Re: Big red "cause a massive problem" button
Because they are often security doors that need need a badge or code to open or be buzzed through by a receptionist on the way in. It's an exit button, not an entry button :-)
25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"egress buttons are usually similar to the Big Red Button but are Big Green Buttons instead."
Most of the time :-(
When they have a "push to exit" button and it's not the almost standard big green hemisphere, it can take a while to figure what to push to get out. I've turned off lights before because it's the only obvious nearby switch. In at least one case, the doors actually open so slowly that the "fix" was the place the button on the wall about 10 metres down the corridor. (An old Victorian building with heavy solid wood doors) The "fix" to the button being so far away was to place two signs. One near the button on a "music stand" affair that's actually quite hard to miss telling you this is "The Button" and another at the door telling you to go back 10m to find the button. :-)
Another downside of gas fire suppression is the sheer force of it going off. ISTR a story on this illustrious site of Glasgow City Councils data centre being severely damaged because the shock of the sudden pressure wave of the gas release kill all or most of their hard disks. I can't remember if this was a deliberate or accidental discharge.
I remember a 5.25" 40MB MFM Seagate running off an RLL controller to give me 65MB. It was standing vertically on it's side outside the case for some reason I don't remember when I knock the desk with my knee. It fell flat and never worked again <sob>[*]
* Both tears and me shouting out Son Of a BITCH!!
I suspect he's more of a Cheeky Girls man :-)
Yes, those who clicked the link, that IS the lyrics and no the record wasn't actually stuck :-)
Yeah, I was thinking that too. In orbit, being shy one leg likely isn't much of a handicap, if any.
He said "what it is about having a physical disability that makes it trickier and overcome those hurdles."
To be fair, I suspect he and they won't actually learn all that much that isn't obvious simply because this is one physical disability and possibly the one that will have the least effect. I'd imagine it will be great for him being microgravity and not having to deal with the earthbound problems a prosthetic leg can have, but I suspect people with other physical disabilities will not benefit much from this experiment, eg those missing a hand or arm, blind or deaf.
On the other hand, it's one small step (no pun intended).
"…everyone will be carrying an android or apple device into those same "sensitive" areas."
If it's truly sensitive, no, they won't. Everything with a camera or storage is placed in a lockbox at the entry point. Anything inside the sensitive area with storage is not taken out again in form where the data could be read.
Not so much sending all the feeds direct to Communist Part headquarters, more creating an entry into whatever networks they are connected to. Whether it could or will happen is a different question, but there have been reported instances of CCTV cameras and other IoT devices being co-opted into DDoS attacks, so if it's accessible, then anything is possible.
"The most dangerous manoeuvre on a motorway is changing lanes."
Only if it's relatively busy and you are not paying attention.
That aphorism is about as useful as "Speed Kills". It sounds scary and, IMHO, is part of what has led to the endemic lane hogging we see so much more of these days.
Of course changing lanes is more dangerous than not changing lanes. But not enough to matter for a competent and aware driver.
Disclaimer: I've been driving 40-60,000 miles per year for the last 40 years and have never had a prang yet. I'm constantly expecting that to change, which may well be why it hasn't happened yet :-)
Yes, this is exactly what I have found in traffic queue too. In general, the middle lane is quicker for exactly the reasons you state and my own experience.
On the other hand, on a less congested 3-lane motorway, but not "clear" by any means, I'm finding more and more that lane one is nearly empty, just lorries, often well spread out, Lane 2 a bit more congested, primarily cars and vans, most of whom will rarely move back to lane 1 even when there's lot of room and time before needing to pull out and pass the next lorry. Then there's lane 3, where everyone who wants to drive to the speed limit or faster are nose to tail, often never quite reaching the speed limit because the traffic in 1 and 2 keep coming into lane 3 because lane 1 is doing 56mph "lorry speed" and the cars not in a hurry are staying in lane 2 doing 60mph with the occasional trip to lane 3 when a lorry is passing another lorry.
I would imagine the view from above is almost the exact opposite of what you'd expect in terms of numbers of vehicles in the lanes, ie 3 is busy, 2 is medium and 1 is nearly empty.
...and I can't immediately think of a single story that envisaged telescope able to discern this level of information from such a distance :-)
Many of have postulated all sorts of "scanning" devices to identify the planets and habitability of a star system when the starship gets there or working from data sent by a probe that travelled there but I don't think any SF author actually wrote about this level of telescopy. I'm probably wrong, and I'm excluding anything written in the last 10-20 years where this level of telescopy isn't actually fiction, but fact.
This all excellent science, and it's especially nice when it out sciences the science fiction :-)
"And nor should you. The absence limit for the UK is 15 years. If you haven't lived in the UK for more than 15 years then you shouldn't have a vote. You left."
