation Doctrine, Part 1" by Sasha Volokh

"Federal Court Condemns Congress for Giving Unconstitutional Regulatory Powers to Amtrak" by Damon Root

"Make Amtrak Safer and Privatize It" by Ira Stoll

"Biden Threatens To Veto GOP Spending Bill That Would 'Cut' Amtrak Funding to Double Pre-Pandemic Levels" by Christian Britschgi

"This Company Is Running a High-Speed Train in Florida—Without Subsidies" by Natalie Dowzicky

"Do Not Under Any Circumstances Nationalize Greyhound" by Christian Britschgi

"With Ride or Die, the Bad Boys Movies Become Referendums on Masculinity" by Peter Suderman

"D.C. Water Spent Nearly $4,000 On Its Wendy the Water Drop Mascot" by Christian Britschgi

Upcoming Reason Events:

Reason Speakeasy: Corey DeAngelis on June 11 in New York City

Send your questions to [email protected]. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today's sponsor:

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Audio production by Justin Zuckerman and John Carter

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The post Partisan Border Wars appeared first on Reason.com.

Shooting fireworks out of a helicopter sounds fun. Shooting fireworks out of a helicopter at a Lamborghini sports car sounds really fun, especially if everyone on the helicopter and everyone in the Lamborghini consents. Alex Choi, a YouTube and Instagram vlogger in California, produced a video of him and his crew doing just that. But he forgot to ask one important group for permission: the federal government.

Earlier this week, the feds indicted Choi for "causing the placement of explosive or incendiary device on an aircraft," a crime with a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. The indictment also revealed that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had revoked the license from Choi's helicopter pilot in January 2024 for flying less than 500 feet from people, failing to display the helicopter's registration number, and creating "a hazard to persons or property" without the necessary FAA waivers.

By all accounts, the only danger was to people directly involved in the video, which has since been removed from Choi's YouTube and Instagram accounts. (Clips of the stunt are still available elsewhere.) Choi and his crew filmed the stunt at El Mirage dry lake bed, an off-roading recreation area miles away from any town. The indictment quotes Choi talking about his "crazy stupid ideas" and one of his crew members saying that the fireworks are "so loud; it's actually terrifying," which only makes the video sound cooler.

The FAA moved very quickly when it caught wind of the stunt. Choi posted the video on the Fourth of July last year. On July 18, an FAA inspector interviewed the person who transported cars for Choi. A few days later, the FAA tracked down the helicopter pilot and a Bureau of Land Management agent went out to the dry lake to photograph Choi's tire tracks. Since the lake bed is federal land, the indictment notes, Choi should have gotten federal permission.

Soon after the FAA interrogations began, Choi texted an associate that the FAA inspector "has a personal issue with my helicopter pilot friend and every time i do a shoot with him, tries to get more information about him so he can go after him," according to the indictment.

The Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General then decided to charge Choi with a crime. The law against taking an explosive on board an aircraft clearly seems to be aimed at would-be bombers, but the feds argue that it applies to firing explosives out of an aircraft as well.

The case against Choi parallels the case of Austin Haughwout almost a decade ago. In 2015, when consumer drone technology was still in its infancy, the teenage Haughwout filmed himself flying a drone with a pistol attached and firing into the woods. The 14-second video, titled "Flying Gun," caused a national media panic about the danger of armed drones. Haughwout also posted a video of himself roasting meat with a drone-mounted flamethrower. 

The FAA subpoenaed Haughwout and his father because the videos showed potentially unsafe piloting of an aircraft. The Haughwout family fought the subpoena in court, arguing that drones are not "aircraft" within the FAA's jurisdiction. (Their lawyer compared the situation to the FAA regulating baseballs, paper airplanes, or birthday balloons.) A district court ruled in favor of the subpoena, and although Haughwout was not charged with an aviation crime, the case became a key precedent for the FAA's ability to regulate drones.

Since then, the FAA has scoured social media for potential drone violations. Earlier this year, a federal court banned Philadelphia YouTuber Michael DiCiurcio from flying drones and fined him $182,000 for violating FAA rules. DiCiurcio had gotten famous for making slapstick videos of himself fighting birds, buzzing fishermen, and crashing into himself with his drone, all while narrating in a thick South Philly accent.

Last year, aviation vlogger Joe Costanza had a friend follow his small Piper Cub airplane down a private runway with a drone. When Costanza posted the video to a Facebook group—and joked that "the pilot knew that the drone was there because I was flying both at the same time"—he was contacted by an FAA inspector. In the end, the FAA did not press any charges, but Constanza took to YouTube to complain about the investigation.

"You know, no matter how stupid the complaint is or how out of the ordinary it is, we have to investigate every single complaint that comes out way," the inspector said, according to Constanza.

The post California YouTuber Faces 10 Years for Having Too Much Fun With Fireworks appeared first on Reason.com.

What do the National Rifle Association (NRA), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and nine U.S. Supreme Court justices from five presidential administrations all have in common? That list is likely relatively small. But at least one area of overlap was made evident Thursday when the Court published a unanimous ruling that a New York government official allegedly violated the First Amendment by pressuring insurers and banks to sever business ties with the NRA, which the ACLU is representing.

The decision resuscitates the gun advocacy group's lawsuit against Maria Vullo, the former head of New York's Department of Financial Services (DFS). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit had previously ruled in her favor.

At the core of the case is Vullo's advocacy following the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. After that tragedy, in private meetings with insurance companies, Vullo allegedly expressed she would selectively apply enforcement action to groups that insisted on serving the NRA.

She didn't stop there. She also sent letters titled "Guidance on Risk Management Relating to the NRA and Similar Gun Promotion Organizations" to insurers and banks, in which she encouraged them to "continue evaluating and managing their risks, including reputational risks, that may arise from their dealings with the NRA or similar gun promotion organizations"; to "review any relationships they have with the NRA or similar gun promotion organizations"; and to "take prompt actions to manag[e] these risks and promote public health and safety." And in a press release with then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the two officials urged such companies to terminate their relationships with the gun advocacy group. Some took them up on the suggestion.

The constitutional issue at stake here is similar to the one the Court explored in Murthy v. Missouri, the case that asks if President Joe Biden's administration violated the First Amendment when it sought to convince social media companies to remove content it disliked. During those oral arguments in March, many justices appeared sympathetic to the view that government officials had not overstepped the bounds of their authority and had merely exercised their own free speech rights to persuade those companies to adopt their views, not unlike a White House press secretary promoting an ideological slant to the media. 

But in NRA v. Vullo, the Court ruled unanimously that Vullo's actions as alleged by the NRA had crossed the line from persuasion into coercion. "Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors," wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The NRA, she said, "plausibly alleges that respondent Maria Vullo did just that."

The decision sends the case back to the 2nd Circuit, which could still give Vullo qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that shields government officials from suits like the NRA's if the misconduct alleged has not been "clearly established" in prior case law. That outcome is certainly probable, as the 2nd Circuit's original decision not only ruled that Vullo had not violated the Constitution—which the Supreme Court rejected today—but that even if she had, qualified immunity would insulate her from the NRA's claim.

It is difficult to imagine, however, a more obvious violation of the Constitution than the weaponization of government power to cripple advocacy disfavored by the state. The supposed reason for qualified immunity is that taxpayer-funded civil servants deserve fair notice that conduct is unlawful before a victim can seek recourse for those misdeeds. To argue that a government agent could not be expected to understand the contours of the First Amendment here is rather dire.

Many people may struggle to separate the constitutional question from the ideological backdrop. The NRA, after all, is one of the more polarizing lobbying organizations in the country, not least of which because its founding issue—gun rights—is not exactly a topic that elicits cool-headed responses. It has also become an advocacy group not just for firearms but for the Republican Party more broadly and the identity politics associated with it, alienating large swaths of people, to put it mildly.

There is another major group in the country that has followed a similar story arc, just on the other side of the political spectrum: the ACLU. Once a stalwart free speech group—so principled it defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis—it has, in modern times, sometimes actively advocated against civil liberties when those principles transgress progressive politics, an awkward move when considering the group's name. But no matter how much you dislike one or both of them, the NRA and the ACLU coming together here is all the more reflective of the fact that some things, like the First Amendment, really aren't partisan.

The post The NRA's Unanimous Supreme Court Victory Is Good for Free Speech—No Matter How You Feel About Guns appeared first on Reason.com.

Bombs kill people. When someone provides bombs to a government at war, those weapons will be used to kill people. It's a simple fact but one that seems to have eluded Democrats.

After voting to send bombs to the Israeli military, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) condemned the Israeli military for killing Palestinian civilians with an American-made bomb. And after urging the Israeli military to use smaller munitions, the Biden administration found itself scrambling to deal with a mass civilian casualty event caused by one of those smaller weapons.

On Sunday, the Israeli Air Force bombed Tel al-Sultan, a neighborhood of Rafah that Israel had previously designated a safe zone for fleeing civilians. The Israeli government claimed the airstrike successfully killed two senior Hamas commanders. But a fire started by the bomb spread through the densely-packed tent city, burning to death at least 45 people, including 12 women, eight children, and three elderly. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the civilian deaths were a "tragic mistake."

British doctor James Smith called the fire "one of the most horrific things that I have seen or heard of in all of the weeks that I've been working in Gaza." CNN found pieces of a GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb, a type of 250-pound bomb that the U.S. military had rush-shipped to Israel following the Hamas attacks last October, with serial numbers from a California manufacturer.

"The Israeli bombing of a refugee camp inside a designated safe zone is horrific," Warren stated on social media. "Israel has a duty to protect innocent civilians and Palestinians seeking shelter in Rafah have nowhere safe to go. Netanyahu's assault of Rafah must stop. We need an immediate cease-fire."

Last month, Warren had voted for a $26.38 billion U.S. military aid package to Israel, as Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) pointed out. "Ma'am, you voted to send those bombs to Israel," he wrote in a response to Warren's statement.

Warren's office did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement last month, Warren noted that she voted for the aid package after the Biden administration agreed to certify that every military receiving U.S. aid "follows international law, protects civilians in war zones and allows for humanitarian aid."

On May 10, the administration ruled that there are "reasonable" accusations that Israel breaks the laws of war but that the Israeli government gave "credible and reliable" assurances about how it plans to use U.S. weapons. President Joe Biden also said that he would not be "supplying the weapons" for an Israeli invasion of Rafah that threatened the civilian population and held up a shipment of Mark 80 series bombs, which were responsible for some of the worst mass-casualty attacks in Gaza.

At a Senate hearing earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin presented the GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb as a safer alternative to the Mark 80 series: "A Small Diameter Bomb, which is a precision weapon, that's very useful in a dense, built-up environment, but maybe not so much a 2,000-pound bomb that could create a lot of collateral damage."

Last October, the Israeli military used two American-made 2,000-pound bombs to assassinate a Hamas commander, killing dozens of civilians in the Jabaliya refugee camp.

Austin is right that 2,000-pound bombs, which can kill everything within 600 feet, are more likely to harm bystanders than lighter alternatives. And as the name suggests, the Small Diameter Bomb has a smaller lethal radius. However, that doesn't make the bombs any less lethal for people inside the radius—or people caught up in secondary fires caused by the weapon.

Much of the Israeli army's "precision" targeting is carried out by artificial intelligence programs. The Israeli publication +972 Magazine has reported that one AI targeting system called "Lavender" is allowed to kill a large number of civilians per Hamas fighter, and is believed to have a 10 percent error rate when identifying fighters in the first place.

Another program revealed by +972, called "Where's Daddy," targets Hamas fighters who have left the battlefield and gone home to their families.

In other words, the type of weapon matters but how the weapon is used matters more. Despite Biden's earlier threats and assurances over human rights, the Biden administration is keen to defer to Israeli claims.

"As a result of this strike on Sunday, I have no policy changes to speak to," White House spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday. "It just happened. The Israelis are going to investigate it. We're going to be taking great interest in what they find in that investigation. And we'll see where it goes from there."

The post Democrats Surprised To Learn Bombs Are Used To Bomb People appeared first on Reason.com.

I am facing a problem with my UE5 project: I am hitting the maximum amount of space my current account allows for git, including LFS.

Some assets are very large, so I cannot use anymore my git provider, unless I ramp up my account pricing tier... which I am unable to afford at the moment.

So, how could I still manage large assets so that they reside outside of the repo?

The target is still be able to collaborate through git... I am dreaming of Unreal, upon cloning/pulling asking "You have assets that need to be downloaded", but my hopes are not high.

A manual solution would also be ok, but I am wary of putting asset names in the README and adding them, I am afraid this would generate conflicts. A related question does not actually answer this, but it's a good start.

Remedy has cancelled its premium co-op multiplayer game, Codename Kestrel.

The project - which started life as codename Vanguard, before it was rebooted last year - was being developed by the Alan Wake and Control studio, with Tencent set to handle the publishing side of things.

Read more

Last Thursday, a federal judge in Delaware rejected Hunter Biden's Second Amendment challenge to the three gun charges he faces for buying a revolver in October 2018, when he was a crack cocaine user. In a 10-page order, U.S. District Marylellen Noreika concludes that 18 USC 922(g)(3), which makes it a felony for an "unlawful user" of a "controlled substance" to receive or possess firearms, is not unconstitutional on its face, meaning there are at least some cases in which the provision can be enforced without violating the right to keep and bear arms.

Noreika's decision does not end a constitutional dispute that pits Biden against his own father, who has steadfastly defended a policy that could send his son to prison. That policy denies Second Amendment rights to millions of Americans with no history of violence, including cannabis consumers, whether or not they live in states that have legalized marijuana.

Noreika's ruling leaves the door open to an "as-applied" challenge if and when Biden is convicted, meaning he can still argue that his prosecution violates the Second Amendment at that point. That claim may ultimately be resolved by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, which has yet to address the constitutionality of Section 922(g)(3) under the test that the U.S. Supreme Court established in the 2022 case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.*

If Biden is convicted and his appeals are unsuccessful, he could face a substantial prison sentence. When he bought his gun, violations of Section 922(g)(3) were punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which his father signed into law in 2022, raised the maximum penalty to 15 years. But even though Congress views gun ownership by illegal drug users as a serious crime, it is rarely prosecuted. While survey data suggest that millions of gun owners are guilty of violating Section 922(g)(3), fewer than 150 Americans are prosecuted for that offense each year.

