I actually used an old Intellimouse Explorer 2.0 from 2003 today -- it's in my laptop bag for those times when the trackpad just doesn't cut it.

Still works pretty well. The button hardware switches are a bit old and some of them produce signals that are too noisy for the signal bounce processing chips to filter out. So, the wheel button registers a single click as a double basically 100% of the time (PITA when using it to open new tabs in a browser), and the "forward" button does the same 50% of the time (much less frequently an issue). Not half bad for 15 year old hardware, really.

After these phased out of popularity, I switched loyalties to Logitech and then more recently Razer. But the hand feel of the chassis (which will be the exact same for this reboot version) of the Explorer was really quite excellent. Might have to look for one!

To add to @eric3579's comment, the work was fairly carefully planned to occur over Summer, and after the water level had been reduced, to minimise the chances that they would get caught out like that. The hydro plant should be able to release more water than required for the duration of the second phase of works.

Their first phase was designed to leave the main spillway usable over winter, so this second phase could commence afterwards. The emergency spillway was designed never to be used, it was more like a fuse to allow evacuation if the dam fails. The revised design, taking into account the fact that the emergency spillway was required, appears to have strengthened it enough to be used as a backup instead.

The repairs would have been a heck of a lot cheaper if they had been conducted a decade ago, although I do wonder if all the flaws would have been obvious at the time.

I played a bit off and on during the NDA period, and that ramped up near the end. Then hardcore after the Early Access for a while, then stopped until the Battle Royale mode was added.

I tried the Battle Royale mode after it launched, but wasn't as impressed with it as I was with the original game. Little did I know then it'd explode the way it did.

I only played PUBG during the open beta phase and stopped playing that as well. I guess I'm not a Battle Royale sort of player...

Invading Crimea might have started the shooting phase of the civil war, but supporting opposition groups to overthrow Yanukovich was necessary for that to even happen. Removing an elected government from office would signify the start to me, even if things quieted down for a while afterwards.

There are a few times in this thread where I would describe a lack of appreciation for degrees of the term "forced"

Part of why I don't consider what happened to me to be rape is because I had a mouthful of tea at the time.

Getting burned by hot tea because the other person doesn't react exactly the way I want when I want them to is a risk I was willing to take when we started pouring tea into each other's mouths. A touch too much or too little is to be expected given the situation.

I'd argue that only after that touch-and-go phase is where the place that "the line" gets crossed, and I'm annoyed at the lack of thorough acknowledgement that errors get made in those moments.

Fuck, girls go fucking crazy when they are climaxing. They dun like break a dude's dick in half and shit. Sheeeeeeeet.

From the looks of it they're still in early prototyping/proof of concept phase.

So, looks like Louis is going through a Woody Allen phase. That might work out.

Your video, Humans Try Time Phased Sweets-Rick and Morty, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Thank you for sharing your perspective, @MilkmanDan!

Here is a link from a farmer detailing what is in one of those license agreements, including a copy of one:

http://thefarmerslife.com/whats-in-a-monsanto-contract/

"That’s what we have to agree to in order to make use of Monsanto’s biotechnology on our farm. I don’t see anything in there that hurts my farm. Neither does Iowa farmer Dave Walton. I don’t have to buy their herbicides, and I don’t have to buy anything from them next year if I don’t want to. The biggest problem I have with seed companies is that it seems like they phase out a variety from time to time that is a really strong performer on our farm. "

Don't worry, lots of soldiers in Iraq roll around on the ground saying "help me, I'm hottt." We all go through that phase.

HBO? When did it move to HBO?

On August 13, 2015, as part of a five-year programming and development deal, Sesame Workshop announced that first-run episodes of Sesame Street would move to premium television service HBO beginning with season 46, which premiered on January 16, 2016. HBO will hold first-run rights to all newer episodes of the series, after which they will air on PBS member stations following a nine-month exclusivity window, with no charge to the stations for airing the content. The agreement also gives HBO exclusive rights to stream past and future Sesame Street episodes on HBO Go and HBO Now – assuming those rights from Amazon Video and Netflix; on August 14, Sesame Workshop announced that it would phase out its in-house subscription streaming service, Sesame Go, as a standalone service; the service will remain in operation, likely with its offerings reduced to a slate content available for free or serving as a portal for Sesame Street's website.

