>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.

In controlled airspace you would be right... but these things are being pitched as suburban/urban commute options operating at low altitude where there's no ATC. That means they have to deal with birds, the GPS-shielding effects of tall buildings, wind tunnels created by the same tall structures and a whole lot more.

The automation of air-transport at 30,000 feet is a whole lot different to transport at a few hundred feet over a busy metropolis and where there may be buildings higher than t he craft itself.

You nailed it!

We've had VTOL passenger transport for decades now, in the form of tried and proven technology: helicopters.

Right now a bunch of startups are trying to reinvent the industry by claiming "carbon zero" and "autonomous" when we know:

1. the market is *very* limited (ie: where are all the helicopter-based flying taxi services?)
2. the tech isn't ready (current battery tech isn't up to the task)
3. we don't trust autonomous sytems on the road so why would be trust them in the air?
4. regulators are still many years away from approving such things in Western nations
5. there is zero mitigation available for GPS failure (or malicious attack) and eVTOL craft don't autorotate in the event of power faulure.

Call me in 10 years time and we'll reconsider.

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

>Of course the VTOL development division can be a completely discrete
>entity from the commercial jet manufacturing side of the business.

[nods]

Yes, ind of like they separate the doors and airframes now . . .

you're both halfway there.

you strap the toast *to* the cat, and it not only can't land, thus elevating, but spins, generating free energy!

One word:

"Software as a service/subscription"

Okay, that's more than one word but if Microsoft says it's one word then you have no option but to believe them because when you run Windows, they *own* you!

(Smug grin, having been a satisfied Linux user for decades).

This can only go well (pfffft!)

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.

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