Surely the clock wouldn't flash anything at all if it was off...

As a non-American, that one doesn't bother me much :)

er, I thought you brought the can opener...

Maybe the whales are a reference to "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home".

So many Star Trek comments and nobody picked up "the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe".
V'ger was Voyager 6 but even so...

A personal PIN number is what you enter into an automatic ATM machine or an electronic EFT terminal.

whoosh....

It means smart cards (typically embedded in credit/debit cards) that have a chip on the card.
You enter your PIN into the payment terminal at a store and it uses the PIN to form part of the key used for comms with the card.

Whereas magnetic credit cards and PINs (er, I mean personal PIN numbers) have been used since the 1960s without a chip on the card.

Didn't Standard Oil do this?
New competitor comes to town and S.O. drops the price of oil below cost.
New competitor is still trying to recoup his start-up costs and can not discount his oil as much.
Customers buy from S.O. because it's cheaper.
New competitor goes out of business.
S.O. puts the price up high enough to recover the losses from the low price period.
Customers continue to buy from S.O. because there is no other option.

In the southern hemisphere Dec 1986 was summertime. It would have been the only one with the correct name as far as we Australians are concerned.

Windows 95 came out in 1995.
Windows NT 4.0 came out in 1996.
Windows 98 came out in 1998.

Except you are solving a known problem, after it happened.
It's much harder to solve problems before they are known.
It's much harder to build a robot that can solve unknown problems.

What might be useful though is a general purpose manipulator that can be controlled by humans on the ground.
Humans are useful because they have brains, eyes and general purpose hands, the combination of which can solve a huge number of problems.
Give the robot cameras, hands so that it can pick-up and use other tools or even non-tools (ie whatever is laying around the craft but wasn't explicitly designed as a tool) and a link to a human controller.

A friend of mine said he didn't mine the cavity searches but sometimes the dog's nose is cold

It comes from a command in Leviticus 19:9
"When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest."
The idea is that landowners should NOT reap every single thing in the field that is owned by them (as they could claimed the right) but that they should leave some bits for the poor people to gather.
The landowner is wealthy enough to not worry about a few percentage loss and the poor people don't need any state welfare.
Of course, this is totally against the practice of modern businesses where very single scrap is gathered up in the name of the almighty dollar and screw anybody else.

In Ruth 2 there is an example of a poor women gleaning behind the rightful workers who eventually marries the boss, so it turned out well for him to let them take the gleanings.

Whether you believe the Bible or not, it's good social economics against being too greedy.

Dilbert: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2000-05-28/