If serious about the goals, they would have followed a straight, shortest route from LA to SF, running frequently, with feeder lines to/from Central Valley and larger coastal cities (Santa Barbara, SLO, Monterey, Salinas, Santa Cruz, etc)

Given where it ended up, mainly because of Congressional shenanigans, it will end up as a little-used, publicly subsidized boondoggle. I'm all for efficient public transit, but this is such a missed opportunity, and a huge waste of taxpayer money. We'll have mid-range electric airplanes before this thing gets going.

Was reading an article about creation of a large public beach. It only sat 2ft above sea level and often washed over in high tide. The developers bulldozed sand from the sea side to bring it up to 12ft. But they had big troubles with wind blowing the sand inland. It almost scuttled the whole project.

So they planted hardy native grass that grew roots toward the water. It mitigated the dust problem.

Wonder if a similar thing can be done with native desert vegetation to solve this problem.

Not sure who to believe now: https://www.axios.com/2024/10/19/israel-iran-attack-telegram-leaked-intelligence

Still can't get the fingers right.

What would be an alliterative version of the "Clean Coal" BS?

• Green Gas
• Gold Gas
• Natural Gas (ok, but it's just there)

Adobe announced a 'distraction removal' Photoshop feature this week at their annual MAX conference. Makes removing people from pictures a one-click operation for anyone: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/remove-tool.html

The car I had the most trouble with wasn't because it was a bad car, but because it kept getting trashed. VW Cabriolet convertible. Bought it when I got my first real job out of school.

One week after driving it off the lot, parked on a busy city street, someone slashed the roof and tore out the stereo. Fixed it all up. Insurance rate went up. Six months later, knife through the roof AND a smashed window. Stereo gone. Switched to a removable, pull-out stereo. Still got broken into.

Had dozens of slashes/smashes. At one point, just left the door locks open. Nothing to take. Someone slept in the back seat (left food wrappers) and pilfered through the ashtray where I kept loose change.

Loved driving it with the top down, but what a pain it was to fix.

It's the Gellert Thermal baths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gellért_Baths

Still around, if anyone visits Budapest.

She badly needs to be introduced to a plate of samosas with a side of tamarind chutney.

Preferably brought over by a kindhearted, wise Nani who has lived through this sort of behavior.

Hey, best of luck figuring that out:

https://www.learnc.net/c-tutorial/c-integer/

https://www.motortrend.com/features/pontiac-fiero/

Drop it off in one of the official ballot drop-off boxes instead of USPS.

In California, you can also sign up for text messages informing you of every stage of ballot handling: https://california.ballottrax.net/voter/

Thrice, all a long time ago:

• Driving back alone from a group camping trip. Got stuck in a freak snowstorm in the mountains, without chains. Stalled and started sliding back towards a really deep ravine. Hit the brakes, but it kept skidding through the sleet. Had the car door open, ready to bail. The car came to a stop, barely inches from the edge.

• Walked out of the shower in a towel. Faced a tweaker with a gun standing in my apartment. Demanded my wallet. Took out the cash. Wasn't much. He paused, trying to decide what to do next. I really wasn't sure which way it would go. He left.

• Flight instructor had checked off on doing a solo, then left town. Was nervous, but he had told me to put in the flight hours in his absence. Practicing short take-off/landings and go-arounds. Little single-engine trainer. On the first touch-and-go, I forgot to take off full flaps, which meant maximum drag on the wings. Got barely 1000 ft above ground, then the engine began to sputter. The plane stalled, and started a slow-mo, nose-down spin toward the ground. I remember stopping breathing. Then the brain kicked in. Figured it out. Recovered from the spin way too close to the ground. The most sphincter-clenching, stupidest moment of my life.

Plastic, nitrogen (or some inert gas, if packaged), and formaldehyde.

Yum!

"Thank you for your vote. Now leave this country."

In Marin County, a wealthy liberal enclave in California, a lot of anti-vaxxers used to be wealthy white suburbans. When COVID hit, those groups found themselves aligned with the right-wing MAGA crowds.

Proving once again, that if you go far enough left, you may come full circle to the far right.

Out in the cloud world, several companies changed their FOSS license to prevent large cloud providers from making money off their work (eg, Terraform, Redis, Mongo, and ElasticSearch).

Their reasoning was sound, on paper. They were spending a ton of time and money supporting a popular product and the only way to make money on it was by selling hosted services to enterprise. Then these other cloud providers would take their work for free, compete with them for the same customers, and often win.

In almost all these cases, the FOSS developers were pilloried for changing the terms of their original license, leading to immediate forks and fragmentation of the community.

The only outfit that I know of that survived the transition was Thingsboard. They still offer an open-source service, but they take a lot of their enterprise-only adapters and do not offer it as FOSS. Only way to get these is to sign up with their service.

Wordpress could have taken a survey of their highest paying customers, then created features they needed behind a private hosting service. Yes, people would have been unhappy, but the core service would remain FOSS and the company would still make a lot of money.

This whole thing has been done in the worse possible, public, mud-slinging manner. I don't understand who benefits from the scorched-earth approach.