The two other gun charges that Biden faces, which are based on the same transaction, likewise are rarely prosecuted. One alleges a violation of 18 USC 922(a)(6), which applies to someone who knowingly makes a false statement in connection with a firearm transaction. The other involves 18 USC 924(a)(1)(A), which applies to someone who "knowingly makes any false statement or representation with respect to the information" that a federally licensed dealer is required to record.

Both charges are based on the same conduct: Biden checked "no" in response to a question on Form 4473, which is required for gun purchases from federally licensed dealers: "Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?" That check mark, according to federal prosecutors, qualified as two felonies, punishable by a combined maximum prison sentence of 15 years. Although actual sentences tend to be much shorter than the maximums, Biden theoretically faces up to 25 years in prison for conduct that violated no one's rights.

Biden argued that Section 922(g)(3) fails the Bruen test, which requires the government to show that a gun law is "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation." He added that the ancillary charges also should be dismissed because they would not be possible but for Section 922(g)(3).

In rejecting Biden's motion to dismiss, Noreika relies heavily on a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit. Last month in United States v. Veasley, the 8th Circuit rejected a facial challenge to Section 922(g)(3), citing the legal treatment of "the mentally ill" in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In the 18th century, the appeals noted, justices of the peace were empowered to order the confinement of "lunatics" who were deemed a threat to public safety. Since such confinement "did not include access to guns," the court reasoned, it was clear that "lunatics" had no such rights. And by the late 19th century, states had begun to prohibit gun sales to people of "unsound mind." Together with "the even longer tradition of confinement," the 8th Circuit said, "these laws suggest that society made it a priority to keep guns out of the hands of anyone who was mentally ill and dangerous."

Those precedents, the appeals court said, amply justify Section 922(g)(3): "The 'burden' imposed by § 922(g)(3) is 'comparable,' if less heavy-handed, than Founding-era laws governing the mentally ill. It goes without saying that confinement with straitjackets and chains carries with it a greater loss of liberty than a temporary loss of gun rights. And the mentally ill had less of a chance to regain their rights than drug users and addicts do today. Stopping the use of drugs, after all, restores gun rights under § 922(g)(3)." The court thought the justification for Section 922(g)(3), "which is to 'keep guns out of the hands of presumptively risky people,'" is "also comparable."

The 8th Circuit assumed that drug users are analogous to "lunatics" and people of "unsound mind" who are "mentally ill and dangerous." But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected that analogy last year, when it overturned the Section 922(g)(3) conviction of Patrick Darnell Daniels Jr., a Mississippi man who was caught with a gun and the remains of a few joints after he was pulled over for driving without a license plate in April 2022.

"Just as there was no historical justification for disarming a citizen of sound mind, there is no tradition that supports disarming a sober citizen who is not currently under an impairing influence," the 5th Circuit said in United States v. Daniels. "The Founders purportedly institutionalized the insane and stripped them of their guns; but they allowed alcoholics to possess firearms while sober. We must ask, in Bruen-style analogical reasoning, which is Daniels more like: a categorically 'insane' person? Or a repeat alcohol user? Given his periodic marihuana usage, Daniels is firmly in the latter camp. If and when Daniels uses marihuana, he may be comparable to a mentally ill individual whom the Founders would have disarmed. But while sober, he is like the repeat alcohol user in between periods of drunkenness."

Noreika also cites district court decisions that accepted the Justice Department's analogy between Section 922(g)(3) and early laws that made it a crime to publicly carry or discharge firearms while intoxicated. But the 5th Circuit rejected that analogy, and so did the 8th Circuit.

As both courts noted, those historical laws addressed a specific hazard—drunken gun handling—with narrow restrictions. They applied only in public and only to people who were actively intoxicated. They did not apply to private possession of firearms, let alone impose a categorical ban on gun ownership by drinkers.

"Under the government's reasoning," the 5th Circuit said, "Congress could ban gun possession by anyone who has multiple alcoholic drinks a week…based on the postbellum intoxicated carry laws. The analogical reasoning Bruen prescribed cannot stretch that far."

The 8th Circuit reached a similar conclusion. "For drinkers, the focus was on the use of a firearm, not its possession," it noted. "And the few restrictions that existed during colonial times were temporary and narrow in scope." It added that "there was even less regulation when it came to [other] drugs," which were widely available without a prescription in the 19th century.

"The government concedes that its 'review of early colonial laws has not revealed any statutes that prohibited [firearm] possession' by drug users," the 8th Circuit noted. "It took until 1968, with the passage of § 922(g)(3), for Congress to keep guns away from drug users and addicts….The fact that 'earlier generations addressed the societal problem…through materially different means [is] evidence that' disarming all drug users, simply because of who they are, is inconsistent with the Second Amendment."

Since it viewed the comparison between Section 922(g)(3) and laws aimed at preventing drunken gun handling as problematic, the 8th Circuit instead relied on the comparison between drug users and people who are "mentally ill and dangerous." It also invoked "the Founding-era criminal prohibition on taking up arms to terrify the people."

The 8th Circuit conceded that "not every drug user or addict will terrify others, even with a firearm." It is "exceedingly unlikely," for example, that "the 80-year-old grandmother who uses marijuana for a chronic medical condition and keeps a pistol tucked away for her own safety" will "pose a danger or induce terror in others." But "those are details relevant to an as-applied challenge, not a facial one," the court added. "For our purposes, all we need to know is that at least some drug users and addicts fall within a class of people who historically have had limits placed on their right to bear arms."

Noreika emphasizes that the 5th Circuit characterized Daniels as upholding an "as-applied" challenge. "We do not invalidate the statute in all its applications, but, importantly, only as applied to Daniels," the appeals court said. Noreika concludes that Daniels therefore provides no support to Biden's challenge. The 5th Circuit's reasoning nevertheless casts doubt on the notion that illegal drug users, as a class, are so dangerous that they have no Second Amendment rights.

Noreika finds that "the overwhelming weight of the district courts lends no support to Defendant's position either." But she notes three decisions in which federal judges concluded that Section 922(g)(3) charges were unconstitutional.

United States v. Harrison, decided in February 2023, involved an Oklahoma marijuana dispensary employee who was pulled over on his way to work for failing to stop at a red light in May 2022. Police found marijuana and a loaded revolver in his car. U.S. District Judge Patrick Wyrick dismissed a Section 922(g)(3) charge, rejecting the government's contention that "Harrison's mere status as a user of marijuana justifies stripping him of his fundamental right to possess a firearm."

United States v. Connelly, decided two months later, involved a Texas woman who was charged with illegal possession of firearms after El Paso police found marijuana and guns in her home while responding to a domestic disturbance in December 2021. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone concluded that Section 922(g)(3) "does not withstand Second Amendment scrutiny."

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Numbers reached the same conclusion that July in United States v. Alston, which also involved a marijuana user charged with violating Section 922(g)(3). "The government has failed to establish that historical laws regulating the mentally ill, the intoxicated, or the dangerous are sufficiently analogous to § 922(g)(3)," Numbers wrote. "The founding-era laws the government offers sought to remedy different problems than § 922(g)(3) does, and they did so through less-restrictive means. Taken together, the historical examples discussed above are not analogous enough to § 922(g)(3) to establish the statute's constitutionality." Last October, U.S. District Judge Louise Flanagan agreed that "the government has not met its burden of proving that § 922(g) is consistent with the Second Amendment."

Although Noreika describes only that last decision as upholding a facial challenge, Cardone's conclusion that Section 922(g)(3) "does not withstand Second Amendment scrutiny" went further than deeming a specific prosecution unconstitutional, and all three decisions rejected the government's historical analogies in no uncertain terms. Furthermore, all of these cases were resolved before trial, as Biden sought to do in his case.

Why does Noreika say that remedy is not available to Biden? "Defendant argues that § 922(g)(3) is unconstitutional under the revised framework announced in Bruen because there is no 'historical precedent for disarming citizens based on their status of having used a controlled substance,'" she writes. "Because Defendant makes no arguments specifically tailored to him or the application of § 922(g)(3) to his facts, Defendant's challenge to the constitutionality of § 922(g)(3) is a facial one….To the extent that Defendant seeks in his motion to raise a challenge to the constitutionality of § 922(g)(3) as applied to him, that request is denied without prejudice to renew on an appropriate trial record."

As Noreika sees it, in other words, Biden has to be convicted before he can challenge his prosecution. But no matter what happens with this particular case, the Biden administration's dogged defense of Section 922(g)(3), especially as applied to cannabis consumers, belies the president's repudiation of the hardline anti-drug position that he took for decades as a senator.

Nowadays, Biden says marijuana use should not be treated as a crime and decries the disadvantages associated with marijuana possession convictions. But his Justice Department simultaneously insists that marijuana use makes people so dangerous that they cannot be trusted with guns—so dangerous, in fact, that they should go to prison for trying to exercise their Second Amendment rights. The government claims that judgment is supported by historical precedents that bear little resemblance to a 1968 law that categorically deprives people of the right to arms for no good reason.

*Correction: This paragraph has been revised to clarify the timing of Biden's possible appeal.

The post Here Is Why a Federal Judge Rejected Hunter Biden's Second Amendment Challenge to His Gun Charges appeared first on Reason.com.

Remedy has cancelled its premium co-op multiplayer game, Codename Kestrel.

The project - which started life as codename Vanguard, before it was rebooted last year - was being developed by the Alan Wake and Control studio, with Tencent set to handle the publishing side of things.

Read more

Remedy has cancelled its premium co-op multiplayer game, Codename Kestrel.

The project - which started life as codename Vanguard, before it was rebooted last year - was being developed by the Alan Wake and Control studio, with Tencent set to handle the publishing side of things.

Read more

Remedy have called it quits on the project codenamed Kestrel. The co-op multiplayer game was an original IP being made with the backing of Tencent, but now Remedy say they've cancelled it to allow them to focus on "other games in our portfolio", all of which are based on "existing franchises".

Read more

Valve's Steam Deck is a highly capable piece of kit, often reaching parity with last-gen consoles at ~720p, while more demanding current-gen efforts can prove quite playable as well - even including some of the top-end Unreal Engine 5 titles. The RDNA2 graphics hardware inside the Deck is even capable of ray tracing, though this support has largely been dormant in SteamOS. That's started to change over the last year, with first Vulkan and then DXR-enabled titles running under Proton with RT enabled - and RT performance has seen big boosts as well.

Today we're taking a look at the state of play when it comes to RT on Steam Deck, looking at some of the best-looking PC titles to see whether they can be playable with RT engaged. Can we get good frame-rates even with demanding ray tracing settings? And how does the Valve's handheld compare in performance terms against the more powerful ROG Ally?

The most obvious place to start is with the Steam Deck is some of the easier ray tracing workloads available - and I think Doom Eternal is a good first choice. The game runs well with minimal settings tweakery: 720p resolution, medium settings and RT toggled on. Relative to the non-RT version of the game, we get solid (if somewhat low-res and slightly ghostly) reflections on glossy surfaces, with very different material properties when RT is enabled. This makes for a transformative difference in scenes with glossy materials, though an aggressive roughness cutoff means that semi-gloss materials are largely bereft of RT treatment.

Read more

Remedy has shared an update on a number of its upcoming projects, including its Control multiplayer game and the Max Payne 1 & 2 remakes.

In a recent report, the studio said its forthcoming co-op multiplayer game set in the Control universe had entered full production. This means Codename Condor, as it is currently known, has "reached the final development stages before the game is launched".

The developer said internal playtests for the upcoming release have shown its game has "a unique Remedy angle" for the genre, with a core loop it described as "engaging".

Read more

Last night, a swarm of bees invaded Chase Field in Phoenix, Arizona, just five minutes before a game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodges was about to start. The bee colony swarmed into a large mass on the protective netting behind home plate. — Read the rest

The post Swarm of bees descends on baseball stadium and delays game for two hours appeared first on Boing Boing.

Rent control is having something of a moment: In Los Angeles, tenants are invoking a law that imposes limits on apartments built on sites where rent-controlled units previously stood. A new rent control ordinance went into effect last month in the Bay Area city of Concord, California. Phillipsburg, New Jersey is considering similar restrictions. And, importantly, the Biden administration recently moved to cap rent hikes in some federally subsidized housing across the entire country.

But reviving bad policy doesn't make it less dumb than it was in past incarnations.

Affordable Housing Comes at a High Price

"The Biden administration moved this week to limit how much rent can rise in certain affordable housing units across the country," CNBC's Annie Nova noted April 3. "The cap applies to units that receive funding from the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, the nation's largest federal affordable housing program, according to experts. The National Low-Income Housing Coalition estimates that around 2.6 million rental homes across the U.S. have current LIHTC rent and income restrictions."

Tenant advocates applauded the move, but it drew criticism, too.

"While well‐​intentioned, rent control fails to achieve its primary goal of improving housing affordability for the poor and disadvantaged," economists Jeffrey Miron and Pedro Aldighieri respond in a piece published by the Cato Institute. "In fact, it often generates unintended consequences that exacerbate the very problems it seeks to solve."

They point out that restricting the price of housing discourages owners from maintaining and improving their property. It can also make it attractive for landlords to pull apartments from the rental market and put them up for sale as owner-occupied dwellings. Those enjoying deals on housing costs might also find themselves in the equivalent of golden handcuffs.

"Tenants in rent‐​controlled units become less mobile to avoid losing access to below‐​market rents," add Miron and Aldighieri.

The authors point to studies finding that rent control has reduced the supply of rental housing in communities as far apart as Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Francisco. In fact, the use of the City by the Bay to illustrate the failures of rent control has a long history. It was the example offered by Milton Friedman and George Stigler in Roofs or Ceilings?, a 1946 essay on rent restrictions published by the Foundation for Economic Education and recently resurfaced on X by the author Amity Shlaes.

A Tale of Two Housing Crunches

Discussing the effects of the infamous April 18, 1906 earthquake, Friedman and Stigler pointed out that "a city of about 400,000 people lost more than half its housing facilities in three days." In the weeks that followed, people left the city, temporary shelters went up, and construction crews swiftly got to work.

"When one turns to the San Francisco Chronicle of May 24, 1906—the first available issue after the earthquake—there is not a single mention of a housing shortage!" they write. "The classified advertisements listed 64 offers (some for more than one dwelling) of flats and houses for rent, and 19 houses for sale, against 5 advertisements of flats or houses wanted. Then and thereafter a considerable number of all types of accommodation except hotel rooms were offered for rent."

Friedman and Stigler contrasted this to the post-war situation in 1946, when "the city was being asked to shelter 10 percent more people in each dwelling unit than before the war"—a less acute situation than the one faced in 1906. But the result in 1946 was very different from that faced 40 years earlier.

