In an American context maybe, but the article wasn't about America, it's about Britain, where the "sport" of "hunting" is almost completely non-existent. Excluding fishing, the active population of "hunters" is probably only a few tenths of a percent.
But having watched the article, I thoughts - "So what?". Both sides presented in the discussion are correct to a degree from their own perspectives : the animal welfare people are worried about this encouraging the "hunting/ shooting/ torturing" fraternity (and I'm sure that it will ; the pest control people don't see any significant difference between a squirrel and a bunny rabbit.
Rabbit stew - haven't had it for years, you can't get the bunnies unless you want to breed, grow, slaughter, skin and gut them yourself. And having done that in the past, I'm not particularly keen on the hassles of breeding and growing the bloody animals. Squirrels, which haven't gone through hundreds or thousands of generations of selective breeding for docility and easy handling : nope, severely don't need that hassle. And do I trust a pest-control company to not (accidentally) slip the occasional poisoned squirrel or bunny into the food chain - of course I don't.
It's a publicity stunt ; and quite a successful one, I'll grant.
Stacking 10 images simply improves the image quality by removing hot pixels.
Where'd you get that idea from? Hot pixels are removed by taking dark frames at the same temperature as your exposures and subtracting them from your exposures before processing.
While your flat field images improve (to a degree) your signal to noise ratio. OK, it's crude approximation. but without doing a full statistical analysis, what you're going to get is a crude approximation.
Answering the original question : for meteor photography, then a plain camera with a fairly wide angle lens is fine - anything much longer than 100mm FL is going to capture an un-usefully small area of sky, and your odds of getting even one meteor on any particular shot is pretty slender, even for a rich shower like the Perseids. If you don't want star trails, then restrict yourself to images of just a minute or two ; if you don't mind star trails, then your sky darkness becomes the limiting factor. When you see a meteor in approximately the right area of sky, stop the current image collecting light and start the next image. Stacking software... that's fine. Dark images and flats... that's fine. Image management... that's fine, pick a tool, they're not in short supply.
Enjoy your astrophotography. I am planning on visiting the family around that time, and I think I may take my tripod and number-crunching tools with me. See what we get - probably the inside of a cloud!
Passports are only required if you leave the country.
Strictly, I thought that their purpose was to request other governments to assist the passport holder in their travels, and practically to assist in paperwork on re-entry to your home country by providing evidence of a right to enter. At least, that's how I read the wording on my passport, and I'd be (only moderately) surprised if it was significantly different in other countries, diplomats being what they are. My wife's first several visas to visit the UK had large letter writing indicating that she didn't have unlimited right of either re-entry, or of residence at all.
I also seem to recall having much the same conversation on SlashDot when GWBush ("Shrub") became the first president of recent times to not have a passport. I don't remember what the wash-up of that was, or if he ever bothered to get a passport (since it was not credible that he'd ever be travelling without a suitably accredited bunch of SS bodyguards and probably a fist full of diplomats, so his identity was never likely to be seriously in doubt).
The plan at the time was to just use the state-issued drivers licenses/id's anyways.
Possibly also discussed in the same discussion : that again begs the question of what non-drivers would do. I already get trouble at the bank when they ask for my drivers license to probe my identity, and I hand over my (perfectly valid) driving license, which contains no photograph nor any other form of security markings, no holograms, nothing - just various printed reference numbers and my name and address. The youngsters behind the counter look highly confused and often have to call for a supervisor. (That's a UK license, and I'm already chuckling at my various friends who have got the new "photo drivers license" (which is only an adjunct to the "paper license" such as I have) and are discovering that they have to get it replaced every 10 years, whenever they move, etc, etc, at a non-trivial cost. There's 25 years to go before I have to return my license and so participate in the new scam, though it is likely that I'll do something that will trigger a new (10-year, photographic) license being issued. And no, we're not required to carry our licenses here, despite what the Police tell people. So I don't.)
Part of the security is no doubt due to the intense control and monitoring of its citizens and visitors.
The citizens make up about 16% of the population (WIkipedia's figure - from my visits I'd have thought that was a bit high, but that was in the oilfield, which most of the citizens try to avoid contact with) ; the remainder is various immigrant workers and tourists. And the non-citizen workers and tourists don't get to say anything about how the country is run.
I don't have any real concerns about going back there to work ; but I don't have any illusions about what would happen to me if I came into any sort of conflict with a citizen or "the authorities".
