Speaking as a local the monorail was insanity from the start.

At the time, the taxi companies still had the "juice" (as it's termed here) to block it from going to the airport, which would have been part of any sane plan.

AFAIK, its only sane feature was meeting the requirement that the cost of demolition be escrowed.

In its bankruptcy a decade or so ago, Judge Markell actually rejected the agreed reorganization--something quite rare. He pointed out that, in spite of the agreement,
a) the court had an independent duty to review, and
b) one of the requirements for confirming a plan being that it wasn't likely to need another bankruptcy--and that this one pretty much locked in another one down the road.

Extending it *might* make sense; I don't know the current economics. But if so, it should go to the airport, downtown, and the nearby stadiums--or don't bother.

And if we're going ahead with tunnels (a big question itself), the monorail would be redundant, anyway.

hack came out in '82, and nethack was a fork a few years later.

It is still in active development, despite the netcraftian rumors some time back.

And still the only game that *matters* . . .

hawk

>And then of course, there's the whole matter of your car often being
>on the road or parked somewhere else when other people in the
>house might need it to be parked in your garage.

But this is about California, where the obvious solution is to raise revenue by requiring advance purchase of a permit to remove the car from your garage!

>followed by sci-fi itself which generally revolves around some
>Earth/Solar System/Universe threat which only one man (it's almost
>always a man) can solve.

That would generally be "space opera".

There are notable space opera protagonists who are at least nominally female: Weber's Honor Harrington (probably the most successful modern series in the subgenera), Moone's Kyla Vatta, Shepherd's Kris Longknife.

Of those, the first two could pretty much flip the sex of pretty much every character except Harrington's pregnant mother with no real rewriting, while the latter might be an exhibit for why male author's *shouldn't* try to write actually female characters.

Then again, there bulk of SF male protagonists aren't male in any more than name, so . . .

hawk

note that the pendulum has swung back.

Note, for example, the 2000 Morrison case, in which the USSC choked on the notion that a violent act a woman was inherently intra-state act.

While the overreach of the Commerce Clause still needs to be reined in, it doesn't (over) extend nearly as far as it used to.

hawk, esq.

cool link! (at least if you disregard things I remember being cast as ancient history!)

the 8080 had at least one or two undocumented instructions that worked their way into code. IIRC, the Heathkit chess program needed a byte changed from that to a documented instruction on the Z80 to run [a one byte patch!].

And there were a pair (?) of quirks where 8085 instructions took a cycle ore or less than the the same instruction on the 8080.

The Z80 executed some instructions in less cycles than the 8080 (but wasn't there one that took an extra cycle for some reason?

it was slow, but could be extremely low power compared to the others, and was silly-rich with registers. 16 general purpose 16 bit registers, iirc. (or pairs of eight bit). And ISTR that you could use all but one or two for program counter and reference (a pair of four bit registers [P & X ?] that pointed to which 16 bit to use]

Also, significantly more radiation resistant than the others of the time (or was that another version? Even so, its design should have been more resistant).

My first computer was a wire-wrapped 1802 . . .

My guess would be that 24 bit address space for the MMU, and that this worked better with the Z80.

There were ways to extend the 6809 space by a couple of bits, but not by eight.

The greater abundance of registers on the Z80--including an entire second set of the 8080 registers, which could be toggled between--sounds like a likely reason. IIRC, the 6809 didn't have any extra data registers as compared to the 6800.

hawk

And what a shit show. I find it highly disturbing that the people in charge of this kind of thing have so little vision, and so little anticipation of what can go wrong. I have to assume that the reality is that they just don't care. Nobody can accidentally be this incompetent.

Obviously this wouldn't help you if your little hub took a hit. (Think, the thing in your back yard so to speak.) But I'm curious to know if they sent the fiber off in different directions. I mean, one line that went through one major street and another that went through another major street. That would mitigate a lightning strike or some kind of weird localized disruption.

I'm lucky enough to be on a power subgrid that includes a few "high priority" sites like nursing homes, so even when the power went out a year or so ago for several days I was covered. The people on the other side of my street were not. I had to make sure to turn off the lights and everything else lest I be raided.

Cloud-based emergency services. You know, even a few years ago that would have invoked widespread ridicule and been a total joke in the industry and a political nightmare. Now, people just emphasize that it's "in the cloud" and that seems to make untold degrees of incompetence acceptable. Even more recently, you can just claim that "AI" did it and therefore all us mere humans are somehow stupid.

I actually think back to the days of old copper POTS and how reliable it was.

I hate replying to myself, but after basically 25 years Slashdot still doesn't have an edit function.

It's kind of like how vulnerable most of the world is to an EMP attack. Think it through. Someone blows off an EMP above North America. It fries everything imaginable, including our electrical grid. We don't have the spares in stock to fix it, and in fact we have to go to China to manufacture them with an ungodly lead time. Meanwhile, the majority of the world's advanced semiconductor production is in Taiwan.

We're all fucked for years. Your new Teslas (or anything made after the early 90s, including ICEs) are bricks. I've been into places that have had a power failure and they literally had to shut down because the retards that they hired as cashiers can't do basic math and check people out.

Obviously, these "engineers" who designed this mess have never considered the concept of redundancy. But I do guess when you're on some engineering team where your boss's major motivation is minimizing cost something has to give. It's even more enshitification of our infrastructure, such as it has become.

According to Mouser a Z80 costs around $9.56 each. I'm sure there are cheaper equivalent processors out there. Actually, that's a Z84 but I think it's compatible.

I think someone needs to take a tour through the legal weed states with a huge joint tied on top of their car. Maybe start in Colorado, then drive down to New Mexico, then Arizona, then Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington. Maybe blasting "Because I Got High" by Afroman.