"During the first five days of the year [in 1946] there were altogether only 4 advertisements offering houses or apartments for rent, as compared with 64 in one day in May 1906."

That's because, faced with a sudden mismatch between supply and demand, people decades apart chose very different ways of "rationing" housing stock.

"In 1906, the rationing was done by higher rents," wrote Friedman and Stigler. "In 1946 the use of higher rents to ration housing has been made illegal by the imposition of rent ceilings, and the rationing is by chance and favoritism." Higher rents in 1906 spurred people to build quickly and to efficiently use available space. Restricted prices in 1946 offered no such incentives, so housing remained hard to find.

That would have been a hard-learned lesson—had it been learned at all. But it wasn't.

Lessons Unlearned

Decades later, the 2019 study cited last month by Miron and Aldighieri looked at a 1994 law change in San Francisco that suddenly extended rent control to housing constructed before 1980. Sure enough, tenants benefiting from controlled rents became less likely to move, while landlords subject to restrictions converted their properties to condos and co-ops or redeveloped them to escape regulation.

Rent controls "reduced the supply of available rental housing by 15 percent," the study concluded. "This reduction in rental supply likely increased rents in the long run." Contrary to housing activists' intentions, "the conversion of existing rental properties to higher-end, owner-occupied condominium housing ultimately led to a housing stock increasingly directed toward higher income individuals."

So much for the magical benefits to the poor of price controls on housing. But, despite bitter experience of the ill-effects of rent controls, restricting the price that landlords can charge tenants for use of their property remains popular. Whether it's the Biden administration or local politicians in California, New Jersey, and elsewhere, a policy that pretends to make homes affordable is a very visible way of demonstrating concern for low-income families—even if it's completely counterproductive.

By contrast, the productive approach—getting out of the way—isn't so headline-ready.

"The most sustainable and effective way to promote affordable rents is to enable new construction by deregulating zoning, land use, and building requirements," write Miron and Aldighieri. "Such policies make development cheaper and supply more responsive to prices, keeping rents in check."

Unfortunately, leaving the market free to match supply and demand for housing—or anything else—may meet human needs, but it doesn't make for feel-good press releases. So, government officials continue to offer rent control as a solution to housing woes. And economists have endless opportunities to explore why restricting prices still fails to make housing affordable.

The post Rent Control Remains the Wrong Solution to Housing Woes appeared first on Reason.com.

Dennis Powanda and Vincent Yakaitis are bound together by a common experience: They were both criminally charged in connection with an attempted burglary. Powanda was the burglar, and Yakaitis was the property owner.

Ah, justice.

Indeed, that's not a misprint, parody, or a bad joke (although I wish it were the latter). Powanda was arrested and charged with criminal trespass and burglary, along with other related offenses, for executing the botched raid a little before 2:00 a.m. in February 2023 at Yakaitis' property in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania. The government charged Yakaitis, who is in his mid-70s, with using a firearm without a license after he shot Powanda, despite that it appears prosecutors agree Yakaitis justifiably used that same firearm in self-defense.

Whatever your vantage point—whether you care about criminal justice reform and a fair legal system, or gun rights, or all of the above—it is difficult to make sense of arresting and potentially imprisoning someone over what essentially amounts to a paperwork violation. That injustice is even more glaring when considering that Powanda, 40, allegedly charged at Yakaitis, who happens to be about three and a half decades older than Powanda.

Pennsylvania's permitting regime does carve out a couple of exceptions, one of which would seem to highly favor Yakaitis. Someone does not need a license to carry, according to the law, "in his place of abode or fixed place of business." Yakaitis owned the home Powanda attempted to burglarize. The catch: He didn't live there—it reportedly had no tenants at the time of the crime—opening a window for law enforcement to charge him essentially on a technicality.

If convicted, Yakaitis faces up to five years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Quite the price to pay for protecting your life on your own property. The misdemeanor charge also implies that Yakaitis has no history of using his weapon inappropriately, or any criminal record at all, as Pennsylvania law classifies his particular crime—carrying a firearm without a license—as a felony if the defendant has prior criminal convictions and would be disqualified from obtaining such a license. In other words, we can deduce that Yakaitis was a law-abiding citizen and eligible for a permit, which means he is staring down five years in a cell for not turning in a form and paying a fee to local law enforcement. OK.

Yakaitis is not the first such case. In June, law enforcement in New York charged Charles Foehner with so many gun possession crimes that if convicted on all of them he would face life in prison. Police came to be aware of his unlicensed firearms when Foehner defended himself against an attempted mugger—the surveillance footage is here—after which they searched Foehner's home and found that only some of his weapons were licensed with the state.

Prosecutors classified it as a justified shooting. And then they hit Foehner with an avalanche of criminal charges that would have resulted in a longer prison sentence than his assailant would have received, had he survived.

There's also LaShawn Craig, another New York City man whose case I covered in December. He, too, shot someone in self-defense and he, too, was arrested for doing so without a license. Like Foehner, he was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, a violent felony in New York. For a paperwork violation.

New York is a particularly relevant case study on the subject, as its highly restrictive concealed carry framework was the subject of a landmark Supreme Court case—New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen—which the majority disemboweled. It wasn't just conservative gun rights advocates who wanted that ruling, although you'd be forgiven for thinking so based on how polarized this debate tends to be. That Supreme Court decision also attracted support from progressive public defenders with The Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, The Bronx Defenders, and Brooklyn Defender Services. As I wrote in June about the amicus brief they submitted to the Court:

[The public defenders] offered several case studies centered around people whose lives were similarly upended. Among them were Benjamin Prosser and Sam Little, who had both been victims of violent crimes and who are now considered "violent felons" in the eyes of the state simply for carrying a firearm without the mandated government approval. Little, a single father who had previously been slashed in the face, was separated from his family while he served his sentence at the Vernon C. Bain Center, a notorious jail that floats on the East River. The conviction destroyed his nascent career, with the Department of Education rescinding its offer of employment.

In many jurisdictions, including New York, it can be expensive and time-consuming to get the required license, which in turn makes the Second Amendment available only to people of a certain class.

So where do we go from here? Those skeptical of rolling back concealed carry restrictions may take comfort in the fact that this doesn't have to be black and white. Governments, for example, can "give eligible persons a 30-day grace period to seek and obtain a permit after being charged, then automatically drop charges and expunge record once obtained," offers Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, or "remove the criminal penalty entirely" and perhaps "make it a fineable infraction," like driving without a license.

Whatever the case, it should be—it is—possible to balance public safety with the right to bear arms, and, as an extension, the right to self-defense. To argue otherwise is to embolden a legal system that incentivizes elderly men like Yakaitis to sit down and take it when someone threatens their life.

The post This Elderly Man Was Arrested After Shooting a Burglar in Self-Defense—for Carrying the Gun Without a License appeared first on Reason.com.

Increasingly tight tolerances and rigorous demands for quality are forcing chipmakers and equipment manufacturers to ferret out minor process variances, which can create significant anomalies in device behavior and render a device non-functional.

In the past, many of these variances were ignored. But for a growing number of applications, that’s no longer possible. Even minor fluctuations in deposition rates during a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process, for example, can lead to inconsistencies in layer uniformity, which can impact the electrical isolation properties essential for reliable circuit operation. Similarly, slight variations in a photolithography step can cause alignment issues between layers, leading to shorts or open circuits in the final device.

Some of these variances can be attributed to process error, but more frequently they stem from process drift — the gradual deviation of process parameters from their set points. Drift can occur in any of the hundreds of process steps involved in manufacturing a single wafer, subtly altering the electrical properties of chips and leading to functional and reliability issues. In highly complex and sensitive ICs, even the slightest deviations can cause defects in the end product.

“All fabs already know drift. They understand drift. They would just like a better way to deal with drift,” said David Park, vice president of marketing at Tignis. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s lithography, CMP (chemical mechanical polishing), CVD or PVD (chemical/physical vapor deposition), they’re all going to have drift. And it’s all going to happen at various rates because they are different process steps.”

At advanced nodes and in dense advanced packages, where a nanometer can be critical, controlling process drift is vital for maintaining high yield and ensuring profitability. By rigorously monitoring and correcting for drift, engineers can ensure that production consistently meets quality standards, thereby maximizing yield and minimizing waste.

“Monitoring and controlling hundreds of thousands of sensors in a typical fab requires the ability to handle petabytes of real-time data from a large variety of tools,” said Vivek Jain, principal product manager, smart manufacturing at Synopsys. “Fabs can only control parameters or behaviors they can measure and analyze. They use statistical analysis and error budget breakdowns to define upper control limits (UCLs) and lower control limits (LCLs) to monitor the stability of measured process parameters and behaviors.”

Dialing in legacy fabs
In legacy fabs — primarily 200mm — most of the chips use 180nm or older process technology, so process drift does not need to be as precisely monitored as in the more advanced 300mm counterparts. Nonetheless, significant divergence can lead to disparities in device performance and reliability, creating a cascade of operational challenges.

Manufacturers operating at older technology nodes might lack the sophisticated, real-time monitoring and control methods that are standard in cutting-edge fabs. While the latter have embraced ML to predict and correct for drift, many legacy operations still rely heavily on periodic manual checks and adjustments. Thus, the management of process drift in these settings is reactive rather than proactive, making changes after problems are detected rather than preventing them.

“There is a separation between 300-millimeter and 200-millimeter fabs,” said Park. “The 300-millimeter guys are all doing some version of machine learning. Sometimes it’s called advanced process control, and sometimes it’s actually AI-powered process control. For some of the 200-millimeter fabs with more mature process nodes, they basically have a recipe they set and a bunch of technicians looking at machines and looking at the CDs. When the drift happens, they go through their process recipe and manually adjust for the out-of-control processes, and that’s just what they’ve always done. It works for them.”

For these older fabs, however, the repercussions of process drift can be substantial. Minor deviations in process parameters, such as temperature or pressure during the deposition or etching phases, gradually can lead to changes in the physical structure of the semiconductor devices. Over time, these minute alterations can compound, resulting in layers of materials that deviate from their intended characteristics. Such deviations affect critical dimensions and ultimately can compromise the electrical performance of the chip, leading to slower processing speeds, higher power consumption, or outright device failure.

The reliability equation is equally impacted by process drift. Chips are expected to operate consistently over extended periods, often under a range of environmental conditions. However, when process-induced variability can weaken the device’s resilience, precipitating early wear-out mechanisms and reducing its lifetime. In situations where dependability is non-negotiable, such as in automotive or medical applications, those variations can have dire consequences.

But with hundreds of process steps for a typical IC, eliminating all variability in fabs is simply not feasible.

“Process drift is never going to not happen, because the processes are going to have some sort of side effect,” Park said. “The machines go out of spec and things like pumps and valves and all sorts of things need to be replaced. You’re still going to have preventive maintenance (PM). But if the critical dimensions are being managed correctly, which is typically what triggers the drift, you can go a longer period of time between cleanings or the scheduled PMs and get more capacity.”

Process drift pitfalls
Managing process drift in semiconductor manufacturing presents several complex challenges. Hysteresis, for example, is a phenomenon where the output of a process varies not solely because of current input conditions, but also based on the history of the states through which the process already has passed. This memory effect can significantly complicate precision control, as materials and equipment might not reset to a baseline state after each operational cycle. Consequently, adjustments that were effective in previous cycles may not yield the same outcomes due to accumulated discrepancies.

One common cause of hysteresis is thermal cycling, where repeated heating and cooling create mechanical stresses. Those stresses can be additive, releasing inconsistently based on temperature history.  That, in turn, can lead to permanent changes in the output of a circuit, such as a voltage reference, which affects its precision and stability.

In many field-effect transistors (FETs), hysteresis also can occur due to charge trapping. This happens when charges are captured in ‘trap states’ within the semiconductor material or at the interface with another material, such as an oxide layer. The trapped charges then can modulate the threshold voltage of the device over time and under different electrical biases, potentially leading to operational instability and variability in device performance.

Human factors also play a critical role in process drift, with errors stemming from incorrect settings adjustments, mishandling of materials, misinterpretation of operational data, or delayed responses to process anomalies. Such errors, though often minor, can lead to substantial variations in manufacturing processes, impacting the consistency and reliability of semiconductor devices.

“Once in production, the biggest source of variability is human error or inconsistency during maintenance,” said Russell Dover, general manager of service product line at Lam Research. “Wet clean optimization (WCO) and machine learning through equipment intelligence solutions can help address this.”

The integration of new equipment into existing production lines introduces additional complexities. New machinery often features increased speed, throughput, and tighter tolerances, but it must be integrated thoughtfully to maintain the stringent specifications required by existing product lines. This is primarily because the specifications and performance metrics of legacy chips have been long established and are deeply integrated into various applications with pre-existing datasheets.

“From an equipment supplier perspective, we focus on tool matching,” said Dover. “That includes manufacturing and installing tools to be identical within specification, ensuring they are set up and running identically — and then bringing to bear systems, tooling, software and domain knowledge to ensure they are maintained and remain as identical as possible.”

The inherent variability of new equipment, even those with advanced capabilities, requires careful calibration and standardization.

“Some equipment, like transmission electron microscopes, are incredibly powerful,” said Jian-Min Zuo, a materials science and engineering professor at the University of Illinois’ Grainger College of Engineering. “But they are also very finicky, depending on how you tune the machine. How you set it up under specific conditions may vary slightly every time. So there are a number of things that can be done when you try to standardize those procedures, and also standardize the equipment. One example is to generate a curate, like a certain type of test case, where you can collect data from different settings and make sure you’re taking into account the variability in the instruments.”

Process drift solutions
As semiconductor manufacturers grapple with the complexities of process drift, a diverse array of strategies and tools has emerged to address the problem. Advanced process control (APC) systems equipped with real-time monitoring capabilities can extract patterns and predictive insights from massive data sets gathered from various sensors throughout the manufacturing process.

By understanding the relationships between different process variables, APC can predict potential deviations before they result in defects. This predictive capability enables the system to make autonomous adjustments to process parameters in real-time, ensuring that each process step remains within the defined control limits. Essentially, APC acts as a dynamic feedback mechanism that continuously fine-tunes the production process.

Fig. 1: Reduced process drift with AI/ML advanced process control. Source: Tignis

While APC proactively manages and optimizes the process to prevent deviations, fault detection and classification (FDC) reacts to deviations by detecting and classifying any faults that still occur.

