"Funding gaps have led to shutdowns since 1980, when Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued a legal opinion requiring it. This opinion was not consistently adhered to through the 1980s, but since 1990 all funding gaps lasting longer than a few hours have led to a shutdown. As of October 2025, 11 funding gaps have led to federal employees being furloughed."
That an AG just came up with this in the 1980s based on an interpretation of an 1884 law (Antideficiency Act) is fascinating, thanks for sharing this. I always assumed this was an explicit own-goal by Congress like the debt ceiling, but it seems like it’s an unintended side effect.
just FYI you can watch on your Android device now. It took them a long time (seriously, I think more than four years after AppleTV+ launched), but they did finally release an Android app.
Is this true though? Texas has had some well-publicized failures (well, really one major one), but as best as I can tell they are more or less middle of the pack on grid reliability[1].
I mean, you'll need a backup generator anywhere, but the report I found (admittedly with just a bit of googling) makes it seem like Texas is a better potential location than quite a few states (including California).
The really major one is the only one that matters. If you are running a datacenter that needs to always be up and running, you're going to need backup power. A power grid that goes down once a decade for multiple weeks is far worse than one that goes down for 5 minutes once a week.
In Texas, if you support those in power with good enough donations, you can ensure that your site does not loose power when the decision is made on who to disconnect. So you can spend the money on back up power equipment, or in donations. Either way, it's going to cost to play.
FWIW, at least as of today, American Airlines' website attempts to show you round trip prices.
When choosing your outbound leg(s), they show a price inclusive of the cheapest return journey on the day you selected to return using the class of service on your outbound leg. So, there's all sorts of ways for it to be incorrect - maybe you want a different class of service, maybe the cheapest return has a stop but you'd like the direct, etc. - but it's still really useful for figuring out the best options for your flights.
I think you're underestimating how hard it is to shoot yourself in the foot when using the PHP language defaults and the defaults for any modern PHP framework - it's genuinely hard to do.
I still don't think PHP is a good idea for a greenfield project or anything, but they have done a good job of hiding all the footguns.
> I think you're underestimating how hard it is to shoot yourself in the foot when using the PHP language defaults and the defaults for any modern PHP framework - it's genuinely hard to do.
Agreed. I remember happily starting a couple of new PHP projects in the last decade and the frameworks felt like working in any other programming language.
Some of the All or Nothing documentaries that cover Premier League teams include a lot of footage in the away dressing rooms, and they are almost all bad (though Goodison was weirdly cavernous and looks more annoying than normal).
Exactly how they are bad changes, though - when you take the Emirates Stadium (Arsenal's home ground in London) tour, for instance, they actually include some details about how the table in the middle of the away dressing room is designed to be uncomfortably high in a way that keeps team members from making eye contact, which is something that the stadium designers thought would be annoying. At one point, at least, the self-guided tour narration actually included a comment that Pep Guardiola hated the layout.
I use pfSense CE, and rely on DNS entries to be automatically created for DHCP addresses. That worked fine for more than a decade, until they made Kea the default a couple of years ago (or did they just put a bunch of notices in the interface that old DHCPd was deprecated? It's been long enough that I don't remember).
Anyway, at the time Kea (at least in pfSense) wasn't able to do that, which caused things to break for me for a bit. It's a small thing (and, I mean, totally fair with free software) but the fact that they pushed an update to Kea before Kea (again, at least in pfSense) was at feature parity rubbed me the wrong way and has kept me from using it since then.
(edit: on the off chance anyone cares, I decided to check and it looks like this issue has been fixed as of pfSense CE 2.8.)
It's not at all a similar ride, but Epcot Center's Horizons (at Walt Disney World) used two Omnimax screens back to back as part of a dark ride. There's a map showing what that looked like here: https://parklore.com/main/horizons/3/
I sort of wonder how many of them had this exact fate - the Ft Worth Texas one was in the exact same situation. My understanding is that both parts to maintain the projection system and people with the knowledge to operate it were getting very rare, and the people largely retired when the pandemic closed the theater. Since a lot of the Omnimax screens were build during a similar range of time and would have had similar challenges, I wonder if that fate was common.
(luckily, the Ft Worth theater specifically was converted to an LED screen and recently reopened)
Since we're getting pretty far down the nerding-out-on-myst rabbit hole: the original version of realMyst, at least for Windows, had some bug that would cause it to immediately crash on any system with a multi-core CPU. At some point someone released a patched EXE that fixed it, I have no idea if gog and/or Steam ever released an official patched version.
Also, while talking about remakes: Riven got a remake last year, and it's fantastic. The sprit of the game is entirely intact, but they made changes to some puzzles that both make the experience fresh (for anyone that played the 90s version of Riven) and much less annoying (for any first time players). Can't recommend the Riven remake enough.
Conceding that it was a technical necessity, the replacement of live actors for in-game CGI rendered characters feels off in the Riven remake to me. Necessary because now you can walk all the way around them, the game can't assume a single viewing angle for videos to play out. Nor would it be practical to record new actors playing the roles (the old assets must surely be too low-quality to pass in a modern game, even if they go back to the source).
Part of Myst and Riven's charm in the 1990s was the immersion it offered, the world felt real, and the actors playing out characters added to it. The original point-and-click format feels dated today, but at the time, it was convincing enough to be believable.
Yeah, I do agree with that. Honestly part of me wishes they would have used the old assets - put whatever you have thought the best available upscaler, and lock the player's position while the video plays. I mean, your position was locked in the original game.. so that should be possible without breaking things, right?
That said, I really do think all of the tradeoffs that they did make were understandable - pretty much like you said. Doesn't keep me from being nostalgic for the 90s, though.
All the footage has been archived by The Video Game History Foundation, and is available in their public archive. It’s significantly higher quality than in the game.
I feel like they could’ve innovated using novel technique, like 3D gaussian splatting (and upscaling the video or better yet record new videos). The vast majority of the time, you’re still pretty much locked unable to move when those CGI character show up, except for turning the camera around (from what I remembered). It could’ve been faked and still work and be much better as I felt it was the only downgrade to an otherwise fantastic remake that I really enjoyed.
They did use real characters in Obduction, which has similar locomotion options to the new Myst and Riven remakes. They used some interesting workarounds to make it work, like only ever seeing characters through gaps, windows or TV screens.
I would kind of like to see some more point-and-click adventure games. There's nothing really fun about walking in games and point-and-click means that every moment of the game can be a perfect painting exactly as the artist visualized.
"Funding gaps have led to shutdowns since 1980, when Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued a legal opinion requiring it. This opinion was not consistently adhered to through the 1980s, but since 1990 all funding gaps lasting longer than a few hours have led to a shutdown. As of October 2025, 11 funding gaps have led to federal employees being furloughed."