On most cars the handbrake actuates the same rear shoes as the footbrake. If the rear shoes burnt out at 60mph (or 125) with the handbrake, so they would routinely with the footbrake. They don't.

We have some people here saying that the rear wheels would lock up, start a spin etc, while others say the handbrake is useless, does practically nothing. Which is it?

In fact a handbrake would/should be capable of locking the rear wheels - if you panic-pull it full on suddenly. What you should do in this situation is (as someone else said) hold in the release button and bring it on gently, easing off a bit at any sign of yawing. Bringing the speed down safely will be a slow process, but should be done long before you finish crossing Belgium, small country though it is.

The guy certainly would not have had this experience on a UK motorway. They are so crowded he would have rear-ended someone within seconds.

It certainly should not break, even with "panic" strength applied, unless the cable is partly rusted through (but don't you have a roadworthiness tests where you are?).

In fact it could take less force to slow the car from 125 mph down to about 40 mph than from "idling" speed to zero, although it will take longer. At 125 - 40 the car will be in a high gear (high speed but low torque) and there will be a lot of wind resistance as a bonus. Moving at "idling" the gearbox will be at a low ratio (low speed but high torque), and the idling governor might (depending on the set-up) give all the throttle it needs to keep it up to idling rpm.

Speak for yourself, I use mine at every traffic light rather than keeping my foot on the footbrake. Anyway, don't you have an annual roadworthiness test in your neck of the woods, handbrake included? The testers are quite fussy about the handbrake in the UK.

At that speed the car will be in a low gear, so it is more likely for the engine to overpower the handbrake. At 125 mph the engine will be in a high gear, so less likely.

It would in the Middle East.

Oh, and :-

5) He thought that to go electronic and/or to extend the srange, the dial code needed to be all digits. Why? The old alpha characters were already translated into digits, so why couldn't buttons do the same?

FTFA : "telephone exchanges that spelled pronounceable words were starting to be exhausted. All-digit dialing would create a cache of new phone numbers". Who said they had to be pronouncable? My postcode (zip code to Americans?) and most others are not pronouncable (eg mine starts "NP16" - the 16th area of Newport - and goes on with another digit and two letters which I dont want to put here) but neverthless are much easier to remember than all-digit phone numbers.

Oh, and :-

6) Shortened phone leads from 3 ft, which sounds long. However in the 1950/60s office phones were quite scarce and often shared between several people. Desks were placed face-to-face in pairs or groups of four to share a phone, in which case that 3 ft was all needed, and more. But, Karlin worked in a phone company office, where no doubt phones were all over the place and that fact does not seem to have occurred to him.

I have worked with people like Karlin. The same sort of busy-bodies who will change your chair height and adjust your screen brightness when you are not looking because they have views on the subject. They volunteer for the "Elf and Safety" courses and become the office safety vigilante, and get biscuits banned at meetings because they are considered unhealthy. They are jerks.

.... but not the order of keys on a calculator or a full PC keyboard. Se elsewhere in this discussion for why this is. .

Any number, like the plumber's, that you have just looked up in a directory or got off the Web needs to be transferred to the phone pad. Perhaps I'm retarded, but I cannot do that without glancing back at the number part way through.

Hey, steady on, sneakers and jeans and black turtleneck were cool (in 1963).

Karlin was cool? Sounds like a jerk to me.

1) Got numeric keys the wrong way up

2) Shortens co-workers phone leads in the middle of the night until they complained loud enough for him to hear. They might have been irritated long before that point, and how would they necessarily know to complain to him. Could he not have confined the experiment to his own phone? Co-incidentally, yesterday I rigged a cord for an overhead bathroom switch. It only took a minute to fix an optimum length by trying it, and getting my wife to try it too.

3) Replaces a rotary dial with push buttons - a no-brainer as all electro-mechanical devices were being replaced with electronics at that time.

4) Believed that people can remember a 7-digit number - they can't, unless it is one they use regularly

I know it's funny, but someone modded it as "Informative"! (as at 1014 hrs GMT) Is there a way here of modding a mod as "funny"?

You could start by cutting your Internet connection.

I take it that your post is irony, but pay annually for newspapers? Maybe direct from the publishers, but it is quite usual (in UK at least) to order papers and mags to be delivered from a local newsagent, and call in the shop to pay him once a week.

What makes you think that knowing people makes you like them? You must be really nice and have only ever met really nice people - in La La Land perhaps? Anyway, it did not work in the Balkans when Yugoslavia broke up. The worst disputes are within families, and the most brutal wars are civil wars, where people know each other only too well. Japan became uninsulated in the 19th century only to become embroiled in 20th century wars. In fact people have no particular reason to hate people they do not meet.

But it will remain possible to determine what someone's race is not. Blacks in the UK will complain if one of their number "has too much milk in their coffee", and I do not believe the Nazis bothered to determine what someones precise mix if they did not think it was pure Arian.