FDC data serves as an advanced early-warning system. This system monitors the myriad parameters and signals during the chip fabrication process, rapidly detecting any variances that could indicate a malfunction or defect in the production line. The classification component of FDC is particularly crucial, as it does more than just flag potential issues. It categorizes each detected fault based on its characteristics and probable causes, vastly simplifying the trouble-shooting process. This allows engineers to swiftly pinpoint the type of intervention needed, whether it’s recalibrating instruments, altering processing recipes, or conducting maintenance repairs.

Statistical process control (SPC) is primarily focused on monitoring and controlling process variations using statistical methods to ensure the process operates efficiently and produces output that meets quality standards. SPC involves plotting data in real-time against control limits on control charts, which are statistically determined to represent the expected normal process behavior. When process measurements stray outside these control limits, it signals that the process may be out of control due to special causes of variation, requiring investigation and correction. SPC is inherently proactive and preventive, aiming to detect potential problems before they result in product defects.

“Statistical process control (SPC) has been a fundamental methodology for the semiconductor industry almost from its very foundation, as there are two core factors supporting the need,” said Dover. “The first is the need for consistent quality, meaning every product needs to be as near identical as possible, and second, the very high manufacturing volume of chips produced creates an excellent workspace for statistical techniques.”

While SPC, FDC, and APC might seem to serve different purposes, they are deeply interconnected. SPC provides the baseline by monitoring process stability and quality over time, setting the stage for effective process control. FDC complements SPC by providing the tools to quickly detect and address anomalies and faults that occur despite the preventive measures put in place by SPC. APC takes insights from both SPC and FDC to adjust process parameters proactively, not just to correct deviations but also to optimize process performance continually.

Despite their benefits, integrating SPC, FDC and APC systems into existing semiconductor manufacturing environments can pose challenges. These systems require extensive configuration and tuning to adapt to specific manufacturing conditions and to interface effectively with other process control systems. Additionally, the success of these systems depends on the quality and granularity of the data they receive, necessitating high-fidelity sensors and a robust data management infrastructure.

“For SPC to be effective you need tight control limits,” adds Dover. “A common trap in the world of SPC is to keep adding control charts (by adding new signals or statistics) during a process ramp, or maybe inheriting old practices from prior nodes without validating their relevance. The result can be millions of control charts running in parallel. It is not a stretch to state that if you are managing a million control charts you are not really controlling much, as it is humanly impossible to synthesize and react to a million control charts on a daily basis.”

This is where AI/ML becomes invaluable, because it can monitor the performance and sustainability of the new equipment more efficiently than traditional methods. By analyzing data from the new machinery, AI/ML can confirm observations, such as reduced accumulation, allowing for adjustments to preventive maintenance schedules that differ from older equipment. This capability not only helps in maintaining the new equipment more effectively but also in optimizing the manufacturing process to take full advantage of the technological upgrades.

AI/ML also facilitate a smoother transition when integrating new equipment, particularly in scenarios involving ‘copy exact’ processes where the goal is to replicate production conditions across different equipment setups. AI and ML can analyze the specific outputs and performance variations of the new equipment compared to the established systems, reducing the time and effort required to achieve optimal settings while ensuring that the new machinery enhances production without compromising the quality and reliability of the legacy chips being produced.

AI/ML
Being more proactive in identifying drift and adjusting parameters in real-time is a necessity. With a very accurate model of the process, you can tune your recipe to minimize that variability and improve both quality and yield.

“The ability to quickly visualize a month’s worth of data in seconds, and be able to look at windows of time, is a huge cost savings because it’s a lot more involved to get data for the technicians or their process engineers to try and figure out what’s wrong,” said Park. “AI/ML has a twofold effect, where you have fewer false alarms, and just fewer alarms in general. So you’re not wasting time looking at things that you shouldn’t have to look at in the first place. But when you do find issues, AI/ML can help you get to the root cause in the diagnostics associated with that much more quickly.”

When there is a real alert, AI/ML offers the ability to correlate multiple parameters and inputs that are driving that alert.

“Traditional process control systems monitor each parameter separately or perform multivariate analysis for key parameters that require significant effort from fab engineers,” adds Jain. “With the amount of fab data scaling exponentially, it is becoming humanly impossible to extract all the actionable insights from the data. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can handle big data generated within a fab to provide effective process control with minimal oversight.”

AI/ML also can look for more other ways of predicting when the drift is going to take your process out of specification. Those correlations can be bivariate and multivariate, as well as univariate. And a machine learning engine that is able to sift through tremendous amounts of data and a larger number of variables than most humans also can turn up some interesting correlations.

“Another benefit of AI/ML is troubleshooting when something does trigger an alarm or alert,” adds Park. “You’ve got SPC and FDC that people are using, and a lot of them have false positives, or false alerts. In some cases, it’s as high as 40% of the alerts that you get are not relevant for what you’re doing. This is where AI/ML becomes vital. It’s never going to take false alerts to zero, but it can significantly reduce the amount of false alerts that you have.”

Engaging with these modern drift solutions, such as AI/ML-based systems, is not mere adherence to industry trends but an essential step towards sustainable semiconductor production. Going beyond the mere mitigation of process drift, these technologies empower manufacturers to optimize operations and maintain the consistency of critical dimensions, allowed by the intelligent analysis of extensive data and automation of complex control processes.

Conclusion
Monitoring process drift is essential for maintaining quality of the device being manufactured, but it also can ensure that the entire fabrication lifecycle operates at peak efficiency. Detecting and managing process drift is a significant challenge in volume production because these variables can be subtle and may compound over time. This makes identifying the root cause of any drift difficult, particularly when measurements are only taken at the end of the production process.

Combating these challenges requires a vigilant approach to process control, regular equipment servicing, and the implementation of AI/ML algorithms that can assist in predicting and correcting for drift. In addition, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and technological adaptation is crucial. Manufacturers must embrace a mindset that prioritizes not only reactive measures, but also proactive strategies to anticipate and mitigate process drift before it affects the production line. This includes training personnel to handle new technologies effectively and to understand the dynamics of process control deeply. Such education enables staff to better recognize early signs of drift and respond swiftly and accurately.

Moreover, the integration of comprehensive data analytics platforms can revolutionize how fabs monitor and analyze the vast amounts of data they generate. These platforms can aggregate data from multiple sources, providing a holistic view of the manufacturing process that is not possible with isolated measurements. With these insights, engineers can refine their process models, enhance predictive maintenance schedules, and optimize the entire production flow to reduce waste and improve yields.

Related Reading
Tackling Variability With AI-Based Process Control
How AI in advanced process control reduces equipment variability and corrects for process drift.

The post Predicting And Preventing Process Drift appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

„Ve hře Lords of Ragnarök ztělesňují hráči hrdiny ze severských mýtů, kteří dobývají území, bojují se zuřivými nestvůrami a staví monumenty severským bohům. Postupně se střídají v tazích po směru hodinových ručiček, dokud některý z nich nesplní jednu ze tří podmínek nutných pro vítězství NEBO hra neskončí Ragnarökem.“

– Cíl hry

Jak již popisek naznačuje, co je našim osudem je nyní jasné. Vyrážíme vstříc Valhalle ať už nás to bude stát cokoliv. Seberte tak partu až čtyř přátel (nebo ještě lépe nepřátel) a usedněte ke stolu, kde nezůstane kámen na kameni. Připravte se tak krvelačné souboje, modlitby kněžích, lov monster v podání legendárních hrdinů a ve finále možná i skolení božského Lokiho.

Co na první pohled zaujme je naprosto gigantická krabice, plná figurek, které přímo křičí, aby se nabarvili. Insert je sice vcelku nešikovný a je velká škoda, že neobsahuje předtištěný manuál, co do kterého slotu patří, avšak cením, že se počítá s obalením karet, a tak je přihrádka na ně dostatečně naddimenzovaná (obávám se však, že větší prostor bude spíš kvůli kartám z rozšíření než kvůli obalům, ale to netuším, takže za mě pěkné plus). Ve finále si připravte na první hru i přibližně dvojnásobek času, než budete potřebovat na jakoukoliv další, jelikož budete muset vyplokávat spoustu žetonů, a hlavně skládat figurky armád. Abyste byly v obraze, tak první setup nám trval něco přes hodinu.

Myšlenka herních mechanik je poměrně plochá. Vylepšuj armádu nebo se s ní pohybuj. Pokud skončíš na poli s nepřítelem, začni souboj – klasický area-contol. Jak ale asi tušíte, nic není tak jednoduché, jak se na první pohled zdá. To, co je třeba hlídat a možné dělat vystačilo na obě strany třech „lama karet“, což nejednoho hráče dokáže odradit. Díky tomu první hry a obzvlášť první kola umí potrápit mozek a nervy při čekání ostatních hráčů. Pokud však máte stálou partu, která tento žánr area-controlu vyhledává, tak se nemusíte bát. Poměrně rychle se Vám vše dostane pod kůži a začne to parádně odsýpat.

Konečně se tedy dostáváme ke konkrétním mechanikám a dost možná Vám budou připomínat legendární Bloodrage. Obrovská mapa v centru s Yggdrasilem tvoří alfu a omegu celého opusu. Po ní se netouláte pouze vy, jakožto hráči, ale zároveň monstra z bájí a samotný Loki. Vše je rozděleno na tzv. území a regiony v nich, které mají svůj význam. To, jaké regiony budete zabírat samozřejmě není jenom tak. V některých se nachází osady, které můžete využívat k vylepšování armád, v jiných se nachází chrámy, ze kterých můžete verbovat kněží k božským monumentům. V každém případě na jednom regionu může být pouze armáda jednoho hráče. Pokud by tedy přišla návštěva odjinud, je potřeba si začít vysvětlovat, kdo je tu pánem. Souboj probíhá poměrně jednoduše. Porovná se hodnota armády a přidá se bojová karta, kterou hráč může a nemusí využít. Oproti právě zmíněnému Bloodrage je karta viditelná od začátku, jak vítěz, tak poražený ji zahodí a poražený se pouze stáhne na své vedlejší území s drobnými ztrátami. Často tak dochází ke strategickému uvažování, jestli raději armádu stáhnout bez použití karty nebo bojovat co to jenom jde.

Zabírání těchto regionů má tak svůj význam v samotné honbě za cílem. Okamžitě skončíte když:

• Jeden hráč obsadil všechny regiony na třech územích
• jeden hráč vlastní pět regionů s postaveným chrámem
• jeden hráč porazí Lokiho (ještě si decentně vysvětlíme)
• spustí se Ragnarök

Ragnarök, neboli soudný den, nastane ve chvíli, kdy se naplní předurčená proroctví během akce monumentů (tj. cleanup fáze, kterou není nutné detailně popisovat). Z mého pohledu se jedná o nejčastější způsob konce a svým způsobem je nejjednodušší jej spustit, jelikož se na něm podílí všichni hráči. No ale co to poražení Lokiho? Každý si chce přeci porazit svého severského boha.

Oproti většině jiných her, zde je hrdina a armáda naprosto odlišná entita. Mohou tak sdílet stejná pole s jinými hráči a žádný souboj nenastane. K čemu tedy hrdina slouží? Existuje několik akcí, jako je uzurpace, která slouží k převzetí regionu pod nadvládu hráče, a to i bez armády; navazování spojenectví; vybírání run z kováren atd. Avšak ta nejdůležitější, je samotný lov příšer. Porazit monstrum tzv. „na první dobrou“ je takřka nemožné, ale proč to nezkusit! Odměna umí být totiž dost sladká, jako je například přidání kněžího do armády, získání runy, či dokonce převzetí kontroly nad specifickým artefaktem. Při vyvolání souboje tak jiný hráč dostane na starost bojové karty monstra a válka začíná. Tyto akce umí být příjemně intenzivní, a to i přesto, že hrdina nemůže nikdy umřít. Jaký je tedy trest za nezvládnutí příšery? Poškození, ale nejen tak ledajaké. Každý hráč má totiž k dispozici desku hrdiny, která má tři základní úrovně vlastností. Autoritu, Moc a Moudrost. Každá z těchto vlastností ovlivňuje herní mechaniky hráče a každá z nich se dá vylepšovat. Pokud však hrdina dostane poškození, musí tuto vlastnost dočasně degradovat zpět na nejnižší úroveň, dokud se nevyléčí. Pokud se Vám ale přes tyto všechny útrapy podařilo skolit dvě monstra, tak poté můžete vyrazit na ultimátního bosse, Lokiho, kterého nám přišlo takřka nemožné porazit.

Poslední unikátní mechanika, kterou si tu popíšeme, jsou chrámy, kněží a monumenty. Zní to sice jako tři mechaniky, ale všechny jsou spojeny takřka do jedné. Na určitých místech na mapě jdou stavět chrámy jakožto součást specifické akce. Připomínám, že pokud by se Vám povedlo jich kontrolovat 5, vyhráváte hru. S každým takto postaveným chrámem získáte do své armády kněžího, který se však neúčastní boje. K čemu tedy je? Kolem mapy jsou rozestavěny 3 monumenty legendárních bohů Ódina, Tóra a Frey. Tyto monumenty se postupně staví a vytváří tak kromě lepších efektů pro kněží i krásnější scenérii při hraní. Kněžího tedy vyšlete k libovolnému z monumentů a zvýšíte si potřebnou vlastnost hrdiny.

Tyto a spoustu dalších dílčích akcí můžete vidět v novince od Albi Lords of Ragnarok, severském area-controlu s větším zaměřením na strategii než jenom bezhlavý souboj. Musíme uznat, že nás hra mile překvapila, a to i přes tu přehnaně dlouhou herní dobu při prvních partiích. Materiál komponent je fenomenální a tomu tedy i odpovídá cenovka. Pokud jste tedy milovníky severské mytologie a area-controlů a neřešíte čas, který strávíte u jedné partie, tak tento opus je pro Vás jasná volba.

CZ Distributor: ALBI

Počet hráčů: 1 – 4

Přibližná herní doba: 90+ minut

Doporučený věk: 14+

Článek DESKOVKA: Lords of Ragnarok – Boj o Yggdrasil začíná… se nejdříve objevil na GAME PRESS.

What do the state's insurance and housing crises have in common? Obviously, homeowner policies have an impact on housing costs, but I'm referring to something different, namely the concept of open-ended risk. Insurers are exiting the market because state policies limit their ability to price policies to reflect the risk of a major wildfire season. They rather pull out of California than risk the destruction of their assets.

I'd argue the same thing is happening in the rental market, thanks to a fusillade of pro-tenant laws that subject landlords to an incalculable level of risk. Landlords have freely entered the business and understand the various ups and downs. They can calculate the costs of mortgages, taxes, insurance, and maintenance. They expect to, say, replace carpets and paint between tenants. They know the cost of the eviction process in those instances where it's necessary.

