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.)

I dunno.

but I suppose that, if you miss, you could take a mulligan . . . :)

hawk

It works.

Youtube is *much* better with the sound off!

(and even better with the monitor off, too . . .)

hawk

the contingency fee sounds unlikely.

Last I checked, they are only legal *at all* in the US, and a crime in all other Common Law jurisdictions.

And even in the US, they are illegal in divorces, save in California.

hawk, esq.

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 an interesting situation in Ukraine.

Ukraine has essentially run out of artillery shells and anti-missiles. That's not an absolute measure, but effectively Russia is missile striking all the infrastructure in Ukraine, notably power generation facilities, with impunity.

The Russians are also slowly taking territory. You might have heard about the recent fall of Avdiivka, which is officially a win for Russia except that Ukraine made it a very expensive piece of real estate. I've heard one estimate that Russian casualties are 10:1 against Ukrainian, so it's really a win for Ukraine. Except that Russia has so many people it can throw into the war effort it might not make a difference.

On the flip side, Ukraine has damaged several oil processing facilities inside Russia 200 miles East of Moscow. Two soldiers carrying small drones in a backpack can hike across the border, deliver a small munition (probably more than a hand grenade but not much more) right to the vertical distillation column using video feedback for targeting, and the distillation column is an integral part of the process and the most difficult piece to repair.

Ukraine has taken some 14% of Russian oil processing offline using this method, which is a huge bite out of Russia's federal budget. Also, Russia now has to allocate resources to protecting vital infrastructure all over Russia.

Ukraine has also had good luck with water-based drones: put a bunch of munitions on a motorboat with a GPS and video feedback for targeting, paint it black and send it at night, several hundred miles with pinpoint precision to sink a warship. Russia discovered experimentally that all of their anti-whatever guns are intended for incoming missiles and other ships, and so they can't point down low enough to hit a small motorboat within striking range. You have to get the crew to shoot at the drone from the deck with rifles and hope you hit something important.

Ukraine has basically kicked the black sea fleet out of the western half of the black sea using this method.

Of note, these drones are being built in Ukraine by Ukrainians. They're not donations from other governments.

Ukraine now has lots and lots of military observers from various countries across the world looking in on the military aspects of drone warfare, which is a completely new tactic for war. If it takes an anti-missile costing $100,000 to take out a drone costing $1,000, that's an obvious advantage to the side using drones.

And no one has tried drone swarms yet either, and I think that would be the next logical step. Exhaust your opponent's anti-missile shield over the city with one wave of cheap drones, then send in the second wave with incendiary munitions to set everything on fire all at once.

And all for the price of 1 anti-missile missile.

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].

30 or 40 years ago, people were asked to bring in any of the (supposedly) endangered desert tortoises, they found, for preservation.

In one of those things that you just can't make up, so many were brought in that they euthanized many of them!

>How to you tag bees?

verrry carefully!