You're correct that the states are more independent under the current interpretation of the law. GP is expecting the Supreme Court to overturn its own current interpretation to get that national abortion ban through.
The Nate Silver model (at least) puts in a bunch of "corrections" for poll quality and historical bias from individual pollsters.
So you're really playing a second or third level game of "Did Nate (or your other poll aggregator) correct for all the effects and biases, or did they miss something important?"
And we will never be able to validate if these odds are accurate or not, because this specific election will never be replayed again.
To plan the attack, authorities said he started in September with undercover employees of the FBI to an electric substation to do research. Authorities said Philippi purchased black powder for pipe bombs and C-4 explosive composition.
This whole paragraph reads like LLM speak... Sad.
I went there to try to find out the target, which was apparently an unspecified substation.
Due to technical reasons, it is possible to have many, many more cable or satellite channels than over the air broadcast channels.
The FCC is allowed to put "reasonable" restrictions on the content if the over the air channels because of that scarcity.
The default position in the US is that both cable and broadcast have a 1st amendment right to say whatever they want. The FCC is only allowed to infringe on that right for the broadcasters, because they are consuming a scarce public resource.
I think it was right around 35% as you say. Unlikely, but not impossible for Trump to win. If Trump hit a one out of three lucky shot, that should be somewhat surprising, but not too very surprising.
Anyhow, he's saying this one is an even coin flip.
Nate Silver left 538, but he is still hosting the Monte Carlo model at the Silver Bulletin. That model is putting it right around 50-50 for Trump win vs Harris win. That's not a polling average... That's the result of playing a few million elections where the results are based on the current polling average.
Kill -9 is a command on Unix and Linux to send signal 9 (SIGKILL) to a process. That's the version of kill that is the most reliable and has immediate effect.
Taskkill is a Windows command line program. I believe that taskkill /f uses the TerminateProcess() API. This is more forceful than the End Task button on the Task Manager. There is a different End Process button on the Task Manager that does use TerminateProcess().
TerminateProcess() is pretty reliable, but it doesn't form part of the C signals stack on Windows like kill -9. So for instance, if you're doing process control on Python, you need to use a special Windows-only API to access TerminateProcess().
It's really racism. But if you want the legalistic explanation, here it is....
The United States started out with 13 states that were all ex-British territories on the Eastern seaboard of North America. There are now 50 states. Every state after the first 13 got its statehood by first being a territory, adopting a state Constitution at a constitutional convention, and then getting that Constitution approved by US Congress, and so being "admitted to the Union."
Under the Constitution, only states (and Washington DC) participate in the electoral college. The concept of non-state "territory" did not necessarily exist when that part was written, because there were only the original 13, and the Louisiana purchase wasn't done until later.
[Washington DC is a very special "district" that is not a state and not a territory.]
Puerto Rico has stayed at the territory stage since it was acquired in the Spanish-American war (started 1898). Why? Well, mostly racism. There have also been some popular votes in Puerto Rico, with very mixed results. In the currently evenly split political climate, getting any new state admitted is probably impossible (as it was before the civil war).
There's also some undercurrent that maybe the US is kinda uncomfortable holding on to these overseas islands (which are mostly connected to the same Spanish-American war). Philippines became an independent country. On the other hand, Hawaii got statehood in 1959 (but there was a whole racist history there of white colonization).
The Constitution says that each state shall send electors to the electoral college. So Puerto Rico's status as an unorganized territory is a bit of a blocker.
The District of Columbia is also not a part of any state, as specified in the Constitution. However, DC explicitly got some electors in the 23rd amendment, so they can vote for President.
Really, the idea that the United States might have overseas territories that are not on track to statehood is itself an invention of the twentieth century. (Owing to the 1898 Spanish-American war, which caused the US to take over several parts of the ex-Spanish empire).
You're correct that the states are more independent under the current interpretation of the law. GP is expecting the Supreme Court to overturn its own current interpretation to get that national abortion ban through.