But the Legislature's anti-property-rights crusade—done in the name of protecting tenants in a tight housing market—has not only increased those easily calculated costs, but also the costs that are potentially devastating. It's one thing to realize it might require x-number of legal fees to remove a bad tenant and quite another to wrap one's head around the possibility of someone staying in a rent-controlled unit forever.

And it's impossible to calculate the emotional drain of, say, fighting with highly sophisticated squatters who have illegally moved into your temporarily vacant home, exerted some right—and are going to strip the place to its studs while you scurry for a legal remedy. I know plenty of would-be landlords who wouldn't dream of renting out their home for those reasons. Most mom-and-pop landlords I know are discussing an exit strategy.

That's reducing needed rental inventory. Why does San Francisco, which has some of the strictest tenant laws in the country, have 52,000-plus vacant rental units? Some of the explanations are ordinary (units are in process of renovation or are on the market), but a major one often is overlooked—especially by city politicians who recently passed an Empty Homes Tax that essentially blames property owners for the situation.

Many owners are afraid if they let strangers rent their units they'll never be able to reclaim them. They rather forego $3,300 a month in rent than take that potentially devastating risk. That's because the risk is not calculable. Investors can navigate their way around costs they understand (extra property taxes, higher insurance rates) but will exit if the risks are too high.

We've seen the news stories. Someone moves into a short-term rental then refuses to leave. In Oakland, a group of organized homeless women commandeered a vacant house. In Los Angeles, alleged squatters turned an empty mansion into a party house. If housing is a "human right," then owners no longer have a right to their property.

The number of incidents has soared, so much so that one entrepreneur has started a business helping landlords retake their own properties. In a sane society, no one should have to worry about this. Other states have passed (or are considering) laws to expedite the removal of these home invaders, but California requires an overly drawn-out process, leaving owners at the mercy of progressive judges.

Does that situation make you more or less likely to invest in rental properties? What's your tolerance for risk? Same questions regarding Assembly Bill 2216 by Matt Haney (D–San Francisco) that's moving through the Legislature. It requires landlords to accept pets and forbids them from charging extra rent or security deposits. Landlords can expect obvious costs (carpet cleaning, various repair costs), but they can't calculate the less-obvious ones.

The landlords would not be allowed to ask tenants if they plan to have a household pet until after they've accepted the application. They would be allowed to impose "reasonable conditions" on the pets, but "reasonable" is ill defined. For instance, the bill refers to "common household pets" but is not limited to cats and dogs. Apparently, that means a tenant could have large aquariums with heat lamps that can cause incredible damage. There's no limit (beyond local ordinances) on the number of pets. It keeps owners from dealing with tenant pet disputes.

Sure, the Assembly analysis explains that a "reasonable condition" includes the right to limit potentially dangerous pets, but it does not allow a prohibition based on breeds, such as Pit Bulls and Rottweilers. Yet insurers typically use a list of potentially vicious breeds that they forbid owners from allowing. If a landlord allows such a breed and it mauls a neighbor, the landlord won't be covered. If this bill becomes law, lawmakers will force landlords to accept an unlimited amount of risk.

I love pets, but don't be surprised when landlords exit the business and invest their money into, say, a mutual fund that doesn't bite toddlers or call them about unplugging a clogged toilet.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post California Is Trying To Drive Landlords Out of Business appeared first on Reason.com.

Xbox has announced the new games coming to Game Pass this March, including Control and day one games Lightyear Frontier and MLB The Show 24.

This is the Ultimate Edition of Control, Remedy's third-person shooter, including expansions The Foundation and AWE. If you've recently played Alan Wake 2, now's your chance to play the game that came before - and could be important for its DLC.

Two brand new games will be available from day one. Lightyear Frontier is a farming sim using mechs to grow alien crops; while MLB The Show 24 is the latest in the baseball series.

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Sorry, folks, I've got some real shitty news for you. Turns out that closing your toilet lids when flushing isn't all that effective for cutting down viral contamination. At least, that's what a team of researchers reported in a recently published study in the American Journal of Infection Control, entitled, "Impacts of lid closure during toilet flushing and of toilet bowl cleaning on viral contamination of surfaces in United States restrooms."  — Read the rest

The post New study finds that closing the toilet lid when flushing isn't all that effective for cutting down viral contamination appeared first on Boing Boing.

Enlarge / In this photo illustration, melatonin gummies are displayed on April 26, 2023, in Miami, Florida. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)

Federal regulators have long decried drug-containing products that appeal to kids—like nicotine-containing e-cigarette products with fruity and dessert-themed flavors or edible cannabis products sold to look exactly like name-brand candies.

But a less-expected candy-like product is sending thousands of kids to emergency departments in the US in recent years: melatonin, particularly in gummy form. According to a new report from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, use of the over-the-counter sleep-aid supplement has skyrocketed in recent years—and so have calls to poison control centers and visits to emergency departments.

Melatonin, a neurohormone that regulates the sleep-wake cycle, has become very popular for self-managing conditions like sleep disorders and jet lag—even in children. Use of melatonin in adults rose from 0.4 percent in 1999–2000 to 2.1 percent in 2017–2018. But the more people have these tempting, often candy-like supplements in their homes, the more risk that children will get ahold of them unsupervised. Indeed, the rise in use led to a 530 percent increase in poison control center calls and a 420 percent increase in emergency department visits for accidental melatonin ingestion in infants and kids between 2009 and 2020.

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Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment has announced it's acquired the full rights to its Control series from publisher 505 Games for €17m.

As detailed in an investor announcement on Remedy's website, the rights acquisition - which includes those for publishing, distribution, and marketing - cover the full Control franchise, including the supernatural third-person shooter's 2019 debut game, the upcoming Control 2 and multiplayer spin-off codenamed Condor, and all future titles in the series.

Remedy's publishing agreement with 505 Games for Control 2 and Condor terminates immediately, and 505 will continue to serve as the publisher of Control until 31st December this year, when the transition period ends.

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The state of California employed Kendall Jones as a correctional officer for 29 years and as a firearms and use-of-force trainer for 19 years. But in 2018, when Jones sought to renew the certificate of eligibility required for firearms instructors, the California Department of Justice (DOJ) informed him that he was not allowed to possess guns under state law because of a 1980 Texas conviction for credit card abuse. Jones committed that third-degree felony in Houston when he was 19, and his conviction was set aside after he completed a probation sentence.

According to the DOJ, that did not matter: Because of his youthful offense, which Jones said involved a credit card he had obtained from someone who falsely claimed he was authorized to use it, the longtime peace officer was permanently barred from owning or possessing firearms in California. That application of California law violated the Second Amendment, a federal judge ruled this week in Linton v. Bonta, which also involves two other similarly situated plaintiffs.

"Plaintiffs were convicted of non-violent felonies decades ago when they were in the earliest years of adulthood," U.S. District Judge James Donato, a Barack Obama appointee, notes in an order granting them summary judgment. "Each conviction was set aside or dismissed by the jurisdiction in which the offense occurred, and the record indicates that all three plaintiffs have been law-abiding citizens in every respect other than the youthful misconduct. Even so, California has acted to permanently deny plaintiffs the right to possess or own firearms solely on the basis of the original convictions." After considering the state's cursory defense of those determinations, Donato thought it was clear that California had "violated the Second Amendment rights of the individual plaintiffs."

Like most jurisdictions, California prohibits people with felony records from buying, owning, receiving, or possessing firearms. That ban encompasses offenses that did not involve weapons or violence, and it applies regardless of how long ago the crime was committed. Federal law imposes a similar disqualification, which applies to people convicted of crimes punishable by more than a year of incarceration (or more than two years for state offenses classified as misdemeanors). But the federal law makes an exception for "any conviction which has been expunged, or set aside or for which a person has been pardoned or has had civil rights restored."

California's policy is different. "The DOJ will permit a person with an out-of-state conviction to acquire or possess a firearm in California only if the conviction was reduced to a misdemeanor, or the person obtained a presidential or governor's pardon that expressly restores their right to possess firearms," Donato explains. The requirements for California convictions are similar.

In Jones' case, the same state that suddenly decided he was not allowed to possess guns employed him as the primary armory officer at the state prison in Solano, where he specialized in "firearms, chemical agents, batons and use of deadly force training," for nearly two decades. Despite all that experience, the sudden denial of his gun rights put an end to his work as a law enforcement firearms and use-of-force instructor in California. The other two plaintiffs told similar stories of losing their Second Amendment rights based not only on nonviolent offenses that happened long ago but also on convictions that were judicially nullified.

According to the 2018 complaint that Chad Linton filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, he was pulled over by state police in 1987, when he was serving in the U.S. Navy at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington. The complaint concedes that Linton was "traveling at a high rate of speed" on his motorcycle while "intoxicated" and that he initially "accelerated," thinking "he might be able to outrun" the cops before he "reconsidered that idea, pulled over to the side of the highway, and voluntarily allowed the state trooper to catch up to him."

Linton was charged with driving under the influence, a misdemeanor, and attempting to evade a police vehicle, a Class C felony. He pleaded guilty to both charges and received a seven-day sentence, time he had already served. In 1988, he "received a certificate of discharge, showing that he successfully completed his probation." It "included a statement that 'the defendant's civil rights lost by operation of law upon conviction [are] HEREBY RESTORED.'"

Linton, who was born and raised in California, returned there in 1988 after he was discharged from the Navy. He successfully purchased several firearms after passing background checks. But when he tried to buy a handgun in 2015, the DOJ told him he was disqualified because of the 1987 felony conviction. In response, he asked the Superior Court of Washington to vacate that conviction, which it did in April 2016. The order "set aside" the conviction and released Linton "from all penalties and disabilities resulting from the offense." But when he tried to buy a rifle in November 2016, he was rejected.

The same thing happened in March 2018, when Linton tried to buy a revolver for home protection. The following month, Donato notes, "DOJ agents came to Linton's home and seized several firearms from him that he had legally acquired and owned for years, including an 'antique, family-heirloom shotgun.'"

Although Linton moved to Nevada in 2020, partly because of these experiences, he still owns a cabin in California. He said he felt "unsafe and unprotected" there "without at least the option of having appropriate firearms available or at hand if needed." He added that he "would like to be able to possess or handle firearms or ammunition for  recreational purposes, such as target shooting," while visiting friends and relatives in California.

Paul McKinley Stewart's disqualifying offense dates back even further than Jones' and Linton's. In 1976, when he was 18 and living in Arizona, he "stole some tools from an unlocked truck in a commercial yard." He was found guilty of first-degree burglary, a felony, and served three years of probation, after which he was told that his conviction had been dismissed.

Stewart moved to California in 1988 and tried to buy firearms in 2014 or 2015 (the record is unclear on the exact date). The DOJ "advised him that he was 'disqualified' from purchasing or possessing firearms 'due to the presence of a prior felony conviction.'" Like Linton, Stewart went back to the court of conviction. In August 2016, Donato notes, the Arizona Superior Court "ordered 'that the civil rights lost at the time of sentencing are now restored,' 'set aside [the] judgment of guilt,' ordered the 'dismissal of the Information/Indictment,' and expressly held that the restored rights 'shall include the right to possess weapons.'" The DOJ nevertheless blocked a gun purchase that Stewart attempted in February 2018, citing the 1976 conviction that officially no longer existed.

Defending these denials in federal court, the state argued that the plaintiffs were not part of "the people" whose "right to keep and bear arms" is guaranteed by the Second Amendment because they were not "law-abiding, responsible citizens." In California's view, Donato writes, "a single felony conviction permanently disqualifies an individual from being a 'law-abiding, responsible citizen' within the ambit of the Second Amendment." He sees "two flaws" that "vitiate this contention."

First, Donato says, "undisputed facts" establish that all three plaintiffs are "fairly described as law-abiding citizens." Judging from the fact that "California entrusted Jones with the authority of a sworn peace officer, and with the special role of training other officers in the use of force," that was the state's view of him until 2018, when he was peremptorily excluded from "the people." And as with Jones, there is no indication that the other two plaintiffs have been anything other than "law-abiding" since their youthful offenses. "Linton is a veteran of the United States Navy with a clean criminal record for the past 37 years," Donato notes. "Stewart has had a clean criminal record for the past 48 years."

Second, Donato says, California failed to identify any "case law supporting its position." In the landmark Second Amendment case District of Columbia v. Heller, he notes, the Supreme Court "determined that 'the people,' as used throughout the Constitution, 'unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset.'" That holding, he says, creates a "strong presumption" that California failed to rebut.

Donato notes that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit rejected California's argument in no uncertain terms last year, when it restored the Second Amendment rights of Bryan Range, a Pennsylvania man who had been convicted of misdemeanor food stamp fraud. "Heller and its progeny lead us to conclude that Bryan Range remains among 'the people' despite his 1995 false statement conviction," the 3rd Circuit said. "The Supreme Court's references to 'law-abiding, responsible citizens' do not mean that every American who gets a traffic ticket is no longer among 'the people' protected by the Second Amendment."

Since Jones, Linton, and Stewart are part of "the people," California had the burden of showing that disarming them was "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation"—the test that the Supreme Court established in the 2022 case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. "California did not come close to meeting its burden," Donato writes. It did little more than assert that Americans have Second Amendment rights only if they are "virtuous," a criterion that is highly contested and in any case would seem to be satisfied by the plaintiffs' long histories as productive and law-abiding citizens.

"California otherwise presented nothing in the way of historical evidence in support of the conduct challenged here," Donato says. "It did not identify even one 'representative analogue' that could be said to come close to speaking to firearms regulations for individuals in circumstances akin to plaintiffs'. That will not do under Bruen."

Donato rejected "California's suggestion that it might have tried harder if the Court had asked." Under Bruen, "the government bears the burden of proving the element of a national historical tradition," he writes. "California had every opportunity to present any historical evidence it believed would carry its burden. It chose not to do so."

Donato was dismayed by the state's attitude. "The Court is not a helicopter parent," he writes. "It is manifestly not the Court's job to poke and prod litigants to live up to their burdens of proof."

The policy that Jones, Linton, and Stewart challenged seems inconsistent with California's criminal justice reforms, such as marijuana legalization and the reclassification of many felonies as misdemeanors. It is also inconsistent with the way California treats voting rights, which are automatically restored upon sentence completion. Gun rights in California, by contrast, are easy to lose and hard to recover, even when they have been restored by courts in other states. That disparity seems to reflect the California political establishment's reflexive hostility to the Second Amendment.

