Last year I came across an old phone, with a button pad, that was switchable between DTMF and pulse dial. The switch was still set to pulse. Better: it could still make calls!
I did switch it to DTMF though :)

3 days ago I would have agreed. Then I went to get a new set of tyres for my car and to have its wheel geometry checked/aligned. They handed me a printout with the alignment data, which was clearly made on a dot matrix printer...

I find remote desktops still incredibly frustrating to work with. RDP hiccups causing drag-and-drop to fail intermittently, inaccuracy in mouse position (try dragging a column separator in Windows Explorer: it's almost impossible to hit that 1-px wide target on a remote machine), security restrictions invariably in place on the remote machine (examples on one RDP machine I have the displeasure of having to work on: no command line access, no access to the control panel so I can't even swap my L/R mouse buttons, session gets wiped on logout so I have to change the same settings every time), endlessly copying between the local and remote systems, sessions that terminate with prejudice if there's no input for an hour. Blaugh.

A few dozen Germans, on a workforce exceeding 100,000 at the height of the Apollo program.

My backups are done on a USB harddisk that's connected to the media server on my home network. Switch the HD on, and it'll appear and backups can be made.

How can I prevent malware from changing my backups? Would it be possible/effective to mount the drive as write-only, making it impossible to change existing files?

Your memory must be better than mine, there's no way I can correctly remember every turn in a 500-km route, nor do I wish to.
You're also toast when your memory is off a bit (second or third right?) or you misinterpret an instruction (is that a road or a private driveway?) or a road name sign is missing/vandalized/unreadable in the dark. One missed instruction and you're lost again and up shit creek without a paddle. Honestly, I am astonished people still accept such kludges.

Not this Luddite bullshit again. When I'm on the road, I'm on my way to a destination. When it's for work, I don't care about new places, I just want to get my appointment via the most efficient route. When I'm on vacation, there's a bit more leeway but I still have a destination to get to. At the end of a long journey, I no longer care about the scenery and just want to get to my hotel or campsite already.

The cost of making a mistake is high in lost time and aggravation. Without GPS I'd have to resort to maps, and have you ever driven solo while navigating from a map? You end up either a menace on the road, or having to stop to consult the bloody map every 5 minutes. Not to mention having to buy the map in the first place.
So if you enjoy getting lost, fine. But stop whining about people using GPS.

French seems to have a demarcation: using words derived from Latin or Greek origins is okay, deriving words from English is not. Walkman becomes balladeur, computer becomes ordinateur etc.

Please, not another useless Chrome clone. We already have more than enough browsers with crap UIs, thank you.

America's military dominance is still more than enough to ensure no nation will take up arms against the US. The current threat to Pax Americana isn't military action from another nation, but US military actions abroad that foster insurgency and terrorism. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that military dominance isn't enough to win a war against a determined population.

It is infinitely preferable to the Windows way of doing things, where the update process can basically say (using the default settings) 'Fuck you and your open documents, we're going to reboot NOW'. The mind boggles at the level of disrespect that shows.
Can things be improved? Probably. But until they are, I prefer the OS that lets me reboot on MY schedule.

Uh, no. West Germany largely recovered on its own. They didn't have access to Marshall Plan funds until after their economic recovery had started. In fact the US and its allies started the postwar period by removing lots of valuables (coal and steel industry, patents, scientists) from Germany.

Small A-pillars were SOP when behavior in a crash wasn't subject to legislation. As a result, you'd have A-pillars that buckled into the passenger compartment at the slightest provocation.
These days, the goal is a door frame strong enough that you can still open the door after a crash.

ISS power budget is 75-90 kW.