Re: The High Way Code needs to be enforced 4MPH!!!
Electric scooters are illegal full stop in NY. Yes, including the Segway and Hover Boards.
No-one gets stopped for riding one, though.
7284 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Actually, John , the speed limits in most urban and suburban locations hereabouts are designed - from data captured by those suspicious-looking cables "they" sometimes stretch over the road - with the goal of ensuring a given amount of revenue from speeding tickets.
'Round here the "magic number" is 65%. That is: after measurement, the speed limit is set at the average which 65% of the local traffic moves at in that place. I'd bet time of day plays a part too, but cannot confirm that rush-hour is a favourite sampling point.
So in point of fact, at least in my locale, speed limits are *not* a limit, they are a threshold for end/beginning of month revenue generation.
Two observations:
20 per 100,000 = 1 per 5000 or .02%, which is a very low risk factor from where I sit.
Missing were any questions along the lines of:
Were you operating a GoPro during the accident?
Did you begin your accident on a standard thoroughfare, or was it more like the railings of a concrete staircase or perhaps the roof of a garage or shed?
Were the wheels of the scooter on the ground immediately before the accident or were they above the footboard, in mid-air, during an attempted loop-de-loop?
Were you the sole occupant of the scooter at the time of the accident, or was your cameraman/camerawoman taken to a different hospital under an assumed name?
I've never done that.
I did write a deletion script for another department which escaped its playpen and wreaked nagasaki across a wide swath of production, high-volume directories.
I was able to put on a horrified look and say "Who changed my code?" before we got to the Blame Allocation Phase, fortunately.
Hahaha. Good one.
Nope, it has to do with the nominal designed working <whatever> of <whatever>, and engineers designing stuff to work outside that safety envelope for a bit (guv). In the case of the shuttle, it would be the rated thrust specification.
Hence "Take the reactor to 110% Mr Christian and be quick about it or we'll never catch the Red October".
Or so I'm told. My original thought was that it was due to the problems of using calculators that work in metric but that once they've had the mode changed, no-one can figure out how to put them back in Imperial Units because the inch-thick manual has been lost for yonks.
Wait, Artemis gets a day named for it because it is being tested?
Fuck that. I declare today "Annoying perl thing I dreamed up to be thoroughly useful but which keeps crashing thanks to some stupid only-onna-Tuesday bug in a library file" day.
When it flies, *then* the rocket can have its day.
Pfft! I owned a '64 Mini Traveller*.
All reversed polarity means is you have to reverse *all* the polarities back to the breakers. Easy peasy, volts up the fingers. Aggleaggleaggle.
Of course, if the polarity is reversed on the drop from the pole pig, life gets a bit more pyrotechnic.
Aggleaggleaggle.
* Positive ground electrics - something to do with corrosion resistance. Wiring accessories like radios was "fun". Also had a genny, so those accessories had better not be too thirsty.
Some years ago working in NY I was walking past our coffee point when the secretary/departmental PA gave a shriek and announced to the world she'd just been electrocuted while moving "a wire".
I took a look as the guilty ones gathered around.
"hmm, let's see: The kettle and the coffee machine are plugged into this half melted white extension cord intended for running three lamp-type devices. So is the fridge You idiots could have killed someone".
"How could we have known the cord would melt?" asked the UK contractors gathering sheepishly around me.
"How could you not?" I demanded. "You all have 'A' level education and above. The cord is clearly labelled as having a maximum capacity of 15 amperes at 110 volts nominal. Let's have a look at all the crap you've plugged in: Kettle - 1 kilowatt. That's around 9 amps right there. Coffee machine: .8 kilowatt for another 7 amps in change. And the pie-ace de resistance? You plugged the bloody fridge into that too. The compressor on that bugger draws 10 amps on it's own. Boil the tea while the fridge door is open and I'm surprised you couldn't smell the technology melting. You can think yourselves luck you didn't kill someone."
Naturally someone argued with me. She pointed out that the coffee machine drew *no* amps around 50% of the time because the thermostat turned it off. I just told the secretary to have this rocket scientist do the cable moving from now on.
"Plumbers grease?"
When I go a-plumbing I carry a tin box full of stuff including a blowtorch, squeezy flint lighter thingy, solder, emery cloth, wire brushes, a bunch of copper pip and fittings, a tin of flux and a brush for same in a little jar.
There is no grease. I'm not sure in what capacity it would ever be called for. You certainly wouldn't want it contaminating any lines you had just carefully soldered together.
I'm sorry - are you equating the nationalistic fervour that fuels the will to go to war with the sadistic culture evinced by the Japanese toward their captives and the Nazis toward "undesirables"?
*My* point was that I wasn't going to give arguments such as yours any weight in the "we should feel bad for what we did in WWII - especially the Little Boy and Fat Man events" debate.
For all the stories you can dredge up of bad behaviour by Allied occupation troops, no-one was herded into cattle cars for a Xylon-B shower or starved and beaten to death during forced labour. Dresden burned? So did large parts of London and Coventry. Hiroshima? The Batan Death March and the events in China.
Save your sympathy for those that deserved it.
