drop-outs

n. 1. A variety of power glitch (see glitch ); momentary 0 voltage on the
electrical mains. 2. Missing characters in typed input due to software
malfunction or system saturation (one cause of such behavior under Unix when
a bad connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character
interrupts; see screaming tty ). 3. Mental glitches; used as a way of
describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a
couple of beats. See glitch , fried. A really serious case of drop-outs.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-21. The previous one is
73-05-19.

