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.

Or there's something out there which makes sure that no society ever gets beyond maybe a few star systems. Think like the Reapers in Mass Effect or the Shivans in Freespace. In other words, any time a society becomes sufficiently advanced, they are deemed a threat and wiped out. Or maybe there really is some kind of Star Trek Prime Directive kind of thing going on. Since our knowledge of physics is limited by the light speed barrier, it seems unlikely that any civilization capable of FTL travel would be using sublight communication which we could detect.

Really, this kind of speculation is really entertaining as thought experiments, but we just don't have the data. Occam's Razor would seem to actually suggest that it's a variety of mechanisms at work. These aren't really studies so much as philosophical essays.

Or this guy...

And soon we shall recognize the true power of this alleged dong? I swear, it's getting like Star Wars meets Space Balls meets Austin Powers in this place. Look, China may have a small dong but the reality of it is that they have more people. More people means more draftable military. Granted, those conscripts might be on the level of what the Russian prisons are pumping out and don't know how to hold their AK-47s, but so it is. They're already the source of much of the world's industrial capacity, so the idea of turning them into a parking lot is absurd on many levels.

I thought about this. It's a terrible waste of space. It would make more sense to have a square city which is built somewhat vertically. This actually minimizes the outside surface area which is important for energy efficiency with regard to climate control. It also makes it far easier to navigate.

The pandemic really didn't help in this regard either. By mandating that everyone wear masks, or at least by making it acceptable to wear a mask because, you know, the science, we neutered the utility of facial recognition technology for a time. Criminals figured this out really quickly. It seems that many of these cases just have a bunch of hoodlums blowing into the place with hoods up and masks on, taking whatever they want. I doubt facial recognition is actually going to be much of a deterrent. And are the places like California, New York, etc. really now going to reverse course and discourage people from using masks? Because, you know, that would be kind of contradictory. In fact, wear gloves, a full facemask, and hoodie and terrorize the place. Good luck finding any actual evidence.

I suggest we roll this out in California and maybe New York where this kind of crime is rampant for the last few years, and then we can see how much of a mess it makes of things. We've all read the stories of people accused of shoplifting jewelry or whatever it was and the facial recognition system disproportionately misidentifies darker-skinned people. At the rate these crimes seem to be happening, it won't be but a few days before we get a pretty good sample size of mass swarming shoplifting mobs to see how poorly it works.

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!]

>It looks like the cars have some steerability

some?

*full*

that's a restraining rail, not a track. It stops you from leading the road.

It does have the practical effect of forcing the car to go the right general direction if you *don't* steer, but in normal operation, you're not even touching it.

yeah, it couldn't *possibly* be the weight difference . . . :)

>given that they run on a track.

but they're *not* on a track, the way some other rides are.

There is a road, and a limiter for how far the car can go. The car isn't usually in contact with the limiter.

To use it as an electric source would require some kind of flexible arm, which would make it a much more complicated system.

Note, though, the two year limit to military appropriations.

Then again, this doesn't apply to *naval* expenditures.

[the Founding Fathers viewed a standing army as a threat, but not a standing navy].

The *existence* of domestic capacity can reasonably be seen as necessary to either force (and can also be reasonably argued].

Ignore the screams as the #2 engine catches fire, parts fall off the plane, an Impala is flattened by a rapidly and independently descending tire shortly after takeoff, doors blow out, rapid depressurization ensues, the oxygen system fails, the lavatory backs up and overflows, the hydraulics spring a leak, and the plane suddenly pitches absurdly to the surprise of the pilots. That's just some of the exciting new features we're introducing here at Boeing.