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Comment Re: If there really is too much solar during the d (Score 1) 275

>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!

Comment Re:Lack of options (Score 1) 122

>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

Comment Re:How does the FTC have this authority? (Score 1) 67

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.

Comment Re:Oldest? (Score 1) 79

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?

Comment Re:Oldest? (Score 1) 79

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 . . .

Comment Re:Hot Rod Z80 (Score 1) 79

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

Comment Re:8 GB isn't enough for me to use more ... (Score 1) 438

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.

Comment Re: Let me clarify (Score 1) 222

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.)

Comment Re: Let me clarify (Score 1) 222

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.

Comment Re:Need emulation for drivers! (Score 1) 147

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!

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