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Comment More unenforceable laws (Score 1) 244

Sure buddy, add ebikes to tickets for handsfree cellphone use, seatbelt, child car seats, headlights on for low vis or rain, speed exhibition and sideshows, proof of insurance, limo tint, vehicle mods for height/wheels/neon/no2 /horsepower/smog compliance, among many others the police have no time for. What planet do lawmakers live on exactly?

Comment As someone who works in education (Score 1) 192

Schools are nothing but babysitting dens until the kids turn 18. Yes, there are some kids who take advantage of their environment, are fascinated with learning, and strive to excel knowing that knowledge creates opportunities. Assign all the homework you like but unless school policies, graduation requirements, and parental involvement changes absolutely nothing is going to happen. I spent my formative years in private school in the mid to late 1980's with my 2 main friends who went to public school and had radically different approaches to education, graduating highschool, and deciding to start their career by joining the military on the GI Bill for college. The street smart one figured out how to do the absolute minimum graduting by taking one year of general math, english, and social studies. He enlisted in the military, got a college degree, and ended up working in various government social service agencies. The booksmart one excelled in AP classes graduating highschool with honors, enlisted in the military, and then after years of alcohol abuse decided to switch to better living through homemade pharmaceuticals.

Comment Re: The short answer (Score 2) 62

"No, not even close. 1984 was the height of the home computer boom, and businesses, by that point, had a personal computer on most white collar worker's desks. Games consoles had been pretty much killed at that point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983), mostly by Jack Tramiel's war on Texas Instruments (!), and would take another half decade to start to become popular again. The Mac had just come out and was considered an impulse-buy personal computer. I always love how some know-it-all takes the narrow view on a comment. Maybe what your saying is true in industrial big town USA but not where i was from in small town outliers. The PC boom didnt happen spontaneously overnight and neither did the so called game console crash. If consoles did crash we wouldnt have had 3rd gen Ataris, 2nd gen INTV, Coleco, Lynx, Amiga among many others. I could made make a strong argument that PCs in everyday were not widely accepted in the household and only really became popular after businesses began switching over. "Typewriters were already looking antiquated at that point. Businesses bought word processors. Authors bought cheap CP/M machines or IBM PCs or other 8088 based personal computers." I wasnt talking about businesses at this point so whatever. Looking antiquated vs practical reliability are two different things. My folks' insurance agency switched to Wangs in the mid 80s and still did much of their paperwork on the typewriter as did those of us still in school. "The Unix PC was just absurdly expensive. That's the explanation. Had it sold for under $1,000, the world might have looked very different. But under $1,000 is tough for an OS that requires a hard disk." Maybe you dont know that even a full C64 build could cost 1k by the time you bought the computer, monitor, hard drive, floppy drive, discs, printer, cables, landline...all of which was pretty out of reach for most of us living in the 80s.

Comment The short answer (Score 2) 62

Computers were large, expensive, unable to interface, and impractical. The attitude at the time was, "id rather just have a typewriter" which honestly was still a luxury. If you wanted to game, you were better off buying a console. If you were writing, a typewriter with error correction paper was the way to go. Data processing was done with a calculator and spreadsheets were done by hand.

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