"This case exposes the hypocrisy of California's treatment of those convicted of non-violent crimes," says Cody J. Wisniewski, an attorney with the Firearms Policy Coalition, one of several gun rights groups that joined the lawsuit. "While California claims to be tolerant of those that have made mistakes in the past, that tolerance ends when it comes to those individuals [who want] to exercise their right to keep and bear arms. Now, the state has no choice but to recognize the rights of peaceable people."

The post California Violated the Second Amendment by Disarming People Based on Nullified Convictions appeared first on Reason.com.

On March 26, 2019, every American who owned a bump stock, a rifle accessory that facilitates rapid firing, was suddenly guilty of a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. That did not happen because a new law took effect; it happened because federal regulators reinterpreted an existing law to mean something they had long said it did not mean.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the question of whether those bureaucrats had the authority to do that. The case, Garland v. Cargill, turns on whether bump stocks are prohibited under the "best reading" of the federal statute covering machine guns. While several justices were clearly inclined to take that view, several others had reservations.

The products targeted by the government are designed to assist bump firing, which involves pushing a rifle forward to activate the trigger by bumping it against a stationary finger, then allowing recoil energy to push the rifle backward, which resets the trigger. As long as the shooter maintains forward pressure and keeps his finger in place, the rifle will fire repeatedly. The "interpretive rule" at issue in this case, which was published in December 2018 and took effect three months later, bans stock replacements that facilitate this technique by allowing the rifle's receiver to slide back and forth.

Officially, the purpose of that rule was merely to "clarify" that bump stocks are illegal. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), they always have been, although no one (including the ATF) realized that until 2018.

Federal law defines a machine gun as a weapon that "automatically" fires "more than one shot" by "a single function of the trigger." The definition also covers parts that are "designed and intended…for use in converting a weapon" into a machine gun.

During Wednesday's oral arguments, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian H. Fletcher maintained that a rifle equipped with a bump stock plainly meets the criteria for a machine gun. It "fires more than one shot by a single function of the trigger," he said, because "a function of the trigger happens when some act by the shooter, usually a pull, starts a firing sequence." An ordinary semi-automatic rifle, according to Fletcher, "fires one shot for each function of the trigger because the shooter has to manually pull and release the trigger for every shot." But "a bump stock eliminates those manual movements and allows the shooter to fire many shots with one act, a forward push."

Fletcher argued that a rifle with a bump stock also "fires more than one shot automatically, that is, through a self-regulating mechanism." After "the shooter presses forward to fire the first shot," he said, "the bump stock uses the gun's recoil energy to create a continuous back-and-forth cycle that fires hundreds of shots per minute."

Jonathan F. Mitchell, the attorney representing Michael Cargill, the Texas gun shop owner who challenged the bump stock ban, argued that Fletcher was misapplying both of those criteria. First, he said, a rifle equipped with a bump stock "can fire only one shot per function of the trigger because the trigger must reset after every shot and must function again before another shot can be fired." The trigger "is the device that initiates the firing of the weapon, and the function of the trigger is what that triggering device must do to cause the weapon to fire," he added. "The phrase 'function of the trigger' can refer only to the trigger's function. It has nothing to do with the shooter or what the shooter does to the trigger because the shooter does not have a function."

Second, Mitchell said, a rifle with a bump stock "does not and cannot fire more than one shot automatically by a single function of the trigger because the shooter, in addition to causing the trigger to function, must also undertake additional manual actions to ensure a successful round of bump firing." That process "depends entirely on human effort and exertion," he explained, because "the shooter must continually and repeatedly thrust the force stock of the rifle forward with his non-shooting hand while simultaneously maintaining backward pressure on the weapon with his shooting hand. None of these acts are automated."

Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson seemed eager to accept Fletcher's reading of the law, arguing that it is consistent with what Congress was trying to do when it approved the National Firearms Act of 1934, which imposed tax and registration requirements on machine guns. Although bump stocks did not exist at the time, they suggested, the law was meant to cover any firearm that approximated a machine gun's rate of fire.

According to Fletcher, "a traditional machine gun" can "shoot in the range of 700 to 950 bullets a minute," while a semi-automatic rifle with a bump stock can "shoot between 400 and 800 rounds a minute." As he conceded, however, the statute does not refer to rate of fire. "This is not a rate-of-fire statute," he said. "It's a function statute." To ban bump stocks, in other words, the ATF has to show that they satisfy the disputed criteria.

"It seems like, yes, that this is functioning like a machine gun would," Justice Amy Coney Barrett said. "But, you know, looking at that definition, I think the question is, 'Why didn't Congress pass…legislation to make this cover it more clearly?'"

Justice Neil Gorsuch made the same point. "I can certainly understand why these items should be made illegal," he said, "but we're dealing with a statute that was enacted in the 1930s, and through many administrations, the government took the position that these bump stocks are not machine guns." That changed after a gunman murdered 60 people at a Las Vegas country music festival in October 2017, and it turned out that some of his rifles were fitted with bump stocks.

The massacre inspired several bills aimed at banning bump stocks. Noting that "the ATF lacks authority under the law to ban bump-fire stocks," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.) said "legislation is the only answer." President Donald Trump, by contrast, maintained that new legislation was unnecessary. After he instructed the ATF to ban bump stocks by administrative fiat, the agency bent the law to his will. Noting that "the law has not changed," Feinstein warned that the ATF's "about face," which relied partly on "a dubious analysis claiming that bumping the trigger is not the same as pulling it," would invite legal challenges.

Feinstein was right about that, and one of those challenges resulted in the decision that the government is now asking the Supreme Court to overturn. In January 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected the ATF's redefinition of machine guns.

"A plain reading of the statutory language, paired with close consideration of the mechanics of a semi-automatic firearm, reveals that a bump stock is excluded from the technical definition of 'machinegun' set forth in the Gun Control Act and National Firearms Act," 5th Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote in the majority opinion. And even if that were not true, Elrod said, "the rule of lenity," which requires construing an ambiguous criminal statute in a defendant's favor, would preclude the government from punishing people for owning bump stocks.

Gorsuch alluded to Feinstein's prescient concerns about the ATF rule's legal vulnerability: "There are a number of members of Congress, including Senator Feinstein, who said that this administrative action forestalled legislation that would have dealt with this topic directly, rather than trying to use a nearly 100-year-old statute in a way that many administrations hadn't anticipated." The ATF's attempt to do that, he said, would "render between a quarter of a million and a half million people federal felons," even though they relied on guidance from "past administrations, Republican and Democrat," that said bump stocks were legal.

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito also were troubled by that reversal's implications for people who already owned bump stocks. Fletcher tried to assuage those concerns.

"ATF made [it] very clear in enacting this rule that anyone who turned in their bump stock or destroyed it before March of [2019] would not face prosecution," Fletcher said. "As a practical matter," he added, "the statute of limitations for this offense is five years," meaning prosecutions of people who owned bump stocks before the rule took effect will no longer be possible a month from now. "We have not prosecuted those people," he said. "We won't do it. And if we try to do it, I think they would have a good defense based on entrapment by estoppel," which applies when someone follows official advice in trying to comply with the law.

"What is the situation of people who have possessed bump stocks between the time of the ATF's new rule and the present day or between the time of the new rule and the 5th Circuit decision?" Alito asked. "Can they be prosecuted?" Fletcher's answer: "probably yes." That prospect, Alito said, is "disturbing."

Kavanaugh wondered about gun owners who did not destroy or surrender their bump stocks because they did not know about the ATF's rule. "For prosecuting someone now," he asked, "what mens rea showing would the government have to make to convict someone?" Fletcher said the defendant would "have to be aware of the facts" that, according to the ATF's reinterpretation of the law, make bump stocks illegal. "So even if you are not aware of the legal prohibition, you can be convicted?" Kavanaugh asked. "That's right," Fletcher replied.

"That's going to ensnare a lot of people who are not aware of the legal prohibition," Kavanaugh said. "Why not require the government to also prove that the person knew that what they were doing…was illegal?"

Gorsuch mocked Fletcher's apparent assumption that gun owners can be expected to keep abreast of the ATF's edicts. "People will sit down and read the Federal Register?" he said to laughter. "That's what they do in their evening for fun. Gun owners across the country crack it open next to the fire and the dog."

Maybe not, Fletcher admitted, but the publicity surrounding the ban and the legal controversy it provoked probably brought the matter to many people's attention. "I agree not everyone is going to find out about those things," he said, "but we've done everything the government could possibly do to make people aware."

Beyond the unfairness to gun owners who bought products they quite reasonably thought were legal, the ATF's about-face lends credibility to the complaint that its current interpretation of the law is misguided. If the ATF was wrong before, how can we be confident that it is right now?

According to the agency's new understanding of the statute, Mitchell noted, "function of the trigger" hinges on what the shooter is doing. But "function is an intransitive verb," he said. "It can't take an object grammatically. It's impossible. The trigger has to be the subject of function. It can't be the object."

Gorsuch picked up on that point, noting that the government had likened "function of the trigger" to "a stroke of a key or a throw of the dice or a swing of the bat." But "those are all things that people do," he said. Since function is an intransitive verb, "people don't function things. They may pull things, they may throw things, but they don't function things."

Gorsuch noted that the ATF is relying on "a very old statute" designed for "an obvious problem" posed by gangsters like Al Capone armed with machine guns that fired repeatedly "with a single function of the trigger—that is, the thing itself was moved once." Maybe legislators "should have written something better," he said. "One might hope they might write something better in the future. But that's the language we're stuck with."

What about the ATF's claim that a rifle equipped with a bump stock shoots "automatically"? Fletcher conceded that "an expert" can bump-fire a rifle "without any assistive device at all" and that "you can also do it if you have a lot of expertise by hooking your finger into a belt loop or using a rubber band or something else like that to hold your finger in place." But he added that "we don't think those things function automatically because the definition of 'automatically'" entails "a self-regulating mechanism."

As the government sees it, a shooter creates such a mechanism by using a bump stock, notwithstanding the "manual actions" that Mitchell highlighted. "There's nothing automatic about that," Mitchell argued. "The shooter is the one who is pushing. It's human effort, human exertion. Nothing automatic at all about this process."

Barrett asked Fletcher how the ATF would treat an elastic "bump band" marketed as an accessory to facilitate rapid firing. "Why wouldn't that then be a machine gun under the statute?" she wondered. "We think that's still not functioning automatically because that's not a self-regulating mechanism," Fletcher replied.

Mitchell, by contrast, argued that Barrett's hypothetical product and a bump stock are "indistinguishable when it comes to 'automatically.'" Bump firing with either involves "a manual action undertaken entirely by the shooter," he said. "There is no automating device….It is all being done by the shooter."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was sympathetic to Fletcher's argument, nevertheless implied that the legal status of bump stocks might not be as clear as the government suggests. "The back-and-forth here leads me to believe that at best there might be some ambiguity," she said. But if the statute is in fact unclear, the 5th Circuit said, the ambiguity should be resolved in a way that protects gun owners from prosecution for a crime invented by bureaucrats.

The post SCOTUS Ponders the Implications of Prosecuting Gun Owners for a Crime Invented by Bureaucrats appeared first on Reason.com.

Control has joined Alan Wake in being fully owned by developers Remedy Entertainment, as the studio announced they have acquired the complete rights to their supernatural shooter - including its upcoming sequel and co-op spin-off - from publisher 505 Games.

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The challenges before semiconductor fabs are expansive and evolving. As the size of chips shrinks from nanometers to eventually angstroms, the complexity of the manufacturing process increases in response. It can take hundreds of process steps and more than a month to process a single wafer. It can subsequently take more than another month to go through the assembly, testing, and packaging steps necessary to get to the final product.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be deployed within a fab to address the complexity and intricacy of semiconductor manufacturing. A fab generates petabytes of data as wafers go through the multitude of process and test operations. This wealth of data also presents a challenge in that it needs to be analyzed and acted on quickly to ensure tight process control, high yield, and avoid process excursions. Beyond navigating the complexity of the manufacturing process, new solutions are necessary to help make the process as efficient as possible and the yield as high as possible to produce the most business value for fabs.

The benefits of AI-enabled analysis tools for IC manufacturers

Traditional techniques to detect issues in the manufacturing process have run out of steam, especially at advanced technology nodes. For example, an engineer must do their own yield analysis to seek out potential problems. Once they identify an issue, they communicate with the defect and process teams to determine the root cause and then troubleshoot it. The defect team will begin work to find some correlation behind the issue and the process team troubleshoot and link it to the root cause.

All these steps take up significant time that could be focused on achieving the highest yield of chips possible, driving costs down and reducing time to market. One of the biggest benefits of enabling AI in analysis tools is that an engineer can quickly recognize and pinpoint an issue in a specific chip to see which process step and/or equipment has caused the issue.

Beyond the fast and accurate process control that AI allows for, there are numerous other benefits that result from the saved time and money, including:

• Predictive applications: Enables fabs to take leap from reactive to predictive process control
• Scalability: Analyzes petabytes of data, connects multiple fabs, and comes cloud-ready
• Efficiency: Allows fab to make better decisions and reduce false alarms

To enable the next generation of manufacturing, Synopsys is enabling AI and Machine Learning (ML) for a comprehensive process control solution.

Actionable insights with AI and ML

Wafer, equipment, design, mask, test, and yield are silos within a fab that can benefit from a comprehensive AI/ML enabled solution. Such a solution can specifically help engineers generate actionable insights into the following:

• Fault detection and classification (FDC)
• Statistical process control (SPC)
• Dynamic fault detection (DFD)
• Defect classification and image analytics
• Defect image analytics
• Decision support system (DSS)

Fast analysis of petabytes of data, from equipment sensors or process parameters, allows manufacturers to quickly identify the root cause of process excursions and take action to maintain yield.

AI and ML in the fab

Synopsys is a provider of software solutions for silicon manufacturing and silicon lifecycle management, including solutions for TCAD, mask solutions, and manufacturing analytics. Its existing solutions are connected to thousands of pieces of equipment over multiple fabs with millions of sensors, analyzing hundreds of petabytes of data. By providing real-time visibility into the manufacturing process, Synopsys enables predictive analytics and optimizes product quality and yield to help give semiconductor fabs a leg up in this competitive landscape.

