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Comment Re:As deadly as many others now. (Score 1) 181

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.

Comment Re:Missing some nuances (Score 1) 83

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.

Comment Wrong assumption in the article (Score 5, Interesting) 83

I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

Comment air traffic control (Score 1) 47

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.

Comment Re:Overreaction, but also poor planning (Score 1) 49

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.

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