...participate in any childhood activities if a**holes like these cops and bureaucrats had been around when I was that age. Our Little League practices were over a mile away and we rode to/from the field -- sometimes as a group but often alone -- without anyone calling the cops. We rode bikes to the public pool -- well over a mile a way -- all summer long, crossing all kinds of busy streets along the way. Even at night. Again nobody called the cops.

Of course, this was a time before pins started showing up in Halloween candy and the kindly old lady down the block could still hand out homemade popcorn balls in your trick/treat bag without risking spending the rest of her life in the big house or on some predator list. I can't quite pin down the time frame when it began but, apparently, some disease began afflicting adults that caused them to hate children. And the unafflicted adults began overreacting to the sight of a child unaccompanied by a cordon of security guards by calling the police whenever they catch a glimpse of one.

... has been such a big hit?

Next new thing on digital cameras: Curved Screens. Just you wait. They're gonna be huge. HUGE I tell ya.

Bah! With a phone camera, it's not point-n-shoot but point-n-pray. In the time it takes the camera in my phone to let me get the zoom set to what I want and then focus on the subject, my point-n-shoot camera has been powered on and has already let me take several shots that are, you know, actually in focus. Especially if I'm indoors. I'm not a big user of flash unless I can adjust the output -- most camera's flash units are too "hot" (IMHO) and overexpose the subjects -- and I've yet to see a phone camera with that feature. My phone's camera is all but useless for taking sharp photos unless the subject is lit by the noon day sun and then it's nearly impossible to see the subject on the screen with all the ambient light. The resulting photos look in-focus on the camera but when I view them on my computer I'm often left wondering "what the heck were you focusing on?". Nothing looks really sharply in-focus. By-product of the crummy optics, probably.

If I know I'm going some place where I'll likely want to take good photos I'll take my DSLR. If the locale isn't exactly camera friendly, I'll slip the point-n-shoot into my pocket. As an absolute last resort I'll use the phone's camera but I find its photos barely passable.

You're right about it being about having the camera on you. Back in the film days, folks would often keep a smallish 35mm with them at all times. Far easier to whip out that little Rollei than dragging the big Nikon or Canon out of the camera bag in the back seat.

``The telephone company stopped supporting pulse dialing almost 3 years ago.''

We must have just beaten the cutoff date when that nasty thunderstorm took out our power for a couple of days about then. Our only means of communication was to use an ancient Radio Shack pulse-dialing phone (no... we hadn't dumped our land line yet) or spend enough time at a local coffee shop charging a cellphone. The trouble we had using that phone during the time the power was out wasn't whether the phone company was accepting (or not) the pulse dialing, it was every place we called that had a freakin' phone menu that only understood touch tones. Since then, we've dumped the land line but the old RS phone is still sitting down in the basement. I just made a mental note to include it in the next bin of old computer parts I haul away to the local electronics recyclery.

Get rid of the sports that cannot measure the success of the competitors using the Olympic motto: higher, faster, stronger. That means no figure skating, no synchronized swimming, and, especially, no more rhythmic gymnastics. Essentially, nothing that requires assigning a number to a performance via a panel of judges. (I'm a little torn about any sport that chooses winners based on the points that they score on a particular day but when I think about the excessive coverage given to beach volleyball in the last few Summer Games I lean hard to the "drop them, too" side.)

Just think how much less expensive it would be to hold an Olympics would be if all those judged "sports" were taken out. The potential sites for the games would mushroom without a need for all the additional venues for the judged events. Cities that hold the Games can rarely afford to and the citizens wind up footing the bill for facilities that will rarely see use after the closing ceremonies. Plus, if it would get Bob Costas' interviews with prepubescent gymnasts off the air, we all win.

This information was making the rounds 1-2 years ago. Seems some submitters are way behind in their reading.

Maybe, just maybe, if the USPS wasn't required to prepay the retirement benefits for employees who haven't even been born yet (and their children who may become postal workers), they'd be able to make a profit. That wasn't mentioned in the article you referenced. My guess is that providing the reader of that little tidbit of information would interfere with their "USPS = inefficient govt. agency" narrative.

I mean an AI that looks at static and says it's a school bus 99.99% of the time seems to be about as broken as could be. The researchers have to be the most optimistic folks in the world if they still think there's a pony in there. I'd be seriously thinking about scrapping the software (or, at least, looking for a bad coding error) and/or looking for an entirely new algorithm after achieving results that bad.

Creative Computing...
IBM PC Technical Journal...
Byte...
DEC Professional...
UNIX Review...
Perl Journal...
Linux Journal...
SysAdmin...
And now Dr. Dobbs?

What the heck am I going to do for leisure reading now?

Those were used on direct drive turntables to allow the user to fine tune the speed. Line frequency is -- in theory -- 60Hz (in the US) but can be off a bit. The strobe+markings were to let you compensate for that. I'm not aware of any drive-wheel or belt-drive turntables that had the speed adjustments.