One day my old pal David has played a gig with some local musicians, including his roommate, Bob, who was a banjo player. After the set, Bob was going somewhere else with some other people, so he asked Dave to take his banjo home for him. On the way home, David stopped at the convenience store to get a six pack. As he was standing in line, he suddenly realized that he had left the car windows down, and that he was in a bad neighborhood. He rushed out, but, sure as hell, the worst possible thing had happened - exactly what he was afraid of - someone had spotted the open car windows, and thrown two more banjoes in the car.

Inthe 70s, Zork on PDP11s had GDT (game debugging tool). It allowed you to manipulate the arrays of objects, locations, etc. It had a password prompt, that demanded your name, cat and zip code. I recall that the name was supnik, the cat was barney, and I've forgotten the zip code. Bob Supnik was the DEC engineer that translated ZORK frm MDL to Fortran.

I steal the lever and see what I can get for it on Ebay.

Before you try using H2O2 80% as propellant, read about how dangerous it was as the monopopellant "T-Stoff" in the ME163. Lots of explosions and dissolved pilots...

DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) sold lots of systems that used these 8" disks. Lots of PDP-8 systems and PDP-11 systems used them for system devices. DEC's first VAX computers, the 11/780, used them as load devices for loading the microcode before the system would boot from a real hard disk. I have a bunch of them in my collection, attached to PDP-11s, still working fine.

It's a good point, that VHF allocation for CB would prevent some of the abuses it is prone too. But when it was allocated, radios that operated at 50 Mc and above . were exotic and expensive. Gear that would operate at 27 Mc was a lot cheaper and ruggeder than VHF gear would have been.

Not allowed to swear? Clearly you don't spend much time listening on 20 meters, or (at least in my local area) 80 meters. The amateur operators to be found there could teach sailors a few things about swearing.

This reminds me of the Friends episode where Monica has to make recipes for a chocloate substitute - Mockolate.

They need to remember what happened to Digg. Sites like this can lose almost all of their users in the blink of an eye.

"...and aren't exactly long lived" Model airplane glow plug engines exist in two states - not broken in yet, and slap worn out. There is no middle ground....

I dunno about the whole country, but in the two big cities I'm familiar with the TV situation, Dallas and Houston, the TV stations all have their broadcast antennas located at more or less the same location, so you don't have to change the antenna aim to change the channel.

Clearly you've never driven in Boston...I had a summer job there driving a patient transport van for the Boston State Hospital (a mental asylum), and I always felt like the lunatics I was driving around in the van weren't a patch on the maniacs driving the other cars.

He's not blaming the victim, he's quoting a Roling Stones song lyric. Jeez....woooshhhh

They say in the future, airliners will no longer have a pilot and a copilot. Instead, there will be just a pilot and a dog. The dog is there to bite the pilot if he tries to mess with any of the controls.

It goes back to the origins of radio. Originally, it was all amateurs messing arouind. Then, as it became more useful and of interest to companies and governments, amateur radio types were quick to restrict themselves as harmless and non-competitive to these interests, in order to keep from being squashed as nuisances. I think it ought to be more like licensing of pilots - those licensed at the lowest skill levels can't charge for flying and can only fly for personal gain under strict rules. As pilots progress in skill levels, they can perform a wider range of flying for hire. Something similar could be done for radio operations. As it is, it took decades to get legal permission to use a radio link to order a pizza.