>Once passengers have arrived at the train station somewhere in
>Nevada & found their way to Las Vegas,

Once upon a time, the railway station in Las Vegas was downtown.

Or to put it better, Las Vegas grew *from* the station.

The old classic shots you see of Fremont street were taken from entrance of the Union Plaza--the hotel eventually built on the railway property.

You actually accessed the station *through* the casino.

I took Amtrak from it to Iowa once. The oddities of accessing central Iowa by air at the time meant an overnight stay/airport sleep! So taking the train meant leaving at about the same time as for the airport.

I'm sure it makes sense to *someone* to not simply join up with the existing track and stop there again, but . . .

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

I agree with you but don't underestimate DeBeers.

They have enough diamond reserves that they can steeply discount natural ones for long enough to put synthetic diamond makers out of business.

LK

>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.

I didn't say possible. I said practical. Strong crypto is hard. Secure key exchange is hard.

Governments have been breaking codes for as long as we have had codes.

LK

Even the most professional of officers would be tempted if he was was cheating on him or if someone delivered a credible threat to the safety of his children.

The best way to prevent this kind of abuse is to make it impossible.

LK

Edward Snowden showed that this is not as true as you seem to think it is.

LK

Then, let them serve the warrant.

What is different is that for the first time in human history, it's not only possible but it's practical to have encrypted communications that no one can access except for the intended recipient.

All of "the most heinous of crimes" take place in the real world, there is some physical action that can be detected and punished. I don't care if this makes the job of law enforcement harder. I want law enforcement to be a difficult and time consuming job. Idle and bored cops tend to find ways to fill their time and it's never good.

LK

I've been thinking about adding solar panels to my house. I would love if I could get a federal subsidy to do it. However, just like with my student loan forgiveness, I'm NOT giving Biden my vote in exchange.

LK

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