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Comment Re: If there really is too much solar during the d (Score 1) 323

>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) 164

>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) 93

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:It's coming for the Tropics and the US (Score 2) 111

It's not morons.

It's people overwhelmed with multiple crisis scenarios that they can't handle. Most of us wish for a stable society and environment because it makes it easier to plan a future. You wouldn't build a house if you're not sure it's still going to be there in five years.

Calling people morons instead of understanding the actual problem is also a way to avoid looking at it too closely, probably because the complexity is overwhelming to you, too. Easier to just call people morons and be done with it.

Climate change is very much a social, cultural and political problem and the scientists have only looked at the meteorological and biological side of it.

Comment please don't do such shoddy reporting (Score 2) 111

Europeans are suffering with unprecedented heat during the day and are stressed by uncomfortable warmth at night.

Maybe some are, but both in my place and where my parents live (1200 km away, that's 750 miles for the metrically challenged) temperatures have plummeted to near freezing at night and single-digits during the day (in Celsius, that's the 35 to 45 range in Fahrenheit for the temperature scale challenged).

I don't doubt climate change at all. But shoddy journalism that creates headlines where those allegedly affected go "what? not at all, why are you lying?" only helps the deniers.

If you look at a weather map of Europe, like this one stuck in the early 2000s - https://www.weatheronline.co.u... - you'll see that at least right now only the very, very southern tips of Europe (in Spain and Greece, that's in the bottom-left corner and the bottom-right corner, no not the very corner that's already Africa, damn where were you in geography?) has temperatures above 20ÂC predicted for today, and that's not unusually hot for those regions.

We did have unusually hot weather 2-3 weeks ago, but they were unusual only for the season and still well below ordinary summer days.

Please get your reporting right, or you're only feeding the trolls that claim climate change is made up.

Comment Re:Good Lord (Score 1) 124

Then they can just run Linux (preferably SELinux) and solve the problem.

I wish, and I would welcome it if they did.

However, as one of the foremost SELinux advocates in its early days, I doubt that the government of all places has the capability to do so. Few sysadmins can configure SELinux halfway decently (i.e. beyond the default policies) and the government (outside the military and secret services) isn't a good tech employer.

Also, MS is far more than the OS. With Office and a bunch of other tools, plus lots of custom software made only for Windows, the entrechnment is really, really deep.

Comment Re:Oldest? (Score 1) 80

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:Screw the American auto industry (Score 1) 304

Exactly. I drive a 1996 Honda Civic. If I were to buy a new car, that is the sort of car that I would be interested in. The sort of car that is inexpensive and capable of driving at freeway speeds. If the government would let me buy a Toyota Hilux for $12K I would do that tomorrow. Instead I get enormous pickups and SUVs that get through the loopholes in our current EPA standards and that cost more than my first house.

I just spent a week in Peru where Chinese cars are quite popular, and the taxi drivers that I talked to were pretty happy with theirs. The mentioned, time and again, that, for the price they were great cars. They were definitely popular. I would buy one of those. They tend to have manual transmissions, which I know how to drive, and which I trust not to leave me stranded.

If I could buy an electric vehicle for $10K I would do that. It wouldn't be my only vehicle, but it probably would be my primary vehicle. I love the idea of electric vehicles, but it doesn't make sense to replace my ridiculously inexpensive (paid for and hyper reliable) Civic with an expensive electric vehicle, or my far more useful Honda Odyssey mini-van. It sort of makes sense to replace the Civic with an electric vehicle, however, if the price is right.

Comment Re:Oldest? (Score 1) 80

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) 80

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

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