Actually, it could be a good thing. Not being able to receive television signals without paying your license fee would mean that people who don't want to pay their license fee won't be hassled by endless threatening letters from the licensing authority. They'd be free to own a television and it'd be easy to prove they weren't using it illegitimately, thus saving them a fine.
</devil's advocate>
As a kid I had a small-gauge slot car set that ran off a double-insulated adaptor with a plastic dummy ground pin that only served to open the shutters on the live and neutral sockets. Then it snapped off.
I can still remember the noise my mother made when she walked in on eight-year-old me prising a matchstick into a wall-socket trying to plug it in
I work for a large UK supermarket chain (the largest, actually) and their computer systems and supporting software are pretty old. The tills run NT4 and the SBO/print queue manager is an IBM RS6000 (a PowerPC based machine, I believe) running OpenVMS.
The most up-to-date bits of kit are the checkout servers and the employee terminals- they run XP, but all of the software they run is either 16bit Windows stuff or terminal emulators to talk to that OpenVMS machine or the datacentres; having said that, I know of at least one store in our area that's still using an IBM 3151 orange-screen terminal. The in-house word processor is Ami Pro, a dreadful piece of software. I'd almost forgotten how annoying the 8.3 filename limit was
Anyway, with mission-critical stuff, the motto is usually "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". In our case, it seems to be "If it ain't completely broke, ignore it."
I heard Douglas Adams quoted on the radio this morning. Seems to apply here.
"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
Grand Central which manages multi-core programming (useless to you)
They made dual G4 Power Macs. I own one. Runs Leopard pretty nicely.
Variables don't; constants aren't.