On the other hand, that was part of the point of being in the EU. Being able to live and work in other parts of the EU without having all the palaver of emigrating and possibly changing citizenship. Brits living in the EU were and are still British Citizens.
I think it really depends on what the vote is about and how many of the electorate vote and whether those voting are actually thinking about or just voting with their party/friends/peers.
An actual free and fair vote is incredibly rare for those reasons alone, never mind all the other reasons why people are swayed one way or the other without actually thinking through themselves. Democracy is the simply the least worst option. I think it was Heilein on one of his political rants that made a good point. If you have the right to vote, always go and vote, even if you support none of the candidates or their positions. At the very least, there's someone you want to vote against. A good argument for compulsory voting IMHO
"it's more a case that he's not allowed to speak in many of the modern day public squares of the internet,"
But Twitter isn't a public square. It's the "public square" inside a privately owned shopping centre/center/mall which is operated under the rules of the owners and management. No skateboarding, no photos, no handing out leaflets etc., etc., etc., without approval by the management.
ISTR someone here, many years ago, relating a story whereby someone had dropped a big screwdriver or spanner and it landed across the contacts of a car battery. The initial sparks welded it to the contacts whereupon it glowed brighter and brighter until it melted and finally broke the circuit :-)
Even when people come up with clever integrated clients, the big boys keep changing things to break them. Remember when there were Instant Messenger clients that tried to work with multiple systems? Constant upgrades to keep up with changes which, prior to the consolidated clients didn't seem to happen often at all.
In the UK, although you can buy a beer at the footy, it's not allowed to be consumed where you can see the match. ie you can go sit (more likely stand) in a bar, which is a bit pointless really since you just paid a lot of cash to get into the ground to watch the match in the first place. Scotland are even more strict. Corporate Hospitality is the only place you can get alcohol. It's been like that for quite a few years now.
"I could probably put together a team capable of creating Twitter (the platform) without much effort."
The clever bit about Twitter was the initial idea. A way of aggregating SMS messages into a social network so anyone with a mobile phone could join in. Everything else is just added icing on the idea.
Often, seemingly obvious ideas just needs someone to actually pick it up and develop it. Once it's been picked, lots of people than say, oh I could have done that.
I remember thinking about Doom many years ago and wondering if I could do something similar with photos and a map of the local town shopping centre where people could virtually walk around, click on a shop and enter their website (few actually had websites then so I'd also be offering them site building too.)
I didn't really have the time, skills or money to do anything with it and few years later things like Multimap, Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Streetview came along :-)
It's in production right now.
Not the Red Queen you meant, but an appropriate look to the near future:
Set in an alternate near-future America, where democracy is replaced by a monarchy and the population is separated into a common-blooded society (known as "Reds") and the powerful elites (or "Silver-blooded")
"I'll add for reference that I regularly burn a 13 gallon kitchen garbage bag full of paper containing personal information,"
Wow, that's a lot. Although it does depend on what you mean by "regularly". Most people use it as a synonym for frequently, which I assume you are also doing here. Regularly could mean June 1st every two years, rather than frequently like say, every month or so.
Do you get a lot of snail-mail spam from banks, insurance and the like with your PII plastered all over it?
He's still publish the equivalent of SFTW, but not always every week at https://autosaveisforwimps.substack.com/
"That would include the fatasses, I supposes. Can you even run Twatter on that?"
If you render down the fatasses [sic] and use the resultant fats as fuel in the generators, then yes, for a while.
Musk (in the bowels of Twitter HQ): "Keep shovelling the lard boys, we need to keep the servers powered!. More fat! Get me more fat!!"
The plan is to stop bundling chargers/PSUs with devices. The upside is you have fewer chargers sitting around and more or less any you do have will work with any device. The downside is that many people buying a new charger/PSU will buy based on price and some will be buying "fake" chargers from Ali Baba et al for £2 including shipping from China.
The EU legislation has been specifically written to allow for future changes in technology. The Indian legislation is very likely to be a cut'n'paste with localisations. Future US legislation is highly likely to be butchered by special interest groups and end up optional but set in stone so people can point to it as unworkable and probably not even be ratified until it's out of date anyway.
A friend of mine once related a story about a course he was on. The lecturer basically "read" a chapter from the book per lecture and, being a "busy" researcher, disappeared at the end, no time for questions or discussion. The class attendance got smaller and smaller over the course of the term as students realised they got just as much information simply be reading the book and not bothering to turn up to have someone read it to them!
Many, many years ago when I went to university, one of the first things we were told was to head off to the Student Union bookshop where we'd almost certainly find second hand copies of all or most of the books on the reading list. From what I understand of "modern" education, that's less of an option these days as the "current reprint" version of text books is the only acceptable version due to changes and updates in some cases, especially when the lecturer is the author.