I got my used laptop that now has linux on it from shopgoodwill.com I am in the US, so ymmv

I just realized that in something like 200 years, no one is really going to understand the difference between George Bush and George W Bush. Like, they’ll know they were two different people, but mis-attributing something that one Bush said to the other Bush will be seen as an easy mistake to make (much like how nowadays, John Adams and John Quincy Adams are seen as two different people but are not really that different in the average person’s eyes).

Like, there might be memes of 41 saying “…fool me -can’t get fooled again. Heheh” and no one will realize what’s wrong with the picture.

When I was stationed at Camp Pendleton around 2003-ish, one of the barracks I was at had a pizza vending machine. It made cheese pizzas (maybe pepperoni too, but I am not sure) that were a little smaller than a frisbee and cost around $5 (at a time when the priciest McDonald’s value meal was almost $5). I never had any myself, but it did take a couple minutes to make and (if I remember correctly) the crust was mostly pre-made. Being able to watch the process (a crust drops onto the conveyor, a robot puts the sauce on, another robot puts the cheese on, another robot puts the toppings on (if any), the pizza is conveyored through the oven) would help occupy the customer’s time. If the crust is pre-made, you’re really just broiling the cheese and toppings to get them melty and hot.

I don’t think the pizza was too tasty or popular, but it was a convenient option if you were drunk.

Randy Savage started his WWF career as a heel. Initially, he didn’t have a manager, so a bunch of heel managers would attend his squash matches and marvel at how amazing he was ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBIXztSSNr0 ). Then after a few matches and promos, he finally announced that he had chosen a manager: Miss Elizabeth ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_G1iMUbbBs ) (In reality, I’m pretty sure he and Elizabeth were a package deal; she would be slated to be his manager/valet before he came to the WWF)

He definitely seemed like a good, genuine dude and someone that was good at most every aspect of pro wrestling (maybe not as technical as Brett Hart, but who is?) regardless, though.

Why did the Trump campaign commit to a debate with Biden despite Biden not being confirmed?

She is leading in NH right now, according to two different polls, by about 6 points

Frying some uncooked rice in oil gives it a nice flavor (you then cook the rice like you normally would, unless you want some flavorful uncooked crunchy rice) - it might be worth testing out this process using pan drippings

So at what point does he lose the right to vote? Is it when he is found guilty of a felony, or does it happen at sentencing?

The thing about the cuecat is that it should have worked. And if it had come out in the mid-to-late '90s (say, 95-97), I really think it would have been a bigger thing than it was. The thing people today don’t really appreciate about the 90’s (and early 00’s) internet was just how deathly slow it was. People were using 33.6 kbps modems and were fine with it. Do you know how deathly slow a 33.6 connection was? A buddy of mine and I had 56k modems and used to download music videos from Kazaa in the early 00’s. We would start the download in the morning before going to work, and the download would be done (or almost done) when we got home (we lived next door to each other and worked at the same place). A full work day to download a 3-ish minute video at a crappy resolution. And this was using 56K modems. A 33.6 was noticably slower. Do you know what one of the big selling points on using Google back in the day was? Speed. Sure, Yahoo or Altavista might have better or nicer-looking results, but Google was fast. It was faster than all the other search engines, so people used it more. It helped that the search results weren’t crap either, but its speed really helped sell it to the average user (Google used to show how long the search took to complete, and if I remember correctly the search time was measured in milliseconds).

I say all this to help illustrate how slow the internet was back then. It was so god-awful slow. I remember in high school, I downloaded a 5MB anime clip on a school computer. It took like 15-20 seconds to download, and I was blown away at the speed (to give a reference, on my home computer I could take the dogs out on their leashes, hook them up on their runs and get back to the computer in the time it took to download a 100 kB file).

So a device that could scan a barcode in the Sears catalog and make the computer pull up the product’s web presence on the Sears website should have been a game changer. And scanning a barcode to add a product to a wishlist or cart would have saved so much time for the average web user. This product should have been gobbled up by the masses, but the breadth of its capabilities wasn’t embraced by the companies that could have used it the most.

Yes, reading paper magazines in front of your computer WAS the way of the future, because modems were super slow and anything that could offload that slowness was a blessing.

Also, your quip about ‘people plugging the cuecat into their Windows-only computer and loading the correct driver (hopefully)’ was just how the computer world worked at the time. Windows’ unofficial slogan was “sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t”. Having Windows crash for no good reason, having hardware fail for no good reason, losing the last hour of progress on your term paper due to Office crashing was all just something that computer users were accustomed to. Hell, Windows 98 had a BSOD while Bill Gates was showing it off at COMDEX 1998. Having hardware that was Windows-only and might or might not work was par for the course in those days. It wouldn’t have hurt the cuecat at all.