I worked as a telephone repairman in the dial era. Impatient diallers would often "push" the dial back rather than let it unwind naturally. Switch gear in the central office was sensitive to mis-timed pulses so wrong numbers often resulted. Also, as mentioned elsewhere, the early keypads sent pulses rather than DTMF, which made for an annoying clicking sound in one's ear.
There seems to be a few pilots on this thread but no one has yet mentioned trim tabs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tabs). The landing speed of a small plane is slower than cruising speed and the trim tab has to be adjusted or keeping the nose up will take take more strength than realized. That alone would cause further panic to an inexperienced person.
Thanks mgrouchy for another site that breaks pgdn. The header that never moves hides some lines on the next page. Reading becomes an annoying series of page downs then scroll up a bit to read the hidden sentences. Does this annoy anyone else?
>policeman-speak is still well-known for being unnecessarily verbose
Policeman-speak is closer to lawyer-speak because police spend a lot of time writing reports that are subject to cross examination in court. Police and lawyers must communicate clearly (in legal-speak) despite any difference in class.
My Toshiba Satellite Pro has a Celeron 497 MHz processor which Intel produced in 1999. It has been used almost daily since then, upgraded to XP but with the same 10 gig HD.
I still follow 1500 stocks with Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS (please, no codger jokes). I use a Python script to download daily Yahoo stock data and Lotus reads the resulting CSV data. Any changes to my stocks are written to a python database by Lotus also. As a wag said, if it works, don't fix it.
For Pythonistas, my little Twitter API script uses tweepy.py. Thanks to http://jmillerinc.com/2010/05/31/twitter-from-the-command-li... for the steps involved. As an exercise, you could scrape the required PIN with beautifulSoup or similar code to eliminate one step.
Honest question, why the need to apologize for being a former Windows admin?