Yes, I realized that the world had really changed when I started having to take account of time deltas greater than three hours in both my work and my recreational lives. Back when the calculators we love so much were created, correspondence between continents was not routine like it is today. Of course, this is still mainly limited to the developed world, although that is projected to rapidly change, and soon. I wish I could say I'm hopeful that the conversations engendered by this coming surge of new netizens would all be as rational, calm and friendly as discussions here tend to be. Even when we are annoyed with one another, we tend to be civil about it. But recent years have shown that enhanced communication doesn't necessarily contribute to better understanding between peoples. It should have been obvious to me that people can spew hatred over the Internet just as easily as fellowship, but it wasn't. I still think that when the sum of all the conversations are added up, the balance is helpful, constructive, rational, loving and above all, useful to human beings everywhere. Wikipedia shows this at work. There is a lot of entropy tugging at that project, but the content still seems to tend toward all those qualities I just mentioned, through the strenuous efforts of lots of dedicated folks.
I just had my day interrupted by a blown clutch, and had a spun down moment, and that's what came up. We now return you to your HP calculator enthusiast's discussion forum, already in progress.
Regards,
Howard