As for the sadism in Japanese Culture, it predates contact with "WASP" Europe (actually Catholic Spain but let's not split hairs).
But I'll readily concede that many times in the past Britain - England really, hasn't covered its reputation in glory, and that America has a past it would today rather hadn't happened the way it did.
During wartime *everyone* is arrogant and racist. The term "cheese scarfing surrender monkeys" was coined on a comedy show, but was soon being bandied about by anyone in the US with strong feelings about the French holding back from Operation Democratic Freedom of Democracy.
And the Senate really did have their French Fries renamed Freedom Fries in the canteen.
By my calculations at the time this meant that the despised French were now the only native speakers of Freedom (formerly thought to be the prerogative of American Blowhard Politicians on The Make).
That aside, I cannot feel sorry about "racism" against WWII era Japan. I saw firsthand what the cost of a stay in a Japanese prisoner of war camp would be like - a neighbour's wounds hadn't properly healed by the end of the 1950s. I believe myself that the Axis nations led the world in Xenophobia.
Why so many are bound and determined to have another go at implementing those views is a source of bewilderment to me. Just think: this time the bad guys are *us*, and we'll know it when it all comes to a sorry end.
Oh well.
The question of the importance of having a carrier present during the events of 1944, South China Sea, Battleships 'n' Dreadnoughts the sinking of, are of little interest as they include no tanks whatsoever. What good a superdreadnought class ship absent the mighty Cromwell, doubty Churchill or the redoubtable Panther ausf G?
Our place has set this up using a Microsoft product.
It does not challenge on activating outlook.
It does not challenge on remotely accessing the system.
It does not challenge when connecting a phone to the mail system.
It DOES challenge randomly about once every three weeks while I am in the middle of my turn at covering the servicenow tickets. If I don't respond on my cell phone (in my pocket and tangled with my keys etc) in thirty seconds it shuts down my email server connection and getting it to come back up is a journey of discovery involving clicking on links, randomly shutting down and restarting outlook and on one particularly desperate occasion clearing off a *very* busy desktop and rebooting the workstation.
The wonderful chaos that ensues when my password needs changing is a thing of beauty too, as the email is configured to demand a change (by silently disconnecting from the server and hanging) in the middle of the day, whereas the network wants it doing at my convenience but nags me for two weeks. Password aging is the cowpat in the field of computer security. A bread and circuses approach that just makes for people gaming the password vetting algorithm and database.
Where's the Tylenol?
Bah!
As a protest against my full of himself new boss and his idiotic "standards" which only I was told to follow ("as a pilot of the idea") I wrote an entire Cobol program that read as a narrative of an attempt to seduce Debby Harry in the backseat of a car.
It got verified *9* times (the narrative was a good 'un but totally PG when all was read and typed, more boddice-ripper than porn) and the head of the punch room stood over me flexing her biceps while I ran it to prove it was a real program and not just time-wasting. Only program I ever got back with zero punch transcription errors. I got smirked at by every one of the punch girls too. Result.
Later, while sharing that story over a pint with some Sperry consultant bods who had let slip they worked at that shop too, one of them exploded that he had worked on that program, assumed it was a joke, added some comments of his own and sent it back to the head of programming - and damn near lost his job.
Not sorry. It was a simple program. If he was so damn lazy as to not bother desk checking it or, more importantly, not bother checking the schedule for it - it ran weekly per my memory - then he deserved to be dinged.
Well, carelessness in use of such a short snippet of English might send a shiver up the spine of anyone expecting to be reading code written by the same hand presumably with the same attention to detail.
I'd make a similar observation about documentation, but no-one writes it any more.
Development costs of aircraft, especially those which will be sold to Govt, are supported by tax money "subsidies" if not outright tax money paid-for development programs.
Even Musk gets tax dollars to defer the costs. Consider, NASA *gave* him a pre-built, fully tested and working launch pad.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing, just that the Administrative Will is still a major factor.
Without funding from the public purse it all still comes down around everyone's ears.
Funding is scarce, politicians think in terms of payoffs within their terms of office and spaceflight is expensive and hard to get right. Next up: The ocean turns out to be wet.
Kudos for the KSC pix. I will probably be there again in January. Love that place, me.
Even if the astronauts on site make me feel sad because of the loss of vision at the highest levels for their hard work.
The US will go back to space in a big way the moment it looks like the other contenders look likely to become the primary presence. China would be my guess. No American president will want to be the one who "Lost Space to the <insert other nation>".
I'd love to see another consortium of nations get serious about going into the business of manned space stations, moon landings etc. But the money needed is serious, and the stream of it needs to be long-term.
I had a colleague who would tease our Sun engineer into apoplexy in hardware provisioning meetings by suggesting that we buy switches on eBay.
He would have cost comparisons, printouts etc and could do the sincere suggestion thing with an absolutely straight face.
Poor old Max (name changed) would melt down every time.
See your UPS serial cable and raise you a box of visually identical but mutually incompatibly wired Sun SPARC null modem cables.
None labelled.
