In one of the parking lots behind the Davis Centre at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, I often used to see a car with a licence plate reading XYZZY. I always wondered who had that one.

Pretty simple if you know the history.

AT&T was a government-regulated monopoly. As part of the understanding under which the U.S. Government gave it that monopoly, AT&T was not allowed to use the base granted by their monopoly to expand into other fields.

Bell Labs was AT&T's R&D division. A lot of what they did went into AT&T's products, as you might expect. However, because of the agreement with the government against expanding into other fields, anything that Bell Labs did which wasn't directly for AT&T's own equipment was generally given out to others to use. From which we get Unix, which was developed as an experiment in a portable operating system that could be ported to any machine for which you had a compiler. Also from which we got other things like the transistor.

Bell Labs was one of those rare things that can happen when you give very smart people free rein, and it was an unfortunate casualty when the whole monopoly status of AT&T was changed.

I must admit I've heard lots of words associated with the Holy Roman Catholic Church (disclosure: raised Catholic, current status lapsed), but this is the first time for 'easygoing'.

Compared to some of the American Evangelists, the Catholics are easy-going. These guys are Dispensationalists. Have you ever seen the Jack Chick tract where he accuses the Pope of being in league with the Devil? There honestly are people who firmly believe that the Pope is a False Prophet sent to tempt people away from true Christianity.

True, there are several Christian churches more easy-going than the Catholics, but the Catholics aren't even close to being the most straight-laced of the lot...

I believe the answer to that one is that while it reduced accidents, it made what accidents that happened far more spectacular.

The fan creates a partial vacuum under the car to hold the car down to the road... which is fine until something overrides the 'seal' around the edges of the car. Say, a rock that only pushes up one of the four tires. Now the partial vacuum will suck air in under the car faster than the fan can get rid of it. The end result of this is that the car goes flying as the air rushes in underneath it and pops it off the road like a loose suction cup, and there were a number of really spectacular deaths.

Oh, I've seen them work. Granted, my father (who had the new chip card) had to tell the person at the hotel how to use the thing. So the readers are out there, but the training on how to work them is lacking.

My understanding of the reasoning behind the creation of the registry was that it was fairly simple.

As you said, every application would create its own .ini file. Remember, though, that FAT32 wasn't developed until after the original release of Windows 95. Under FAT16, the maximum size of any partition was 2GB (a drive size that was already becoming available), and the maximum number of files was 65520. With every application creating its own .ini file, which would take up 32KB on the disk no matter how small it was, huge amounts of space on a drive were being taken up by tiny .ini files. Microsoft created the registry largely so that they could clear out a lot of the small configuration data files, and put it all in one place so it wouldn't look like wasted space.

Naah, it's in the deliverance.

Yes; basically the issue is that Quebec uses a higher transmission voltage than most of the rest of Canada or the U.S. Under normal circumstances, this is actually a good thing; higher voltage means lower current to carry the same power, and lower current means lower transmission losses, since those are proportional to the square of the current.

However, this has the problems in that whenever there's serious ionization in the air, the power grid is less stable because you get corona effects around the wires.

Not to mention s/Retric/Rhetoric/