Metaphorical, or have you guys introduced Identity Cards of some sort? Or do you have to present your passport (as my Russian wife had to when she still lived in the USSR) when it's demanded by internal police?
When I am learning something, I have little interest at all in whether or not my teacher has laid a good cable that morning, or shouted at the TV because of "X". So what benefit would there be from a blog - a semi-continuously updated description of the professor's life, activities and thoughts? Now, if I were a researcher working with a professor, when every day at the coalface is likely to bring something which is actually NEW... then yes a blog is appropriate. For the 17th presentation of the isotope geochemistry course, where nothing new has been added in the last half-decade, I fail to see the relevance of a blog. Course websites, containing relevant paperwork (referenced papers, lecture summaries/ synopses, etc), assignments, apologies that Proff Bloggs will be taking next Monday's lecture, and an invite to buy the professor beer on Friday afternoon - that's relevant. Updating the site to reveal more parts of the course every few weeks may also be relevant (you don't want people rushing too far ahead, or doing all year's assignments in the first week). But a blog? Give me a break!
Unfortunately, I have to share a very long "undefended" border. Now, if there was something I could do about that, I would.
Errr, well, it takes the actions of two countries for a border for it to be undefended. There's to prevent your government from sending out relays of soldiers in all-terrain vehicles to patrol your side of the border and detain (or deter) any illegal immigrants from the poverty-stricken south. Nothing apart from fear of the neighbours that you're not defending yourselves against.
Hmmm, I was just wondering if that claim was still valid. Germany has a pretty long border, with IIRC, either EU borders (free transit of goods, services and people) or their Swiss border. Hmmm, Liechtenstein too? France too, if you include the marine borders ; no, not France, I forgot the Med - probably borders Lybia.
However, I am not averse to answering any questions the BSA may ask as long as it doesn't compromise my NDA and security ethics,
In your jurisdiction, does having signed an NDA over something (e.g., the existence of an illegal activity within your company) protect you from criminal prosecution for active or passive participation in the crime itself? I suspect that if you tried that argument in court over here [note], you'd find that the charges laid against you - of "Conspiracy", or "attempting to defeat the ends of justice", depending on which of the several jurisdictions you found yourself in - have tarrifs against them which are not any lighter than actually carrying out the crime in question.
Now, if you blow a whistle, then you might have a different outcome - in large degree. But that's not the passive stance that you're talking about. If you could provide grounds to justify a belief that the main criminals would have killed you by using you for welding practice or something equally distasteful, then you'd have a reasonable defence and may get away with a suspended or very light sentence. But you would get the conviction that you deserve. (In the eyes of the law ; which are the eyes that count in this circumstance.)
[note] in reality, if you were naive enough to be try it, you'd probably be trying it first with your own lawyer, whose alternating eruptions of laughter and tears at the ignorance of the masses may hint at how the court would treat it.
So it's intent is to be a traffic hazard and introduce risk in to the equation?
No, it's intent is to SCARE drivers, because scared drivers, on average, drive more cautiously. (They also probably drive less often, which can be much much cheaper than building more roads.)
Whether there is any actual DIFFERENCE in risk at roundabouts, compared to the level of risk at any intersection, is a different question to whether people are more afraid of one design or the other. And probably the levels of risk are not much different between crossroads, light-controlled crossroads and roundabouts. I see broadly similar amounts of broken glass on both. The statisticians could probably have a field day arguing which is actually the riskiest, but the psychologists would quickly home in on "the unfamilar" as being the scariest. Did you follow the link I posted to the "Magic Roundabout"? It's not a joke, and I well recall the terror with which I first encountered it, shell shocked from seeing the approach signs describing it's layout. It's an absolutely terrifying place, and it had me slow right down to navigate it. Far more than I'd expected to. Very effective. Of course, it's probably just annoying to the people who traverse it four times a day, so perhaps they should also randomly close some lanes.
The norm in Britain, where they've always been popular, is to call them a "roundabout" (all one word). I recall an American friend taking a detour to "the only roundabout in New England" just so he could have a laugh about how difficult his countrymen found it to handle the idea. That was 1990 or 1991, so I gather that things haven't changed much.
people are constantly stopping at those things when no one is there, or trying to go even though they don't have the right away.
Confusion, fear, uncertainty, doubt... leading I hope to reduced driving speeds. Sounds to me as if the roundabout is working as intended. It's their job to make drivers think harder and pay closer attention to the actions of other road users. That generally leads to lower speeds, which in turn leads to fewer accidents, less injury and damage in each accident, and (this is the bit that people find counter-intuitive) higher throughput of traffic. Did someone lie to you when you were a trainee driver, and leave you with the impression that driving was meant to be easy or fun? Probably - it's in the nature of driving instructors to do that - I certainly do so when I'm trying to teach the wife to drive. But you know it's a lie really, don't you?
