It used to be 26 episodes per season, with each episode airing twice during the year. It was a nice, simple way of filling the broadcast schedule. That shifted to 24 episodes at some point. There was a bigger shift, I think in the early 2000s, where they started having separate shows for the summer, and seasons started getting much shorter, sometimes more like 13 episodes. Now streaming services will put out 6-7 episode seasons; only a quarter of what a season used to be.

The good part of this is that you no longer get filler episodes. I remember watching shows like Stargate SG-1, and there were inevitably a few junk episodes, like a clip show that has some excuse to edit together a bunch of clips of previous episodes, or some episode that really didn't do much because they clearly spent all their budget already. I don't miss those. But with only 6 episodes, it's down to the same run-time as a miniseries, and things sometimes feel rushed.

For shows that are telling a story over the course of a season, the shorter episodes sometimes work well, but for more episodic shows (like Doctor Who), it just feels like you're getting shorted (because you are).

For many shows, the driving force is the quality of the writing and acting. Would the studios do better to spend less on the production and get more episodes for the same money? Good stories outweigh good effects.

Rides to and from airports are regulated, and there's a lot of money involved. That means the existing players are lobbying hard to keep the new competition out. If this is like everything else in history, they'll succeed only in delaying it. That delay will make the finances that much harder for new players, which may result in some failing, but eventually they'll get in. Considering that Tesla and Waymo have significant resources, they'll probably be the ones to break in to airport rides first. (Tesla just started trying to get the permits in California.)

The only people arguing against EVs on environmental grounds are either people on the far left who are opposed to cars in general or people on the right who don't care about the environment to begin with.

No.
More like basically decent people don't think it's alright to follow the bad example of a few people around them, so the number of people being obnoxious drops to where those who do really stand out. Social pressure can be an effective way to minimize disruptive behavior.

This sounds like an education campaign, not new rules. Unless I read it wrong (or the summary left it out), this is about trying to set the social norms, not about issuing fines.

I keep seeing these posts about what's needed to get people into an EV, and the bar keeps getting raised.

Frankly, we don't need high speed chargers to be as common a gas pumps, as the majority of gas pumps are for local use, and most charging is slow-speed at home. (We do need good solutions for those who rent or have on-street parking, though.) And for trips in the USA, if you're on the Interstate, you shouldn't need to think about it if you can use the Tesla Superchargers. Non-Interstate trips are getting more coverage, so most of those trips work now, too.

Posts about why you can't switch to an EV now sound more like excuses that real reasons, which is why goal posts keep moving. There are many good reasons why people who switch to EVs rarely switch back.

MicroSD has been around for 20 years now, and it's been another 6 years of SD before that. They can now fit tons of storage in the format, but they can't bump it up to modern performance speeds. It's time to find a new format that overcomes that. Now I'm not saying that this is necessarily the right answer, but it's certainly something in the right direction.

YES!

I was going to suggest the same thing. The ship could go into orbit around the best candidate planet in the target solar system, then seed it with life to try to get it to optimal conditions before raising humans to live there from frozen embryos. They could send sufficient DNA to eliminate any inbreeding concerns, and not for humans, but all the species introduced. And in many cases, it may be simplest to have a database and synthesize new DNA as needed for each new seed or embryo.

I imagine sending out a fleet of them to dozens or hundreds of star systems in the hopes of finding some good planets to colonize.

But at the same time, it's always interesting to consider what it would take to build a generation ship.

So will global warming eventually kill the .tv top-level domain? That's something like 10% of the country's GDP.

What part of the statement has turned you into a rifle wielding revolutionary? That I run 3 companies? That I have people working for me? That a business I run operates 24x7x52 and people work in shifts, including weekends and because of that some people work 4 days instead of 5? Which shift you personally have a problem with, the morning one, the day one or the night one? We need explanations as to how simple statements turn someone into a violent maniac. Posting from my backup account, since can no longer make new comments from the main one.

So it's effectively an organ transplant, only instead of using a donor organ, they use donor stem cells to grow the needed functionality in the recipient. That's a really cool technique, but it has all the rejection issues. Now if they could disable whatever caused the recipient's immune system to mess up their receptors in the first place, they could then use the recipient's own stem cells and eliminate all the immune suppression required for organ recipients, and it would be a real cure. This is one step in that process.

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/fi...

That's the full graph, showing how each language they tracked rated on both GitHub and Stack Overflow.

I find it interesting that D is slightly ahead of Visual Basic on GitHub and significantly ahead on Stack Overflow. And everyone has heard of Visual Basic, but it's hard to find people who have even heard of D.

It would be interesting to do a study of how well programmers comment their code and see how that is correlated with touch typing, or with typing speed in general. My assumption is that it's strongly correlated.

Though I have to say AI is changing things. Now you can write a good comment, and then hit tab to accept the suggested code, sometimes needing to make a few edits. It's crazy.

And it gets more confusing as some people put 65C02 processors in or a 65816 (which includes 65C02 instructions). Even in the Atari community, people will get it backwards.

The summary mentions added instructions, so I assume those are 65C02 instructions, most notably the STZ instruction (store zero), allowing you to write zero to memory without altering one of the real registers. The downside is that there were undocumented instructions that people had figured out on the original 6502, and some people used them. Apparently it was done in some cases to obfuscate code to make removing copy protection more difficult. A few of the instructions were actually useful in some cases. So adding in new instructions from the 65C02 or 65816 reduces compatibility. The only exception would be the original opcodes that locked up the CPU.

As a side note, the undocumented instructions were caused by not having entries in the instruction decoding table for them, so they got a mix of entries for other instructions, enabling various parts of the CPU in ways that behaved strangely.

Much of the development of new code on retro computers is done using tools on modern computers. Last year I did some coding for my Atari using Linux.

I wrote a simple AUTORUN.SYS program to launch a BASIC program, but with a few tweaks like enabling BASIC if it was disabled and displaying an error if it's a model without BASIC. And I managed to get it in 124 bytes so that it would fit on a single 128-byte sector, so it can be a drop-in replacement for any other version without those features. That was fun, and I wrote and assembled it under Linux.

I also wrote a FUSE file system to mount Atari disk images as native file systems under Linux (and apparently MacOS and with some hacking Windows). That was fun, and more about analyzing the various Atari DOS formats. No Atari hardware was used in that project.