As bad as AOL was, especially when viewed from the perspective of today's internet, it was many people's first experience to an online world. One of those was me. I signed up almost as soon as I heard about it, using a 14.4K modem with my Apple II+. It definitely was quirky, often unreliable, and, even then, slow as molasses but I was online. With no prior history with that sort of technology, it was pretty cool. All these years later, I can't remember how long I stayed or even what I used next (maybe att@home?) but like being there at the dawn of handheld calculators replacing the venerable slide rule, it was quite amazing.

The way I read it, they didn't need to write the code to solve the actual game, they just needed to write a constructor and a method that, given one cell and it's value, search the array from the row specified to the end for a second value that either is equal to the first or sums to 10 with the first. That ought to have been easy for anyone who was paying attention in class and was actually doing the assignments instead of submitting chatgpt's responses to their homework.

I worked for a company that held classified contracts with various government agencies. Most required a clearance from the sponsor to work on them. The company did not have the authority to grant access to anyone but had to submit employees to the sponsor who made the decision whether or not to grant the access. For a business like Oracle to come in to audit software in a classified area would require that they have previously had employees be granted the same access and have those accesses passed to the sponsor who then sends them on to the company. At one point, we did have a request to audit software (don't recall who it was) which we denied due to the clearance situation, although we were legal and could show valid purchase orders. Never heard back from them.

I drove around a part of the Moffett Business Park area in Sunnyvale yesterday that used to be part of Lockheed but was sold off and developed 15 or more years ago. Huge multistory buildings with acres of surrounding parking lots, all, totally empty and deserted except for some landscaping maintenance guys. Another older part of the park where I actually used to work 40 years ago is almost just as deserted. A number of buildings have fences surrounding them like maybe there is some remodeling going on except no one was there. Obviously, these were built during the boom and were probably occupied for awhile but are now just excess real estate. I wonder what the owners are going to do with them. I just can't see those heady days returning any time soon.

Looks like his check to the trump crime family was late. No way this justice dept is going to go after wealthy grifters like this, otherwise.

Being charged a premium for features you neither want nor need.

Depends on how well they were constructed and whether they are maintained. Poorly constructed buildings with no maintenance degrade much faster so, after just a few years, the costs of resurrecting exceeds the cost of demolition and rebuild. Given the history of modern China, I'd bet on the latter happening.

Even in Las Vegas, the sphere is a huge money sink but even so, visitors are already primed to have their wallets emptied out by the casinos, hotels, restaurants, parking lots, ATMs, taxis, and strip joints. They are ready to spend outrageous prices for tickets to concerts and shows at the place so that they can see Don Henley or Bono lip-synch to all their favorite tunes. The question is will locals and/or tourists, where the mini-speres are placed, be so willing when they're back into real life instead of a fantasy zone.

Absolutely, I watched it. I was also 11 years old and didn't really know about, well, much of anything. Having watched it so many times over 60 years, those episodes are a part of my youth so they tend to get a pass. Well, except for that S3E4 "And the children shall lead" POS. We hates it forever!

The introduction of Q into the series, for me, started its descent into irrelevancy. I liked ST because of its close association with hard SciFi. It wasn't a perfect match but it was close enough. Having magical beings who can simply snap their fingers to make characters disappear into new realities or locations exceed my ability to swallow such impossibilities.

I agree about Lost. The first season was its best while the first 3 seasons were great in comparison to the final 3. After season 4, I was wavering a bit going into 5 but I'd invested so much time in it, I really wanted to see it through. I'm glad I did but it was sometimes a struggle.

The first 5 or 6 episodes of Seinfeld weren't very good. The cast were trying to grow into the characters so things were stiff and awkward. The same is true of other shows like M*A*S*H, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and even the Simpsons. They all became major hits and were on for years. But it's hard to know that early on. For me, unless the show premise is ridiculous, too much like other shows, or has one or more characters I simply can't stand, I'll give it 3 or 4 episodes before I pull the plug. Of course, there are the shows that immediately grab me from the first episode and I know I'm going to stay to the end. For me, those would be shows like Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and Mad Men.

My god, these billionaires are such whiny bitches and I, for one, am beginning to believe they are actually detrimental to a functional society. I'm tirec of them buying the control of our government and thinking they should play a fundamental role in its operations instead of just accepting the millions in tax cuts republicans want to throw at them and shutting the fuck up.

We've reach some kind of satanic confluence where CEOs spout the same kind of religious bullshit in regards to their flailing company that politicians spout when pretending to deal with gun violence in society (USA division).

Don't know but I hope that their admissions team kept a level playing field when deciding on who actually gets in. Cal Tech is incredibly hard to get in on the order of only 3% of applicants are admitted. It certainly wouldn't do to accept someone based on sex or ethnicity only to have them wash out in a year or two because the academics were just too tough. If these new entrants have the right stuff to succeed, and I think they probably do, then I wish them great success.