I remember when I was student at university, about 5 years before I started to learn to drive myself, meeting a car driving around a roundabout in the wrong direction. The meeting was head-on, and I climbed off my pedal bike, leaned in through the drivers window and told him just what a plonker I thought he was, before pedalling off into the distance. Even where we've had roundabouts for many decades, people still get them wrong and so you have to treat them with caution.
Try this little beauty for size : Swindon's "Magic Roundabout". Think that'd go down well in your neck of the woods?
Enlighten me please : you and the submitter use the term "rolling stop", which obviously means something in the States, but is flat-out nonsensical here. In British English, to "stop" means to cease movement, whereas to "roll" is a form of movement. So a "rolling stop" is a complete contradiction in terms. If you've not brought the vehicle to a halt while de-clutching the engine, put your gearbox into neutral and are ready to swap foot brake for parking brake, then you've not "stopped" ; you are still moving. Does the term have some meaning in the US equivalent of the Highway Code? Or, for that matter, in the European equivalents, as I'm likely to drive in Europe on many occasions in the future.
In inclement weather, or other situations in which the speed limit is too high to drive safely,
You seem to realise what the parent post doesn't clearly express (or seem to care about) : a speed limit is the maximum speed that it is considered safe for any vehicle to travel on that section of road under ideal conditions. Practically any deviation of conditions from ideal would therefore mean that the safe driving speed is lower, often substantially lower, than the speed limit.
People need to pass their driving tests more often.
He volunteered to go there. If he gets killed fighting America's wars for them, tough shit. (I write as one whose nephew is trying to get into the British army, and who knows that many members of his family think that he's wrong for doing it.)
Well, it's certainly a contender. Up there with QC and recruitment manager in a brothel. And... umm, I can't think of many others as attractive.
Interesting factoid in the article that the US market for dope is given as $18 billion/year. That's about $60pppy. which isn't too bad.
So, the big question: has taking this group of users of previously illegal drugs out of the illegal drug market and into the legal pharmaceutical market had any noticeable effect on the illegal (unlicensed/ untaxed) dope market? And does this tell us anything about the oft-made claims that dope is a "gateway" drug, which leads people into contact with (and by implication, use of) other illegal drugs?
Actually it sounds like they have already done this:
"We've captured and saved thousands of IP addresses of alleged offenders, along with logs and screenshots which prove wrong behaviour. "We are initiating a conversation with enforcement agencies and we are willing to provide all the information we have."
Are they going to press charges? Do you think that site created by a lone developer has the legal resources to do that against that many offenders? Do you really think any law enforcement agency has the resources to investigate thousands of complaints with little more than a screenshot of someone's junk and their IP address?
One case, one single solitary case, of an under-age-of-consent person signing on in $LOCALE , and then waving their dangly bits around to be captured by (I've already forgotten the service's name - SlashRoulette, or something like that?) SlashRoulette's servers, is going to have the owners, administrators etc hauled up on the old pyre of public opinion and burned at the stake as child pornographers. "And quite rightly," I should say as I feel our unthinking-knee-jerk-reacting overlords focus their baleful glare upon me, like the Eye of Sauron.
Hang on - is this what was being copied in that stupid, irritating piece of shit that SlashDolt had going a few months ago. That is a staggeringly stupid idea. I mean, that is industrial grade stupidity. Who built the Beowulf cluster of lobotomised hydrocephalous abortions that thought up that one? That (the dumbBeowulf) was an idea impressive in it's technical achievement, but practically a complete waste of money, b rains (OK, not brains) and time.
Parsing the description of "iPad owners", I find myself at odds with the details of their conclusions:
tend to be wealthy,
I read that as evidence of a prolonged period as a successful thief or exploitative employer. There are counter examples, but they're a vanishingly small proportion.
sophisticated,
Uh, huh - so they use the whole chicken instead of just one feather. Riiiight. "Perv" is what the denizens of my street would call them, punctuated by the impact of half-bricks on faces.
highly educated
Compared to just which amoeba?
and disproportionately interested in business and finance,
Nothing interesting to do with their lives, I almost feel sorry for them.
while they scored terribly in the areas of altruism and kindness.
Still nothing better to do with their lives, but my feelings are receding from the area of mild sympathy.