The deal came in the wake of cutbacks that had affected the series in recent years, the changing viewer habits of American children in the previous ten years, and Sesame Workshop's dependence upon revenue from DVD sales.

/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street

This is the 2nd video where the author got the Concorde story wrong... It became profitable 8 years into service (1984), largely due to BA raising ticket prices and making it more of a luxury. And the Concorde division remained profitable until the crash in France, when they grounded all Concordes while they investigated the root cause. After they started flying again, people were still wary to buy Concorde tickets, and airlines could get more profit out of 1st class tickets on larger, slower planes. So both BA and AF phased them out ~2003.

I will follow you, Namor! First, let me use my Quantum Bands to wreak havoc and sink the entire west coast of the United States into the Pacific. And with the help of the Fantastic Four and the more agreeable Deviants, shield the land mass from all harm and construct that utopia: Atlantis 5.

Yeah, the other Atlantises were blown up and or phased out of time and space, but i have high hopes for A5. Better than liberal hubs named after Mesopotamian cities! Death to the Night Watch and beware gov't telepaths...

Seems U-4 is the number one should normally look at, since discouraged workers wanting work, but not looking is a valid number. U-5 I don't get, if you are taking care of family or are in school so not actively looking, but would take a job if a good one came... just seems to be a meh number.

I don't get how U-6, which seems to be the underemployed number, is a indicator of potential job growth. If the jobs aren't here, or they don't have the skills, etc... then that number doesn't represent potential growth. It would be one thing if you have somebody who could be in a great job, that job is around, but they haven't found it, but I'd guess that most of those are unskilled, or underskilled, or those jobs just no longer exist or at the very least are being phased out. Automation is going to become a bigger and bigger issue, and seems to be the thing people, especially those on the far right, seem to ignore... and neither side is really looking at guaranteed basic income yet as a serious issue, which really needs to be discussed in detail. Too many people are becoming unemployable and that is a problem we don't seem ready to seriously discuss in political circles.

My long time issue with the "they would be too intelligent/evolved to have any interest in us" type scenario, such as he puts as number two here, is that we go through great lengths to try and research and understand very primitive life. There are efforts being made to talk to dolphins and apes. We're looking to build ships to crash or land ships onto Titan to see if there is microbial life on a moon orbiting a gas giant, not to mention work to see if Mars once upon had life. So the very fact we're able to get off our little rock (though not much off it), I think would warrant a stop and look, perhaps to help answer what was life like at such an early stage of evolution.

Not said stop and look doesn't imply any sort of communications. Indeed there may be a Prime Directive like thing with them where by they see and observe, but leave no evidence of such a visit (alien abductions being just mental illness coupled with abuse or other issues).

Now distance is a super valid point, but by far the most likely point is the survivability window, which he talks about in point three. We're still a level zero civilization (Kardashev scale) and decades until we reach a level one civilization (unfortunately it seems delayed even further due to some very anti-science moves being made by certain groups). Moving up that scale is only one thing, avoiding killing ourselves via war is another huge one. With CRISPR technology advancing, there is a very real danger of a Division/Stand/Utopia type disease coming to the foreground, especially if driven by a zealot (ala Division and Utopia). I highly doubt a man made black hole or something, but war or a CRISPR engineered disease... Not to mention the natural disasters he mentioned, and others, such as huge gamma ray bursts and others that we've managed to avoid. And we'd have to think that most civilizations go through somewhat similar phases, with a universe that is fairly hostile to life, even if many planets are capable of at least starting life. Generally I figure that most civilizations never make it past the stage we are at now, and those that do probably don't get to stage two and beyond (to be fair, I doubt any civilization can achieve stage two on Kardashev's scale as it goes beyond knowledge needed, but materials and more).

Back to the technology of communications point. I've generally figured if you are space faring, you gave up on radio communications and are using strange properties or something along those lines.