In the pocket on the driver's door of my vehicle I have a hand-powered flashlight and a glass-breaking device. Hardly anyone else I know has a glass-breaking device, although they are readily available and cheap. Too many people just aren't safety conscious. And yes, on one occasion, I was in an accident (not our fault) in which we couldn't open the doors and had to crawl out through the windshield. It happens.

I was a year behind Gates at Harvard and don't remember signing any such thing. It's conceivable I've forgotten, but any evidence of this?

That isn't the story the way I have heard it (e.g. as on Wikipedia). Gates and Allen used Harvard facilities to adapt an Intel 8008 emulator that Allen had written for their Traf-o-Data project. There doesn't seem to have been any kind of contract that made that work the property of Harvard even if Harvard did not intend their hardware to be used for commercial projects. They polished it on time purchased from a time-sharing service.

My understanding is that Gates bought what was then called QDOS from Seattle Computer Systems for $50K. There is much to be said about Microsoft's later business practices, but as far as I can tell, the acquisition of MS-DOS was perfectly ethical.

Unless and until air traffic control systems that can deal with these things are in place, "flying cars" (whether actually car-like or not) will be a nightmare. In some places the airspace is already congested. Adding thousands of small aircraft will be a mess unless there is a major improvement in air traffic control.

Exactly. One really wants to know what their capabilities as computers are and what kind of programming environment the provide. It sounds like the instruction set is non-standard. Also, how much RAM do they have?

He has retired.

Maybe, but remember, counties are not independent governmental units; they are creatures of the state, under the authority of the state. It is possible that the specific legislation governing this gave control to the county, but generally speaking, states can indeed tell counties what to do. The relationship between states and counties is not like the relationship between the federal government and the states.

Exactly. I have a "smart" phone but dislike it and use it as little as possible. I use it as a telephone, as a camera, occasionally as a web browser, if my laptop is not convenient, and for little else. For payment I use a debit card, a credit card, or cash. I read text messages on it but almost never send them except in response to others. Why? For several reasons: (a) typing on the tiny keyboard is slow and error-prone, and switching from one language to another is a pain; (b) the tiny screen severely restricts how much I can see at one time; (c) its storage capacity is small and I don't want to keep everything in the cloud, from which I am at times disconnected; (d) the user interface is slow and painful; and (e) (closely related to (d)), it is a poor programming environment. Yet I am not a troglodyte. I use a real computer constantly. I've been programming for 52 years. I do almost all of my work on a GNU/Linux laptop, with a large TV screen when I am at home. I make heavy use of the command line. In most respects, my laptop is vastly preferable to a cell phone. As for communicating, I mostly use email, for some purposes with some people Facebook messages. Minimizing smart phone usage does not mean cutting oneself off from other people or from the tech world.

The discovery of the tape and the fact that it has been successfully read are not new, but the post does contain new information about what has since been done with it, how it has been made accessible, and what has been learned about its history. So I would say this post is not a dupe.

Does anyone remember Starbase graphics, the graphics/windowing system that came with HP-UX? Back in the 1980s we got a bunch of Bobcat's running HP-UX, with, for the time, lovely big color graphics terminals and thought they were great. Coming from 4.2BSD on Vaxen, HP-UX was a little weird - I still have code with #ifdefs in it for HP-UX - but it wasn't that weird, Starbase was easy to use. It was also closely tied to HPGL, so if you had something that ran a terminal, it was easy to send it to a pen plotter. Even so, it was an improvement in the end to move from HP-UX to BSD and from Starbase to X Windows.

Exactly. There's no need for everything to be on-line.

This is most likely more of Trump's bullshit, but are there any radar experts here who can comment on the validity of the claim that the turbines interfere with military radar?

The whole MAGA movement is on crack.

So, why were the stricter rest requirements a problem if the airline knew well in advance that they were coming? Is there a shortage of pilots in India? Was the airline not paying attention?