In other words, 'selfish elites.'"
Sound more like a bunch of miserable cunts to me. I wonder how many iFeminineHygieneProduct users have been mugged for their ego-boosters so far.
What was that rather disturbing image that I heard a few days ago on here? Oh yes, "golf clap". Tiger has been doing what he didn't oughta. Again.
OK, you didn't see the several other weights and measures puns I worked into the original version, before deciding that less is more, and deleting the lot. Sheesh, do people think that I just type the first random thought that comes into my head?
If, by some stretch, we managed to get into space, and found an intelligent species you can be sure that various sects of religious wackos will quickly try to convert them to Earthly religion. And probably, judging how these things historically worked, slaughter most of the in the process (in the name of progress and for their own good).
Somewhere out in the relatively close areas of the Milky Way, an alien race has it's own Alien-SlashDot, where Alien-ReligiousNutjobs are being discussed in terms of them converting the Aliens(to them, i.e. US) to $AlienReligion, or to fertilizer. And on AlienWorld there is an AlienHawking saying that "We Aliens ought to be careful about going Out There, in case we meet something as nasty, as xenophobic and as cowardly as ourselves and be destroyed by them."
Galaxies sterilised by different species of nut jobs, each proselytising in favour of it's own imaginary friend in the sky. What a gloomy prospect.
I guess we won't have to worry about 12-21-2012 after all.
Errr, since my level of worry about 2012-12-21 (ISO format date) was precisely zero above (or below) my worry about any randomly selected day of the week, does your reassurance mean that I can now be (guardedly) optimistic about that date?
What the hell is so special about that date anyway? It's not palindromic, unless you're in a locale that uses MM-YYYY-DD ; oh no, it's not even palindromic then. Does it spell something rude when typed into a base-13 calculator and turned upside down, or something? Oh, hang on - this is SlashDot, and that's a date of cosmic importance and significance? So it's the date on which SlashDotters will get laid? I'll tell the wife to put it in her diary.
Just kidding. I suspect most basement Ham radio geeks are literally waiting for the day where they can assist in some sort of emergency situation.
Did Canada ever "do" Tony H-H-H-Hancock ?
(A radio and later TV series from before I was born consisting of sketches from the rather shambolic life of the rather shambolic Mr Hancock. In one episode, he does exactly this. Disaster, predictably, ensues. Must have put a whole generation off the idea of ham radio.)
Rent one when you're going out. Return it to the vendor when you get back. Weight is appropriate (I met an RAF mountain rescue team trialling an early one about 15 years ago ; eminently packable, though hardly light weight) ; dimensions are appropriate;reception is appropriate ; available for rental without too much difficulty. Cost is the biggest reason for not owning one. Which is why there is a reasonable market for them for rent. Do roadworks in the middle of nowhere (cellphone-reception-wise, that can be almost anywhere) and it very quickly gets to be a justifiable business expense.
But frankly, I'd look at the human factors first. If you're on your own, what are you doing that you can't face the thought of crawling on a broken knee for a few days to get back to "civilisation" ? ; if you're in a group, why don't you have confidence in the ability of your group to get assistance and get you off? ; if you're leading a party, why don't you have confidence in yourself to get your party to safety while managing casualties. If you've not addressed those human factors, then you can be guaranteed that your technological fix will short a circuit (or have a flat battery) at precisely the wrong moment.
Murphy's Law : if it can go wrong, it will. Extended Murphy's Law : if it can go wrong, it will go wrong, in the most inconvenient possible way, at the most inconvenient possible time.
Governments own land and mineral resources beneath it (I gather that the USA has some bizzare aspects to it's law onshore in this respect, but I doubt that's relevant offshore).
But governments don't know how to evaluate, develop or exploit an oilfield, so they get oil companies to do it (some countries nationalise their oil companies, as the USA plans to do with BP, but that doesn't much change things). The contracts are called licensing agreements, PSA (production sharing agreements) and shit like that, but their essence doesn't change.
Oil companies know how to evaluate, develop and exploit oil fields, but don't want to have thousands of engineering staff and billions of dollars worth of equipment under-used waiting on them having a prospect that needs just that equipment and expertise, so they sub-contract that job to drilling companies. (A little more detail - BP have probably got several dozen little rigs around the world, for repair work and that sort of thing, but the big ticket equipment such as the Ocean Alliance drilling rig, they either rent out on the open market when they're not using it themselves, or they just plain sub-contract. The Ocean Alliance drilling rig was, in fact, managed for BP by... a drilling company. Don't confuse exploration and assessment equipment like drilling rigs with production equipment like production platforms, each of which is more or less a unique build of chemical processing plant for a specific oilfield's temperature, pressure, hydrocarbon properties and environmental conditions, and they are owned by the oil companies. Often the ownership is in consortium, as with the 25% stake that Andarko (of Texas) and the 10% that Mitsui group (Japan) have in the costs of the Macondo blowout.