Synopsys has introduced an AI/ML enabled software offering, Fab.da, to make semiconductor manufacturing efficient. Fab.da is a part of the Synopsys EDA Data Analytics solution, which brings together data analytics and insights from the entire chip lifecycle

It offers a complete data continuum by bringing together these different data types from many different sources into one platform for both advanced and mature node chips. This data continuum allows for high user productivity, maximum data scalability, and increased speed and accuracy in root cause analysis for issues.

Delivering process control solutions to manage complexity at leading-edge fabs, Fab.da can help chip designers and manufacturers drive operational excellence and productivity, providing a competitive edge in today’s manufacturing landscape.

The post Utilizing Artificial Intelligence For Efficient Semiconductor Manufacturing appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Jon Herlocker, co-founder and CEO of Tignis, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how AI in advanced process control reduces equipment variability and corrects for process drift. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.

SE: How is AI being used in semiconductor manufacturing and what will the impact be?

Herlocker: AI is going to create a completely different factory. The real change is going to happen when AI gets integrated, from the design side all the way through the manufacturing side. We are just starting to see the beginnings of this integration right now. One of the biggest challenges in the semiconductor industry is it can take years from the time an engineer designs a new device to that device reaching high-volume production. Machine learning is going to cut that to half, or even a quarter. The AI technology that Tignis offers today accelerates that very last step — high-volume manufacturing. Our customers want to know how to tune their tools so that every time they process a wafer the process is in control. Traditionally, device makers get the hardware that meets their specifications from the equipment manufacturer, and then the fab team gets their process recipes working. Depending on the size of the fab, they try to physically replicate that process in a ‘copy exact’ manner, which can take a lot of time and effort. But now device makers can use machine learning (ML) models to autonomously compensate for the differences in equipment variation to produce the exact same outcome, but with significantly less effort by process engineers and equipment technicians.

SE: How is this typically done?

Herlocker: A classic APC system on the floor today might model three input parameters using linear models. But if you need to model 20 or 30 parameters, these linear models don’t work very well. With AI controllers and non-linear models, customers can ingest all of their rich sensor data that shows what is happening in the chamber, and optimally modulate the recipe settings to ensure that the outcome is on-target. AI tools such as our PAICe Maker solution can control any complex process with a greater degree of precision.

SE: So, the adjustments AI process control software makes is to tweak inputs to provide consistent outputs?

Herlocker: Yes, I preach this all the time. By letting AI automate the tasks that were traditionally very manual and time-consuming, engineers and technicians in the fab can remove a lot of the manual precision tasks they needed to do to control their equipment, significantly reducing module operating costs. AI algorithms also can help identify integration issues — interacting effects between tools that are causing variability. We look at process control from two angles. Software can autonomously control the tool by modulating the recipe parameters in response to sensor readings and metrology. But your autonomous control cannot control the process if your equipment is not doing what it is supposed to do, so we developed a separate AI learning platform that ensures equipment is performing to specification. It brings together all the different data silos across the fab – the FDC trace data, metrology data, test data, equipment data, and maintenance data. The aggregation of all that data is critical to understanding the causes of a variation in equipment. This is where ML algorithms can automatically sift through massive amount of data to help process engineers and data scientists determine what parameters are most influencing their process outcomes.

SE: Which process tools benefit the most from AI modeling of advanced process control?

Herlocker: We see the most interest in thin film deposition tools. The physics involved in plasma etching and plasma-enhanced CVD are non-linear processes. That is why you can get much better control with ML modeling. You also can model how the process and equipment evolves over time. For example, every time you run a batch through the PECVD chamber you get some amount of material accumulation on the chamber walls, and that changes the physics and chemistry of the process. AI can build a predictive model of that chamber. In addition to reacting to what it sees in the chamber, it also can predict what the chamber is going to look like for the next run, and now the ML model can tweak the input parameters before you even see the feedback.

SE: How do engineers react to the idea that the AI will be shifting the tool recipe?

Herlocker: That is a good question. Depending on the customer, they have different levels of comfort about how frequently things should change, and how much human oversight there needs to be for that change. We have seen everything from, ‘Just make a recommendation and one of our engineers will decide whether or not to accept that recommendation,’ to adjusting the recipe once a day, to autonomously adjusting for every run. The whole idea behind these adjustments is for variability reduction and drift management, and customers weigh the targeted results versus the perceived risk of taking a novel approach.

SE: Does this involve building confidence in AI-based approaches?

Herlocker: Absolutely, and our systems have a large number of fail-safes, and some limits are hard-coded. We have people with PhDs in chemical engineering and material science who have operated these tools for years. These experts understand the physics of what is happening in these tools, and they have the practical experience to know what level of change can be expected or not.

SE: How much of your modeling is physics-based?

Herlocker: In the beginning, all of our modeling was physics-based, because we were working with equipment makers on their next-generation tools. But now we are also bringing our technology to device makers, where we can also deliver a lot of value by squeezing the most juice out of a data-driven approach. The main challenge with physics models is they are usually IP-protected. When we work with equipment makers, they typically pay us to build those physics-based models so they cannot be shared with other customers.

SE: So are your target customers the toolmakers or the fabs?

Herlocker: They are both our target customers. Most of our sales and marketing efforts are focused on device makers with legacy fabs. In most cases, the fab manager has us engage with their team members to do an assessment. Frequently, that team includes a cross section of automation, process, and equipment teams. The automation team is most interested in reducing the time to detect some sort of deviation that is going to cause yield loss, scrap, or tool downtime. The process and equipment engineers are interested in reducing variability or controlling drift, which also increases chamber life.

For example, let’s consider a PECVD tool. As I mentioned, every time you run the process, byproducts such as polymer materials build up on the chamber walls. You want a thickness of x in your deposition, but you are getting a slightly different wafer thickness uniformity due to drift of that chamber because of plasma confinement changes. Eventually, you must shut down the tool, wet clean the chamber, replace the preventive maintenance kit parts, and send them through the cleaning loop (i.e., to the cleaning vendor shop). Then you need to season the chamber and bring it back online. By controlling the process better, the PECVD team does not have to vent the chamber as often to clean parts. Just a 5% increase in chamber life can be quite significant from a maintenance cost reduction perspective (e.g., parts spend, refurb spend, cleaning spend, etc.). Reducing variability has a similarly large impact, particularly if it is a bottleneck tool, because then that reduction directly contributes to higher or more stable yields via more ‘sweet spot’ processing time, and sometimes better wafer throughput due to the longer chamber lifetime. The ROI story is more nuanced on non-bottleneck tools because they don’t modulate fab revenue, but the ROI there is still there. It is just more about chamber life stability.

SE: Where does this go next?

Herlocker: We also are working with OEMs on next-generation toolsets. Using AI/ML as the core of process control enables equipment makers to control processes that are impossible to implement with existing control strategies and software. For example, imagine on each process step there are a million different parameters that you can control. Further imagine that changing any one parameter has a global effect on all the other parameters, and only by co-varying all the million parameters in just the right way will you get the ideal outcome. And to further complicate things, toss in run-to-run variance, so that the right solution continues to change over time. And then there is the need to do this more than 200 times per hour to support high-volume manufacturing. AI/ML enables this kind of process control, which in turn will enable a step function increase in the ability to produce more complex devices more reliably.

SE: What additional changes do you see from AI-based algorithms?

Herlocker: Machine learning will dramatically improve the agility and productivity of the facility broadly. For example, process engineers will spend less time chasing issues and have more time to implement continuous improvement. Maintenance engineers will have time to do more preventive maintenance. Agility and resiliency — the ability to rapidly adjust to or maintain operations, despite disturbances in the factory or market — will increase. If you look at ML combined with upcoming generative AI capabilities, within a year or two we are going to have agents that effectively will understand many aspects of how equipment or a process works. These agents will make good engineers great, and enable better capture, aggregation, and transfer of manufacturing knowledge. In fact, we have some early examples of this running in our labs. These ML agents capture and ingest knowledge very quickly. So when it comes to implementing the vision of smart factories, machine learning automation will have a massive impact on manufacturing in the future.

The post Tackling Variability With AI-based Process Control appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

A large majority of Americans—70 percent, according to the latest Gallup poll—support marijuana legalization, and that sentiment is especially strong among younger voters. Gallup found that 79 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds thought marijuana should be legal, compared to 64 percent of adults 55 or older. Similarly, a Pew Research Center survey found that support for legalization was inversely correlated with age. It therefore makes sense that President Joe Biden, who has generated little enthusiasm among Americans of any age group, would try to motivate young voters by touting his support for "marijuana reform."

The problem for Biden, a longtime drug warrior who is now presenting himself as a reformer, is that his position on marijuana falls far short of repealing federal prohibition, which is what most Americans say they want. His outreach attempts have clumsily obfuscated that point, as illustrated by a video that Vice President Kamala Harris posted on X (formerly Twitter) earlier this month.

"In 2020," Harris writes in her introduction, "young voters turned out in record numbers to make a difference. Let's do it again in 2024." The video highlights "the largest investment in climate action in history," cancellation of "$132 billion in student debt," "the first major gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years," and $7 billion in subsidies for historically black colleges and universities. Then Harris says this: "We changed federal marijuana policy, because nobody should have to go to jail just for smoking weed." That gloss is misleading in several ways.

Biden has not actually "changed federal marijuana policy." His two big moves in this area were a mass pardon for people convicted of simple possession under federal law and a directive that may soon result in moving marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, a category supposedly reserved for drugs with a high abuse potential and no recognized medical use that cannot be used safely even under a doctor's supervision, to Schedule III, which includes prescription drugs such as ketamine, Tylenol with codeine, and anabolic steroids.

Although Harris, echoing Biden, says "nobody should have to go to jail just for smoking weed," that rarely happens. Biden's pardons, which excluded people convicted of growing or distributing marijuana, did not free a single prisoner, and they applied to a tiny fraction of possession cases, which are typically prosecuted under state law.

When he announced the pardons in October 2022, Biden noted that "criminal records for marijuana possession" create "needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities." But his pardons do not remove those barriers. They do not entail expungement of marijuana records, which is currently not possible under federal law. The certificates that pardon recipients can obtain might carry weight with landlords or employers, but there is no guarantee of that.

Biden's pardons also did not change federal law, which still treats simple marijuana possession as a misdemeanor punishable by a minimum $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail. So people can still be arrested for marijuana possession under federal law, even if they are unlikely to serve time for that offense (which would be true with or without Biden's pardons). The pardons that Biden announced on October 6, 2022, applied only to offenses committed "on or before the date of this proclamation." When he expanded those pardons on December 22, 2023, that became the new cutoff.

Marijuana use still can disqualify people from federal housing and food assistance. Under immigration law, marijuana convictions are still a bar to admission, legal residence, and citizenship. And cannabis consumers, even if they live in states that have legalized marijuana, are still prohibited from possessing firearms under 18 USC 922(g)(3), which applies to any "unlawful user" of a "controlled substance."

The Biden administration has stubbornly defended that last policy against Second Amendment challenges in federal court, where government lawyers have likened cannabis consumers to dangerous criminals and "lunatics." Worse, Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, which increased the maximum prison sentence for marijuana users who own guns from 10 years to 15 years and created a new potential charge against them, which likewise can be punished by up to 15 years behind bars. This is the very same law that Harris touts as "the first major gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years."

Biden, in short, has neither "decriminalize[d] the use of marijuana" nor "automatically expunge[d] all marijuana use convictions," as Harris promised on the campaign trail. Both of those steps would require congressional action that Biden has done little to promote.

What about rescheduling? A recent poll commissioned by the Coalition for Cannabis Scheduling Reform, Marijuana Moment reports, found that "voters' impression of the president jumped a net 11 points" after they were informed about "the implications of the rescheduling review that the president initiated." That included "an 11-point favorability swing among young voters 18-25," who "will be critical to his reelection bid."

But let's not get too excited. Since rescheduling has not happened yet, it is not true that Biden "changed federal marijuana policy" in this area either. And assuming that the Drug Enforcement Administration moves marijuana to Schedule III, as the Department of Health and Human Services recommended last August in response to Biden's directive, the practical impact would be limited. Rescheduling would facilitate medical research, and it would allow state-licensed marijuana suppliers to deduct business expenses when they file their federal tax returns, which is currently prohibited under Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code.

Even after rescheduling, however, marijuana businesses would remain criminal enterprises under federal law, which makes it hard for them to obtain financial services and exposes them to the risk of prosecution and asset forfeiture. For businesses that serve recreational consumers, prosecutorial discretion is the only protection against that risk. Cannabis consumers would still have no legally recognized right to own guns, and people who work in the cannabis industry would still face other disabilities under federal law, including life-disrupting consequences for immigrants. Rescheduling would not even make marijuana legally available as a prescription medicine, which would require approval of specific products by the Food and Drug Administration.

In response to overwhelming public support for marijuana legalization, in other words, Biden has made modest moves that leave federal prohibition essentially untouched. While he does not have the authority to unilaterally deschedule marijuana, he cannot even bring himself to support legislation that would do that. Why not?

During the 2020 campaign, Biden echoed seven decades of anti-pot propaganda, saying he was worried that marijuana might be a "gateway" to other, more dangerous drugs. "The truth of the matter is, there's not nearly been enough evidence that has been acquired as to whether or not it is a gateway drug," he said. "It's a debate, and I want a lot more before I legalize it nationally. I want to make sure we know a lot more about the science behind it….It is not irrational to do more scientific investigation to determine, which we have not done significantly enough, whether or not there are any things that relate to whether it's a gateway drug or not."

After Biden took office, his press secretary confirmed that his thinking had not changed. "He spoke about this on the campaign," she said. "He believes in decriminalizing the use of marijuana, but his position has not changed."

Biden's rationale for opposing legalization is the same line of argument that Harry J. Anslinger, who headed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, began pushing in the early 1950s after retreating from his oft-reiterated claim that marijuana causes murderous madness. "Over 50 percent of those young [heroin] addicts started on marijuana smoking," he told a congressional committee in 1951. "They started there and graduated to heroin; they took the needle when the thrill of marijuana was gone."

Anslinger reiterated that point four years later, when he testified in favor of stricter penalties for marijuana offenses. "While we are discussing marijuana," a senator said, "the real danger there is that the use of marijuana leads many people eventually to the use of heroin." Anslinger agreed: "That is the great problem and our great concern about the use of marijuana, that eventually if used over a long period, it does lead to heroin addiction."

Since then, a great deal of research has examined this issue, which is complicated by confounding variables that make the distinction between correlation and causation elusive. Biden nevertheless thinks "more scientific investigation" will reach a definitive conclusion. If he won't support legalization until we know for sure whether marijuana is a "gateway drug," he will never support legalization.

