Uh, what? Your family couldn't afford a $50 calculator but you had "many" "DIY PC kits"? Like the $995 SOL-20, or a $400 "cheapie" like an MITS Altair or IMSAI 8080? Sorry, not buying the bullshit.

When I was in HS in the late '70s we had a teletype with an acoustic coupler modem that connected to a district computer center running an HP2000. I still have a printout of the BASIC code for the football and drag race programs we played with, but by the time I was a junior we had a TRS-80 model I at home so I pretty much gave up on the school's system. Taught myself BASIC, then saved my allowance to buy a Z-80 assembler (on cassette tape!) and learned that. Then I went to college and my first class was on punched cards. Kind of a letdown...

Depends entirely on how long he owned the home. I bought a house in Portland (OR) and sold it two years later for a 5% profit. That was in 2003, before the bubble burst. I bought my current house from a couple who had bought it in 1974. They made over 400% profit on it (believe me, they certainly didn't spend any money updating anything...). It's pretty much only people who bought and sold in the last decade who took a beating. Friends of mine that bought places in the mid-90s are sitting pretty. I expect I'll sell my house for a loss when I sell it twenty years from now, but in the meantime it's cheaper than renting and I have a nice back yard.

Maybe we'll resurrect the old Nike missle tech -- fire a supersonic missile into a flock of targets and detonate it. Doesn't take much damage at Mach 2+ to make something so unstable it'll tear itself apart.

Good point, though -- that's why the XB-70 was never developed: it's much cheaper to make missiles than bombers.

Phalanx-type systems have been used to fire at waterborne targets that come within range, I don't think something fifteen feet off the deck is going to present much of a challenge.

Wait, you're adding yeast to hot cider? When brewing beer, you have to get your wort temperature down below 80 before you add your yeast. Sounds like it's working for you, though, maybe champagne yeast is tougher stuff than regular brewer's yeast.

LOL. "Carefully boiled"? What's that, in an ASTM-certified 18/10 stainless steel reaction vessel with distilled water when the ambient air pressure is no more than 30.05 using a thermal introduction profile not to exceed 10deg/sec? I just dump two cups of tap water in a small saucepan, heat it to boiling, dump in my priming sugar, and stir until dissolved (takes about twenty seconds). Then I dump it into my (freshly-sanitized) bottling bucket, rack my beer onto it, give it a quick stir with a sanitized stainless spoon, then bottle. It's really pretty difficult to screw this stuff up.

Sure, you can agonize over how many volumes of CO2 the BJCP claims are "proper" for your beer's style, and what kind of fermentables will either compliment or at least not intrude on your beer's flavor, but that's optional. It's all beer in the end. Relax!

Yup! ;)

What, you didn't have a bike?

How did you figure that out? Are you a plane/clothes detective?

Exactly. It would be difficult to design an ISA with a back door, surely that would have to be an implementation-specific effort. Of course, if they government also required projects to use chips from "approved" suppliers then they could make this happen, but it probably wouldn't be an architecture-level artifact.

Twenty years ago we were all using x86 CPUs, whereas today we're all using...what was it again? Something different, because we've advanced so much....right?

Or maybe they forgot to wear it shiny side out!

Because they got too close to something! You notice how you almost never see re-runs? It's because they don't want to encourage skeptical thinking! We of the Society to Win Intellectual Freedom Through Keeping Ideas Circulating Knowledgeably (S.W.I.F.T.K.I.C.K.) are currently waging a war of intensity against the networks to get these shows back on the air!

"legacy apps"? Like what? WoW? SWTOR? Or are we talking things like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest? Face it, there are no "killer apps" anymore -- and if there are any niche areas that don't have open-source or otherwise freely-available software, I'm sure they can code up their own solutions. Which will likely start by reverse-engineering the current best-of-breed solutions and porting them (or at least their algorithms) to their new architecture.

Frankly, I'm hoping that without all the entrenched legacy apps to support, they'll be able to come up with a superior architecture that won't be doomed to failure because it's not x86 compatible.

Sometimes natural selection isn't selective enough...

Yeah, kinda. Problem is, you can only control approximately when the transmission shifts. There's still a second (or two) delay. You also can't go flying into a corner in 4th, stick it in 2nd and stand on the brakes with the clutch in, then roll off the brakes and clutch while mashing the throttle for a proper exit.

For the record, my wife's Dodge only has P-R-N-D; you can push the shift lever left or right to manually change gears, but then there's no way to return to automatic mode without shifting into neutral and back into drive. However, that's the only example I've seen, and I hope it doesn't catch on.