The drilling companies who own the drilling equipment also employ personnel who have long-term contracts on particular MODUs (Mobile Offshore Drilling Units) or land rigs. These are large, complex assemblages of equipment, each of which has particular idiosyncrasies which really require long-term familiarity to work with effectively. To use the popular car analogy : in theory, Joe Le Taxi could drive Jenson Button's Formula One car, while Button could drive Fred The Miner's 100-tonne dump truck, and Fred could drive the taxi in the city. But in practice, specialisation leads to improved performance. Include the mechanics teams for each vehicle, and I think the analogy is reasonable. This is the level at which the original issue was described. A TransOcean employee complaining about a TransOcean system on a TransOcean rig ; BP's (and Andarko, and Mitsui's) only involvement is to make space available on supply boats and/ or helicopters for parts and technicians.
Moving down the line, the oil companies also don't want to have specialist drilling geologists (myself) on their pension liabilities (generally ; BP are almost uniquely hands-on in this regard), nor do they want catering staff, or medics, or bed-changers, or ROV pilots. All these specialisms are contracted or sub-contracted out to increasingly specialised companies. Similarly, the drilling companies generally don't provide specialists for things like top drive hydraulic systems, pipe handling systems, etc, but also sub-contract that back to the manufacturers.
The oil industry, like many other industries, is a nest of sub-contracting to specialisation. Which is not in itself a bad thing. The problems occur (and this may or may not be an issue in this specific case - I know enough to know that I don't know, so I'm only illustrating a general point here) when the chains of information and accountability between the companies break down. In my work, I have an obligation (and get paid for doing) to report any concerns about excessive pore pressure in the formation. And I do report such things, partly because it's a part of my job, and partly because it's a matter of personal safety. But if the level above
Slashdot Mirror
In an American context maybe, but the article wasn't about America, it's about Britain, where the "sport" of "hunting" is almost completely non-existent. Excluding fishing, the active population of "hunters" is probably only a few tenths of a percent.
But having watched the article, I thoughts - "So what?". Both sides presented in the discussion are correct to a degree from their own perspectives : the animal welfare people are worried about this encouraging the "hunting/ shooting/ torturing" fraternity (and I'm sure that it will ; the pest control people don't see any significant difference between a squirrel and a bunny rabbit.
Rabbit stew - haven't had it for years, you can't get the bunnies unless you want to breed, grow, slaughter, skin and gut them yourself. And having done that in the past, I'm not particularly keen on the hassles of breeding and growing the bloody animals.
Squirrels, which haven't gone through hundreds or thousands of generations of selective breeding for docility and easy handling : nope, severely don't need that hassle.
And do I trust a pest-control company to not (accidentally) slip the occasional poisoned squirrel or bunny into the food chain - of course I don't.
It's a publicity stunt ; and quite a successful one, I'll grant.
While your flat field images improve (to a degree) your signal to noise ratio.
OK, it's crude approximation. but without doing a full statistical analysis, what you're going to get is a crude approximation.
Answering the original question : for meteor photography, then a plain camera with a fairly wide angle lens is fine - anything much longer than 100mm FL is going to capture an un-usefully small area of sky, and your odds of getting even one meteor on any particular shot is pretty slender, even for a rich shower like the Perseids. If you don't want star trails, then restrict yourself to images of just a minute or two ; if you don't mind star trails, then your sky darkness becomes the limiting factor. When you see a meteor in approximately the right area of sky, stop the current image collecting light and start the next image. ... that's fine. ... that's fine. ... that's fine, pick a tool, they're not in short supply.
Stacking software
Dark images and flats
Image management
Enjoy your astrophotography. I am planning on visiting the family around that time, and I think I may take my tripod and number-crunching tools with me. See what we get - probably the inside of a cloud!
Strictly, I thought that their purpose was to request other governments to assist the passport holder in their travels, and practically to assist in paperwork on re-entry to your home country by providing evidence of a right to enter. At least, that's how I read the wording on my passport, and I'd be (only moderately) surprised if it was significantly different in other countries, diplomats being what they are. My wife's first several visas to visit the UK had large letter writing indicating that she didn't have unlimited right of either re-entry, or of residence at all.
