Ternaugh

White Christmas. One of the few Christmas-themed movies that I can watch every year.

I'm not sure. Ask Putin.

Die Hard

There was a joke in Computer Science back when I was studying it in the late 80s and early 90s that everything for CS was conceptualized back in the 50s and 60s, but just had to wait for the hardware to catch up. Magnetic tape storage was used by the UNIVAC I back in 1951, and has been used in a variety of form factors since then. Hard drives were announced by IBM in 1956. A number of 64K microcomputers were released in the early 80s, including the Commodore 64 (1982), Apple IIe (1983), and the Atari 1200XL (1983). They were all based on microprocessors designed primarily in the 1970s. IBM announced a phase-out of punch cards around 1984, though many programming languages still utilized the punch card model for input for many years after that. In the 1980s, the Cray X-MP supercomputer was the dominant machine. An X-MP was used to render graphics for The Last Starfighter (1984), and in the 1990 novel, Jurassic Park, it's mentioned that InGen had three X-MPs shipped to the island for sequencing DNA (which would have been a huge expense, around $50 million or so, depending on options). A single-processor X-MP was capable of approximately 234 MFLOPS (millions of floating-point operations per second), a 4-processor unit would be able to generate a bit over 900 MFLOPS. To put it into context, most newer cell phones produce at least 10 GFLOPS (billions of FLOPS). High end desktop graphics boards can easily exceed 7+ TFLOPS (trillions of FLOPS). Supercomputers are generally now over 10+ PFLOPS (quadrillions of FLOPS). SF games from the 70s and 80s rarely figured on these types of improvements. Most, like Traveller, assumed a centralized model with a mainframe controlling a ship, and personal "hand computers" being about as powerful as an 80s IBM PC. 2300AD made the mistake of actually putting real-world stats for their "portacomp", which had 10MB of internal memory, and could run one 200MB program chip (or roughly 10x memory and hard drive space of a PC when the game was released).

MediaMonkey AutoDJ (last 5): "Good Times Roll" - The Cars "Chiquitita" - Abba "Music Machine" - Erik Norlander "Repair Ward" - Thomas Newman (Wall-e soundtrack) "Song for America" - Kansas

It should be remembered that what's being discussed here are base line assumptions for the Third Imperium setting, which is not the same thing as the Traveller rules. There have been a number of alternate settings based upon various rule sets, and some of them do have FTL communications, some use alternate FTL systems*. Heck, some of the various mainline Traveller releases make wildly different assumptions for how the tech works (HePlaR instead of thruster plates and jump ships less than 100 displacement tons in TNE, for example). Very much like Hero, just how the universe works is up to the Referee. It's common to see IMTU (In My Traveller Universe) on various discussion boards when talking about differences between games. *As an example, Mongoose Traveller has been used as the engine for Babylon 5 (Jump gates, FTL communications), 2300AD (Stutterwarp, no FTL communications), and the Third Imperium setting. FTL radios were addressed on p. 54 of the Traveller: The New Era supplement, Fire, Fusion & Steel 2nd edition as an alternate technology, and the book also describes a variety of alternate FTL systems, including keyhole drives, stutterwarp, subspace, stargates, and even psionic transfer.

Excuse me You're wearing out my joie de vie Grabbing those good years again I want to be alone Excuse me I'm not the man I used to be Someone else crept in again I want to be alone Excuse me please I'm looking for Lost Angeles Soaking up the sin again I want to be alone You got the money back, that's okay Who needs a Cadillac anyway I got the medicine, make you see the light Call me in Alaska if it all turns out right (Allright) Excuse me please You're standing on my memories Stealing souvenirs again I want to be alone Leave me alone, I wanna be alone... [repeated several times] You got the money back, that's okay Who needs a Cadillac anyway I got the medicine, (to) make you see the light Call me in Alaska, if it all turns out right

I sincerely doubt that any politician will admit to deliberately making a fiscal disaster so that they can have an excuse to get rid of entitlements, and that's not what I was saying. Wisconsin and Maine both elected governors who cut taxes, and then cut benefits and services when the decreased revenues were not enough to cover expenses. I'd also add Kansas to the list (google "Kansas financial crisis"), and also mention that Brownback's tax plan has many components that are duplicated in the Federal plan.

Fish.

Tracks 9 and 10 from Tony Banks' first solo album, A Curious Feeling.

My condolences to his family and friends. QM was always a class act here on the boards, and he will truly be missed.

The Republicans stopped mailing me stuff like that after I kept on using their return envelopes to send back corrections about what they were claiming. Interestingly, stuff that Danny Tarkanian's team and sends by email are automatically trapped in the mail provider's spam filter. Adam Laxalt's mailers got through a little longer, but they're being automatically blocked as well.

If there's a market for ESPN to maintain the regional services, I'm sure that they will. And I'm sure that they'll be willing to share out-of-market games for a cut of the revenue (which is probably what the Fox regionals get as well). That said, ESPN's base model (charge everyone for the service as part of a basic cable package) is starting to fail, due to cord-cutting*. That's one of the reasons that they're attempting to go into streaming in a big way. *I don't watch ESPN, but when I had cable, it represented about $8 of my basic cable subscription price**. A few more bucks went to the regional Fox Sports channel, which also was something that I didn't watch. I got tired of paying about a quarter of my cable bill as a subsidy for other people's viewing habits, so I cut the cord, and went with various streaming and over the air options. **It's been estimated that ESPN would cost about $20/month if not subsidized

Well, there's what Paul Ryan has laid out: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/01/gop-eyes-post-tax-cut-changes-to-welfare-medicare-and-social-security/?utm_term=.a80e803e00e3 It's also the model used in several states (Maine and Wisconsin comes to mind).

Hulu. And they're releasing one episode per week, instead of all at once.

Jeans tumbling in the dryer.

They have a few of them, but they're generally limited to just a few hours in the afternoon.

There's news and then there's pundit shows. Fox News actually does pretty okay on the news part. http://www.slate.com/blogs/watching_fox/2017/11/03/the_lessons_of_watching_fox_news_for_three_weeks_non_stop.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/11/15/shepard-smiths-long-history-of-infuriating-fox-news-viewers/?utm_term=.650507c48100

There is actually news on Fox News (Shepard Smith comes to mind), but it's surrounded in a format of talking head programs that are designed to tell the viewer the "correct" way to think, with very little basis on reality. Unfortunately, CNN and MSNBC aren't much different.

The 1990s Flash TV show didn't need to kill off his mother for motivation, either. The production teams at Warner now seem stuck on trying to re-tell Flashpoint over and over, and it's getting really boring, frankly.

"Look for the Silver Lining" by the Dave Brubeck Quartet

Deflection. Because if we're talking about Hillary's transgressions, we aren't talking about Trump's.

So, which reed is it using as a snorkel?

I believe that he's been elected to serve the remaining time in the term, meaning that he'll have to defend in 2020.

Fox News has called it for Jones, as well.