Back in the day there was this monstrosity known as "Windows 95." Microsoft was advertising the hell out of it. The PC manufacturers were advertising the hell out of it and their PCs. Internet in dorms was becoming a big thing. There were ads all over TV telling luddite parents that their kids had to have a Windows 95 PC to go off to college or they would FAIL!

Well, predictably, people did this in droves. They then went to their dorms (or did it at home) and hooked their non-firewalled Windows 95 machines up to the Internet with full file and print sharing turned on. It used to be a sport to go surfing through SMB shares on these college networks. You'd find peoples' email, their entire documents folder, and yes, porn they shot of their girlfriends and God knows what else. One time I knew that this dude had a hidden camera in his dorm and his girlfriend wasn't aware of it. So in the interest of being anti-revenge, I went into his email, found her email address, and forged an email from him to her with a link to it. I'm sure that went over well.

There were also so many bugs in the Windows TCP/IP stack, such as it was. Winsock was still even a thing. Then there was Winnuke, where you could send a malformed TCP/IP packet to an IP address and blue screen someone's computer. Anybody who had any clue blocked it in short order, but you always had the script kiddies and trolls and otherwise annoying shits who would pop into IRC or something else and it was necessary to just eliminate them in short order. Most of them never figured it out. ("Uh, every time I say something stupid my computer crashes. What a coincidence!")

This was before Napster and all the rest. In fact, originally it was kind of the original peer-to-peer file sharing. I used to have a huge library of MP3s and stuff from back in the day but that was lost long ago in a HDD crash. Not that I really miss any of it.

that.

And I'll be even blunter: the problem here seems to be the choice of a notoriously inefficient browser.

It's as if the folks that used to design word & excel to use a maxed out machine from three years in the future were brought back out of retirement to build a browser.

I've been putting 16gb+ into machines over a decade, but this 8gb m3 is doing just fine--but I'm no longer doing massive compile jobs, don't need VMs, and loathe video. I was leery, hashed it out heavily with other folks, and just grabbed the base. for that matter, I didn't even get the 15" model, and not over price, but because of weight; the 12" is just fine for one-handed use, and I could feel the difference.

So are Stanford researchers:
https://youtu.be/HaaZ8ss-HP4

Yes, the enshitification is in full effect now.

there's no "giving Gingrich the credit", here.

there is no credit for the Arkansas balanced budget, as that is require by law (whether it works is a separate issue).

It is not *either* party that gets the credit for the balance; it came about by the competition to outdo the other. Left to themselves, *neither* party would do it--it's just that they'd spend on different things with borrowed money.

(actually, it's also hard to blame Gingrich for any budgets before '94, as his party had been in the minority nearly 50 years before he became speaker.)

I dunno.

but I suppose that, if you miss, you could take a mulligan . . . :)

hawk

It works.

Youtube is *much* better with the sound off!

(and even better with the monitor off, too . . .)

hawk

the contingency fee sounds unlikely.

Last I checked, they are only legal *at all* in the US, and a crime in all other Common Law jurisdictions.

And even in the US, they are illegal in divorces, save in California.

hawk, esq.

In California, it looks like this has been on the books since 1943...

Gingrich served four years as speaker, to Clinton's eight.

it's 94-96, the end of Clinton's terms, and the beginning of Gingrich, when they were competing that produced the deals that actually balanced it. It did *not* happen while Clinton had Democratic majorities, nor did it happen later with Republican majorities under Bush.

Or there's something out there which makes sure that no society ever gets beyond maybe a few star systems. Think like the Reapers in Mass Effect or the Shivans in Freespace. In other words, any time a society becomes sufficiently advanced, they are deemed a threat and wiped out. Or maybe there really is some kind of Star Trek Prime Directive kind of thing going on. Since our knowledge of physics is limited by the light speed barrier, it seems unlikely that any civilization capable of FTL travel would be using sublight communication which we could detect.

Really, this kind of speculation is really entertaining as thought experiments, but we just don't have the data. Occam's Razor would seem to actually suggest that it's a variety of mechanisms at work. These aren't really studies so much as philosophical essays.