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.

It's also worth noting that even objectively terrible movie treatments (for example, Soylent Green's failure to represent the actual storyline of Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, while also being cheesy and stupid, and Without Remorse's failure to even remotely resemble Tom Clancy's book, while also being... well, lame) didn't hurt those books.

Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!

Newton submissively begs scraps from Einstein's table, suh.

No. Leave the fucking books alone.

Protip: Just don't buy into new motion pictures based on books. Your problem, solved! Because as you probably will understand if you give it some thought, the existence of a first-time movie treatment of a book doesn't hurt the related book. Quite the contrary, most often.

For those of us who don't want to see yet another Roadhouse or Bladerunner or Poseidon or Total Recall — and for the authors — new motion pictures based on previously untreated stories are a good thing. At least once they're out on physical media. Movie theaters... [shudders] :)

Pretty much all tech we have today is entirely possible without burning fossile[sic] fuels

One of the apparent filters is simply that above a certain level of gravity, chemical rockets will not suffice to reach space. We're near the edge of that condition ourselves. Any number of civilizations might be out there, pinned against their planet's surfaces. The only way that's not true is if there are physics yet to be discovered that can accomplish surface-to-space in high gravity without using chemical rockets. We certainly haven't found any sign of such science/technology here. And fission or fusion powered rockets... the engineering for that is at least completely non-obvious thus far. And before anyone says "nukes against a pressure plate", yeah, a delightfully bang-y notion, but no.

The assumption made in the Fermi paradox that any civilization could reach space if they try may simply be wrong.

As there are so many wonderful books out there just begging for a motion picture treatment, Hollywood will oblige by... releasing more pointless, vapid remakes.

Yes, that's not surprising that there's nuance that does beyond the headline. There always is.

This is a law that will allow the federal government to take total control of AI forever

No. The tech is already out — this horse is so far out of the barn you'd need a passport and numerous border crossings to even find hoofprints.

Not only is such a law completely unable to regulate GPT/LLM/generative software in the USA's non-commercial software ecosphere, it can have no effect across national borders and you may be absolutely certain that other state actors will simply smile and wave at such ideas (for that matter, you may be certain that the US intelligence apparatus will do the same.)

At home or cloud-based? It is either-or.

Exactly. These marketing twerps no longer know WTF the words they use even mean. If they ever did. Also, using "secure" in the same context with "the cloud"... that's a similar bit of nonsense. When your data leaves your hands, even just crossing the Internet, it's no longer secure. One party can keep a secret. Anything else... can very quickly become not a secret. As we have seen many times. And of course, we should never forget about this.

> MacOS Sonoma 14.4.1.

Running Ventura 13.3.1 here. Perhaps that's it.

Thanks. I'll consider upgrading after I surf the "bugs in Sonoma" stuff.

Ironically, it's is more of an argument for them. They were not saying there would be no more updates, be them major or minor to windows, but rather than they wouldn't have "numbers" and transition into more of an OS as a service model.

The market doesn't like the sound of that. That's fine, but it's not like if Microsoft stopped numbering their releases they wouldn't be doing the exact same thing: sunsetting older versions of windows and pushing users towards newer supported versions.

I know some people think they should be able to "buy" an OS and stay on it forever, but the internet has rendered that largely impossible. If you want to air-gap your PC and stay on whatever version of Windows you want, go for it, but as soon as you're connected to the internet, they're doing the right thing trying to push people off of codebases that no longer support an economic case for security updates.

I'm an anglophone. I lived in Quebec for 8 years. I work for a company that is headquartered there. I go there all the time.

This is nothing like what Quebec is doing. Don't be a fucking moron.

On the bright side, we have a whole new round of entertainment coming, with the ongoing stream of, "we're as good as apple now" . . . "well, *this* time we are" . . . "no, we mean it this time" . . . "ok, we've said it a few times now, but *this* time" . . . a veritable treasure trove of nostalgia to be!

no, that meant it stayed in the unit.

the upper disk pack could be removed, so you could swap in a different pack of platters. I believe that the heads remained in the base unit, rather than being part of the pack.

The first hard disk I met for a microcomputer was a 5meg drive for the apple ][.

It presented itself to the computer as 35 or so 143k floppies on the same controller card, so it could use the regular DOS at the time. (there might have been a patch, but I don't think so).

And, iirc, the drive was an 8" drive.

That was 1981; the following year, I had a 10meg drive assigned to me for development on an Osborne. It appeared as a single CP/M drive!

[but you could specify about 14 "users" on CP/M, and only see those--but that didn't stop you from overwriting files you couldn't see if you used the same name!]

> There's also the Text Size slider under the Accessibility control panel.

There is no text size slider under accessibility on my machine (4k monitor, M1 Studio Ultra.)

What works, sort of, is to select the desktop then right click (or control left click), select "Show View Options" from the context menu, and then in there, select a text size from the drop down. You can also do this in the context of any finder window.

However, maximum selectable text size is 16pts — which is very small on a 4k display. As an "accessibility" setting, it's laughable. Which is perhaps why it's not under accessibility.

I have been using a free app from the Mac app store, "Loupe", which provides a comprehensive zoom capability much more convenient than Apple's "Zoom." It's not as good as actual reasonable control over system fonts would be, but it's better than being stuck with 16pt fonts.