OMG, yeah. I learned how to type on old manual typewriters, without a delete key like the later Selectrics had. Hit the wrong key, and you had to backspace, get out the Liquid Paper (or other correction fluid) and wait 5 minutes for the damned stuff to dry before you dared smack your ribbon against it.

I mourn that today's children and young adults will never know the tactile pleasures of playing music or videos on equipment which makes pleasant snapping and whirring sounds at every command - or potentially losing a fingertip when the reel-to-reel is fast-forwarding through a 20 minute tape - but I sure do envy the word processor as a first typing experience.

OTOH, there is no computer keyboard ever made which feels as satisfying as a well-maintained IBM Selectric. My IBM Type M keyboards are the best I've ever felt (this is being typed on a 1984 Type M) but still don't feel as nice as Selectric III.

Among my obsolete skills, I can also use a sliderule, edit videotape with a razorblade, test a vacuum tube circuit for proper bias, and do a mean A-B roll edit on non-timecoded U-matic VTRs. And I was born in the 1970s! LOL

I found a chainsaw in the garbage on the way to school. Being the collector/fixer that I am, I grabbed the chainsaw and took it to school with me. My friends made jokes. None of the staff even batted an eye as a 14-year-old nonchalantly carried a chainsaw to his locker. I fixed the saw the next day in auto shop. And for the next 7 months, a fueled up and ready-to-go chainsaw sat in my locker because my mom would freak out if I brought home more "junk". A friend got on to a school bus with a rifle. It was seized solid, and wouldn't have fired at all. He walked right into the school with it. AFAIK, nobody freaked on him. It was to be used as a prop for the school play. Dave now has a PhD. Columbine really changed things.

What the hell did you do?

Wasn't the TI-99/4 the first 16 bit home computer? While it wasn't until 1981's TI-99/4A that you could play Parsec, there were many classic games you could play on either: Munchman. Car Wars. Hunt The Wumpus.

How about bolting a notebook computer to the reshelving cart?

The guy from Little Mosque on the Prairie could meet up with some chick from Wild Roses and then he could cut off her head as a pay-per-view event, but still no one would watch. As with all CBC programming, it would be culturally realistic enough, but as with all CanCon, it's all bad lighting, all bad acting, all bad concept, all horribly written, and all horrific direction. Welcome to Canadian television. No wonder I have an illegal satellite dish.

The people petitioning the CRTC to expand CanCon are just bitter that they weren't talented enough to get a Green Card.

No, Canada has the Bricklin, and we all know how well that turned out.

You are right, you speak hard truths, but you're right. The Canadian market isn't big enough to support a car industry, except through reciprocal agreements with our best friends, the USA. As for the Japanese stuff, it's ASSEMBLED in Canada, much like Ikea furniture is ASSEMBLED in your living room - it's not a product of your innovation, testing, or manufacture: its factory is a slightly larger Allen key, that's all.

Detroit/Windsor builds some of the most innovative and technologically amazing cars of the day, and had historically done so. The Model T. The Cord. The Hemi cars. The Omni/Horizon. The Chrysler minivan. US leadership and design for a US market, but MANY American cars were built in Canada.

US/CDN cars are well-designed and very innovative. The killer for The Big Three is that when you have a poor quality intake manifold casting built by someone with a 9th grade education making $40+ an hour, you can't afford to scrap it. (Case in point: intake manifold on my Dodge Ram was full of bubbles; it looked and sealed like Swiss cheese. No wonder the truck never had any power and had burned out three sets of exhaust valves.) You have to deal with it - put it on the car and pray it doesn't come back under warranty. The unions have driven the Big Three into their current state. A sock filled with mashed potatoes could make a better brake piston than some of the work I've seen the UAW's people turn out.

You need to kill the unions to save the Big Three.

Pull a Reagan. Fire them all, replace them with a bunch of pimply high school kids who like to ask questions, and I promise you the cars will be better.

As for me, I continue to drive domestics. It's easier to fix bad manufacturing than it is to fix bad engineering.

I disagree. If your IP address is by DHCP, it may change even more often than a teenager's cellphone number. How good is the ISP's record keeping?