The supposedly reformed drug warrior's intransigence on this issue poses an obvious challenge for Harris, a belated legalization supporter who is trying to persuade voters who take the same view that Biden is simpatico. Marijuana Moment reports that Harris' staff recently has been reaching out to marijuana pardon recipients, "seeking assurance that the Justice Department certification process is going smoothly and engaging in broader discussions about cannabis policy reform."

According to Chris Goldstein, a marijuana activist who was pardoned for a 2014 possession conviction, the vice president's people get it. Goldstein was "surprised by how up to speed and nice everybody was," he told Marijuana Moment. "Her staff really did know the difference between rescheduling [and] descheduling, and they were interested to talk about it."

No doubt Biden also understands the difference. The problem is that he supports the former but not the latter, which he rejects for Anslinger-esque reasons. Cheery campaign videos cannot disguise that reality.

The post Biden Is Trying To Motivate Voters Who Oppose Pot Prohibition. Maybe He Should Stop Supporting It. appeared first on Reason.com.

Hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court might strike down rent control this term were dashed today when the Court declined to take up the two remaining rent control cases on its docket. But a short statement from Justice Clarence Thomas otherwise agreeing not to take up the cases does provide rent control critics some optimism that the Court might reconsider the issue at a future date.

The cases, 74 Pinehurst LLC v. New York and 335-7 LLC v. City of New York, both involved New York City rental property owners' challenges to their state's stabilization regime and related New York City regulations implementing that regime.

The petitioners argued that the 2019 amendments to New York's rent stabilization law amounted to a physical taking because they prevented property owners from choosing their tenants or withdrawing their property from the rental market. They also argued that New York's post-2019 rent stabilization law amounted to a regulatory taking by tanking the value of their properties and removing avenues to "deregulate" (charge market rents on) their units.

Lower courts rejected these arguments. So, last spring, the landlord plaintiffs in both cases petitioned the Supreme Court to take up their case.

The fact that the two cases stayed on the Supreme Court's docket even after it had declined to take up another, higher profile, and more sweeping challenge to New York's rent stabilization law in October raised hopes that the justices might still take up these cases.

At a minimum, rent control critics offered some hopeful speculation that one or more of the justices might write a lengthy dissent to any court decision to not take up the cases that would outline how another rent control challenge could make its way back to the Supreme Court.

Neither of those things happened today. But today's order wasn't a total loss for rent control opponents.

Justice Clarence Thomas did issue a short statement saying that the "constitutionality of regimes like New York City's is an important and pressing question."

Ultimately, Thomas agreed with the Court's denial of cert, saying that petitioners' claims in their lawsuits "primarily contained generalized allegation." In order to evaluate their "as-applied" challenges, the Court would need to see more specific arguments about the circumstances of individual landlords.

For that reason, Thomas wrote, the 74 Pinehurst and 335-7 pleadings would "complicate" the Court's review.

"Any time you get something more than just a denial, I would say that gives you reason for optimism," says Mark Miller, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which has supported constitutional challenges to rent control. "Oftentimes justices give statements like this to give you a roadmap for how to better tee up the issue."

In the meantime, however, New York City property owners are offered no relief from the state's rent stabilization regime.

Rent-stabilized owners argue the state's limits on rent increases are so punishingly strict that they can't finance basic repairs or turn over vacant units. The ongoing struggles of New York Community Bancorp, which lent heavily to rent-stabilized buildings, are only compounding this problem.

Without greater flexibility to raise rents or obtain private capital, "the future of rent-stabilized buildings is in the hands of the state government," said the Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP) and the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) in an emailed statement reacting to the Supreme Court's decision today. "Thousands of buildings housing hundreds of thousands of tenants are in financial distress. Without action, the homes of many hard-working New Yorkers will deteriorate.

CHIP and RSA had been plaintiffs in another challenge to New York's rent stabilization regime that the Supreme Court also declined to take up last year. Thomas' statement seems to have done little to raise their optimism about future rent control cases.

"We do expect there will be many more challenges to this law, which remains irrationally punitive," they said.

The post After Supreme Court Denies Cases, Clarence Thomas Offers Hope to Rent Control Critics appeared first on Reason.com.

Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. Despite the ink still wet on many state-level YIMBY reforms prodding local governments to allow housing, we're already witnessing a concerted counter-revolution from the forces of local control. This week's stories include:

• Slow-growth activists in the Boston-adjacent suburb of Milton, Massachusetts, have successfully overturned state-required zoning reforms that allowed apartments near the town's train stations.
• Local governments in Florida are trying to defang a new state law allowing residential high-rises in commercial zones with lawsuits and regulatory obstructions.
• A lawsuit against Arlington, Virginia's exceedingly modest "missing middle" reforms that were passed last year trundles on.

But first, our lead item is a short take on how America's overregulated, undersupplied housing market turns good things, like economic growth, into bad things, like more evictions.

Why Evictions Go Up in a Good Economy (and Why It Doesn't Have to Be This Way)

In an article from last week, L.A. Times columnist LZ Granderson asks "If the economy is so great, why are evictions soaring?" Despite low unemployment and better-than-expected economic growth "evictions have spiked and homelessness has reached a record high," he notes.

Granderson's explanation for this incongruity is that it's all just the latest ill effects of Reaganite low taxes, slim government benefits, and underregulated corporations.

The more compelling answer is that evictions are up because the economy is so great (or at least better than it used to be).

Landlord Incentives

As Granderson notes, unemployment is low. The unemployment rate has been under four percent for the past two years. Real wages have also been growing.

For landlords, that means that there are a lot of workers with steady incomes out there who would likely make for steadily paying tenants. If their current tenant isn't paying rent or is behind on rent, a low unemployment rate boosts their confidence that they'll be able to find another one who will pay their bills on time. That makes it less risky to take on the costs of evicting a tenant and turning over a unit.

That's a counterintuitive answer. The intuitive assumption is that since evictions are a bad personal economic event, they'll happen more often when economic times are bad generally.

This was the assumption that prompted both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations, and almost every state government, to adopt eviction moratoriums during the pandemic. The fear was that sudden, mass unemployment would result in millions of delinquent renters being kicked out of their homes.

Lessons from the pandemic 

This turned out to be wrong. Even after most state moratoriums had lapsed, the federal moratorium had been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, and rental assistance programs expired, evictions stayed well below pre-pandemic averages.

Evictions did rise slowly over time, but there was never the sudden "avalanche" or "tsunami" of people getting kicked out of their homes that some housing activists predicted. Today, according to Princeton University's Eviction Lab data, evictions nationwide are slightly below pre-pandemic averages.

The fact that evictions fall during bad economic times and rise during good times might seem to validate the left-wing view that economic growth under capitalism just means more hardship for poor and marginalized renters. Therefore, the thinking goes, we need more legal restrictions on evictions, rent control, and/or direct government provision of housing to keep a roof over people's heads. That too is a mistaken view.

More homes, fewer evictions

All else being equal, economic growth and low unemployment will give landlords a greater incentive to evict a delinquent tenant. But economic growth and low unemployment should also raise the demand for housing, and therefore lead to new housing construction.

More housing supply will in turn make the housing market more competitive for suppliers. A landlord with a delinquent tenant can't be so sure they'll be able to find a replacement so easily, as the pool of potential tenants will have a lot more housing options. More housing supply will also lower housing prices, which in turn should result in fewer tenants risking eviction by falling behind on their rent in the first place.

Thanks to zoning, restrictions on mortgage financing, needless environmental reviews, and more, we're not seeing as much new supply as we would under a free market. That means we're also not seeing the eviction-suppressing effects of new supply.

The result of restricted housing supply in a time of economic growth and low unemployment is higher prices and higher evictions.

As Kevin Erdmann explained in his Substack last June, when there's not enough housing to go around, "somebody has to be displaced, and the displacement is achieved through rising housing costs, which tend to pile up the most on the poorest residents."

The good news in the short term is that in the places where evictions are going up the most (mostly booming sunbelt metros), there is a rash of new supply coming onto the market. This glut of new homes and apartments should cool price increases and evictions.

The better news in the long term is that many states are passing YIMBY zoning reforms that will make housing supply even more elastic. That is unless NIMBY forces manage to handicap these laws right out of the gate…

In Massachusetts, A Popular Rebellion Against New Housing

This past Wednesday, 54 percent of voters in Milton, Massachusetts, an inner suburb of Boston, approved a ballot initiative repealing recently passed local zoning amendments that allowed apartments near local rail stations.

In doing so, the town has made itself non-compliant with Massachusetts' signature YIMBY reform—the 2021 MBTA Communities Law—which requires towns with rail transit service to allow apartments near rail stations.

The vote sets up a crucial test for the state law: can it prod reluctant local governments to zone for infill housing in a way that actually gets units built? Or will it be another state YIMBY reform that's bested by clever NIMBY intransigence?

The backstory

Prior to Wednesday's vote, it appeared most localities were complying with the letter of the MBTA Communities Law. All twelve of the towns required by the law to pass upzoning legislation by the end of 2023 had done so.

That includes Milton. In December 2023, the town passed the state-required zoning changes. But shortly thereafter, local activists gathered enough signatures to put the zoning changes up to a popular vote.

State officials, including Gov. Maura Healey and Attorney General Andrea Campbell, had warned the town that a vote for repeal would make Milton ineligible for numerous state grants and a lawsuit from the state.

Consequences

Having voted for repeal anyway, Milton is now ineligible for three grant programs, including the state's largest capital grant program for localities. It's uncompetitive for another dozen grants.

The attorney general's office has made clear that "communities cannot avoid their obligations under the Law by foregoing this funding." Campbell said in a sharply worded, pre-vote letter to Milton that her office would bring legal action to enforce the MBTA Communities Law "without hesitation."

Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of Abundant Housing Massachusetts, tells Reason that there's speculation that developers could also sue non-compliant town governments should projects they propose that meet the state law standards are rejected.

The combined weight of all these potential enforcement actions is seemingly encouraging most communities to come into line. Milton is thus far the exception, and even there, the margin on its referendum was a little under 800 votes.

An uncertain road ahead

The longer-term risk is that communities will find ways to comply with the MBTA Communities Law on paper while thwarting it in practice. The zoning amendments Milton had approved, for instance, required that newly legal apartments come with parking spaces and below-market-rate units—both of which are a tax on new housing.

Kanson-Benanav suggests some towns might come into paper compliance by upzoning commercial parcels that wouldn't likely be redeveloped into housing or upzone near environmentally protected areas where development is infeasible.

"It's hard to know what's written on paper, what its impact will be in practice," he says.

In Florida, the Backlash to the Law That Allowed Too Much Housing 

Was it too good to last? That's the question that YIMBYs in Florida might be asking themselves as local governments rebel against, and state lawmakers mull reforms of, the state's year-old Live Local Act.

The law allows developers to build apartments in commercial and industrial areas, local zoning be damned, provided the new housing includes affordable units.

Because the law's affordability requirements are turning out to be pretty modest, and its density allowances are turning out to be mouth-wateringly generous, developers have made ready use of the law to build massive new high-rises that would have otherwise been prohibited by local zoning.

Now the backlash. The Tampa Bay Times reports that Pasco County threatened to sue developers trying to use the law to build apartments. Another city adopted a six-month building moratorium to block a Live Local Project.

At the state level, the Florida Senate approved a bill that weakens the Live Local Act's zoning preemptions in one respect while strengthening them in another.

S.B. 328 would allow local governments to say no to Live Local projects that are more than 150 percent taller than adjacent buildings if its near a single-family neighborhood. In applicable areas, that's a significant reduction in the law's height allowances.

On the other hand, S.B. 328 would prohibit local governments from imposing floor-area-ratio regulations on Live Local projects. That would significantly pare back localities' ability to thwart Live Local projects they don't like.

All things considered, S.B. 328 doesn't appear to be a bad trade. It's now being considered by the Florida House of Representatives.

In Virginia, Lawsuits Challenge Modest 'Missing Middle' Reform

Early last year, Arlington County, Virginia, approved a series of zoning changes that allowed up to at least four units of housing to be built in neighborhoods formerly zoned for only single-family housing.

The architects of the reforms described them as intentionally "small 'c' conservative" by only allowing a modest amount of new housing. A yearly cap on how many new duplexes, triplexes, and the like could be built made sure of that.

The cap's done nothing to mollify opponents of the missing middle reforms, who expressed heated opposition during the local legislative process and are now suing to undo the already passed reforms.

Last month, an Arlington Circuit Court Judge rejected a motion from Arlington County seeking to stop the lawsuit from going to trial later this summer. Also last month, residents in neighboring Alexandria, Virginia, sued to overturn that city's also-quite-modest ending of single-family-only zoning.

Zoning reformers might consider these lawsuits good news in a way. Middle-housing opponents lost in the democratic process, so now they have to resort to the courts.

On the other hand, local courts have recently issued some truly bizarre rulings overturning other state and city laws abolishing single-family zoning. The Arlington and Alexandria lawsuits will be an important test of whether even modest missing middle reforms can stick.

Quick Links

• California's zoomer socialist lawmaker, Assemblymember Alex Lee (D–Milpitas), has introduced a bill that would ban corporations from purchasing and renting out single-family homes. Studies suggest such bans mostly work to exclude renters from living in more expensive single-family neighborhoods where they could afford to rent but can't afford to buy.
• Earlier this year, Rent Free covered the case of Vanie Mangal, who was stuck with an abusive, non-paying tenant for close to four years because of eviction moratoriums and New York's dysfunctional housing court system. Real Deal reports that Mangal is at last rid of her tenant (who trashed the place before she left).
• A Washington bill capping annual rent increases at seven percent statewide has passed the state House of Representatives. It will now be considered by the state Senate.
• A proposed Illinois bill would lift the state's preemption on local governments adopting rent control policies.
• "The most magical place on Earth's" plan to build a 1,400-unit affordable housing project is failing to enchant neighboring residents.
• The "year of the granny flat" is picking up steam. The Rhode Island House of Representatives passed a bill last week that will allow homeowners to build accessory dwelling units within the footprint of their existing home and on large lot single-family properties. It's a pretty modest ADU reform, all things considered.
• Is exclusionary zoning unconstitutional? Yes, say George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin and University of Wisconsin Law School professor Joshua Braver in a new article.
• The Federation of American Scientists argues the federal government should require localities to liberalize their zoning codes in order to receive federal highway funds.
• The Boston Globe has a new article on the perilous politics of zoning reform in Boston.

The post Good Times, Bad Times: Eviction Edition appeared first on Reason.com.

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