Every flippin' time remote console access was required there was a ten minute mix-n-match cable to server fiasco. Nearly drove me nuts. I offered to label the cables and was told in no uncertain terms not to do so "in case the labels caused confusion".
Same crew kept the departmental dry erase markers in a ziplock baggie with permanent markers. Every presentation started with a ten minute shout fest as eveyone warned everyone else in the room about the pens while the one who wanted to draw a f*cking diagram madly searched for the one usable dry erase in a bag of unfit-for-purpose.
I eventually bought my own pens (4 bux from Staples) and an eraser (about the same) and my next visual presentation was given to an incredulous repeating chorus of "you bought your own pens????" that drowned out my narrative.
All Unix SAs of course, regarded themselves as the bees knees but were seen by everyone else as the Laurel and Hardy of the enterprise. I never met a less agile or more reactionary team.
They achieved new highs of "popularity" when they informed the Grand High Muckety Muck that they could not shut down our Unix server farm "by application, in a rolling fashion" because "that was a windows server methodology". Truth was no a single person on that team had the faintest idea of who was running what applications on each server since they never did any kind of assay when provisioning a new server.
All changed now. New brooms at the top levels (along with that impossible rolling shutdown debacle) enforced more control and monitoring. You probably heard the wailing on the other side of the Atlantic.
GO #ABCD 20 - start the job with paper tape input
GO #ABCD 21 - Start the job with punch card input
GO #ABCD 25 & 27 ibid
GO #ABCD 29 - abort the job (usually) - yes, under George II+ you had to type GO when you wanted things to STOP.
The number after the program name was the address of the starting command in the compiled program.
Some programs had a "go type entry block" so you only ever typed GO #ABCD. I've never found out why.
On the 1900 series OU #ABCD 8 was useful too, as word 8 was the program counter. Good for finding forever loops (if the speaker warble wasn't indicative).
Though all those commands were actually EXEC commands as I remember them. George was a set of modules you could load (or not) to get a job done with minimal interference from the operators. The "steering lines" (aka JCL) were a drop-through action list. Dead simps. So you operator would type something like:
FI#XKYE#GEOG 1 (find the input spooler in file GEOG and assign it to unit number 1)
blahblahblah
INPA R WAS XKYE
XKYE HALTED TR 1 FIX (the spooler had renamed itself and stopped pending the loading of a paper tape and the operator pressing the green button on the reader)
GO#INPA 20
blahblahblah
INPA HALTED HH (the spooler has finished and is ready for the next job)
FI#GEMA#GEOG (load the central control module from file GEOG - ours was called GEMA after someone's girlfriend)
GO#GEMA
ABCD R WAS GEMA (your ABCD program is now running)
ABCD HALTED HH (and it just finished)
FI#XKZE#GEOG 3 (Load the output spooler and assign it to unit 3 - the line printer in this case)
blahblahblah
OUTA R WAS XKZE
OUTA HALTED LP3 FIX (operator loads paper and presses the green button on the printer)
GO OUTA 25 (I think, it has been over 40 years since I did this for real)
(EARSPLITTING BANGBANGBANG NOISES FROM THE BARREL PRINTER)
OUTA HALTED HH (the print run is finished and the operator, ears bleeding, can tear off the report)
If you needed more room for ABCD you would DE#INPA before you GO#GEMA'd. There was something of an art to juggling the memory. I remember one consultant we had who would lobotomize EXEC on the fly from the console so they could finish in only 3/4 the memory they needed.
Ah the happy sound of the print drum of the console Westrex slamming into its lid so it snapped like and angry crocodile when the machine "went illegal" because someone had typed DE#ABCD when there was less than two kilowords of core memory unused. Ah the happy sounds of the cursing operator typing like mad when a stupid compilation mistake did the same from a program test run.
Worse days.
"this might have been okay in 1995 but it sure as hell aint now."
I think the aggrieved commentor was reacting to the slew of "Right on, I do this!" responses.
I agree with him. If your users are writing everything to My Documents there should be a policy and procedure to automatically move that stuff where the IT Crowd want it to be upon Log On.
If it is a proper delta backup, the IT bods can still have fun explaining that the two hour sign-on will be a lot shorter if people just save to the network etc etc etc. Maintaining the bespoke system will also be a slot you can fit the departmental plodders into, an easy job that doesn't change much over time.
IT departments that get reputations as unhelpful gits will eventually find themselves outsourced. Won't solve the users' problems, but will add a whole new level of pain for no real benefit.
Think of it like the domestic electricity supply. You don't have to understand how three phase distribution networks work to use it, and you have to be willfully thick to make it dangerous. All the fixable stuff has been fixed for the uneducated masses needing to make toast or watch Come Dancing.
Everyone is banging on about the best way to use the Amazon payment system, but to me the thing that is ringing WAY out of tune is the fact that there can be devices attached to an Amazon account that the owner of the account cannot see, and administer out of existence.
This is the key factor in the whole sorry story (it is a mark of how inured we've become to such things that I don't say the original unauthorized access is the key factor - though it should be of course).
Why devices attached to accounts are not announced in the dashboard, and why they take such effort to be rid of is the real story.