I also seem to recall having much the same conversation on SlashDot when GWBush ("Shrub") became the first president of recent times to not have a passport. I don't remember what the wash-up of that was, or if he ever bothered to get a passport (since it was not credible that he'd ever be travelling without a suitably accredited bunch of SS bodyguards and probably a fist full of diplomats, so his identity was never likely to be seriously in doubt).
Possibly also discussed in the same discussion : that again begs the question of what non-drivers would do. I already get trouble at the bank when they ask for my drivers license to probe my identity, and I hand over my (perfectly valid) driving license, which contains no photograph nor any other form of security markings, no holograms, nothing - just various printed reference numbers and my name and address. The youngsters behind the counter look highly confused and often have to call for a supervisor.
(That's a UK license, and I'm already chuckling at my various friends who have got the new "photo drivers license" (which is only an adjunct to the "paper license" such as I have) and are discovering that they have to get it replaced every 10 years, whenever they move, etc, etc, at a non-trivial cost. There's 25 years to go before I have to return my license and so participate in the new scam, though it is likely that I'll do something that will trigger a new (10-year, photographic) license being issued. And no, we're not required to carry our licenses here, despite what the Police tell people. So I don't.)
The citizens make up about 16% of the population (WIkipedia's figure - from my visits I'd have thought that was a bit high, but that was in the oilfield, which most of the citizens try to avoid contact with) ; the remainder is various immigrant workers and tourists. And the non-citizen workers and tourists don't get to say anything about how the country is run.
I don't have any real concerns about going back there to work ; but I don't have any illusions about what would happen to me if I came into any sort of conflict with a citizen or "the authorities".
Metaphorical, or have you guys introduced Identity Cards of some sort? Or do you have to present your passport (as my Russian wife had to when she still lived in the USSR) when it's demanded by internal police?
When I am learning something, I have little interest at all in whether or not my teacher has laid a good cable that morning, or shouted at the TV because of "X". So what benefit would there be from a blog - a semi-continuously updated description of the professor's life, activities and thoughts? ... then yes a blog is appropriate. For the 17th presentation of the isotope geochemistry course, where nothing new has been added in the last half-decade, I fail to see the relevance of a blog.
Now, if I were a researcher working with a professor, when every day at the coalface is likely to bring something which is actually NEW
Course websites, containing relevant paperwork (referenced papers, lecture summaries/ synopses, etc), assignments, apologies that Proff Bloggs will be taking next Monday's lecture, and an invite to buy the professor beer on Friday afternoon - that's relevant. Updating the site to reveal more parts of the course every few weeks may also be relevant (you don't want people rushing too far ahead, or doing all year's assignments in the first week). But a blog? Give me a break!
Errr, well, it takes the actions of two countries for a border for it to be undefended. There's to prevent your government from sending out relays of soldiers in all-terrain vehicles to patrol your side of the border and detain (or deter) any illegal immigrants from the poverty-stricken south. Nothing apart from fear of the neighbours that you're not defending yourselves against.
Hmmm, I was just wondering if that claim was still valid. Germany has a pretty long border, with IIRC, either EU borders (free transit of goods, services and people) or their Swiss border. Hmmm, Liechtenstein too? France too, if you include the marine borders ; no, not France, I forgot the Med - probably borders Lybia.
In your jurisdiction, does having signed an NDA over something (e.g., the existence of an illegal activity within your company) protect you from criminal prosecution for active or passive participation in the crime itself?
I suspect that if you tried that argument in court over here [note], you'd find that the charges laid against you - of "Conspiracy", or "attempting to defeat the ends of justice", depending on which of the several jurisdictions you found yourself in - have tarrifs against them which are not any lighter than actually carrying out the crime in question.
Now, if you blow a whistle, then you might have a different outcome - in large degree. But that's not the passive stance that you're talking about. If you could provide grounds to justify a belief that the main criminals would have killed you by using you for welding practice or something equally distasteful, then you'd have a reasonable defence and may get away with a suspended or very light sentence. But you would get the conviction that you deserve. (In the eyes of the law ; which are the eyes that count in this circumstance.)
[note] in reality, if you were naive enough to be try it, you'd probably be trying it first with your own lawyer, whose alternating eruptions of laughter and tears at the ignorance of the masses may hint at how the court would treat it.
No, it's intent is to SCARE drivers, because scared drivers, on average, drive more cautiously. (They also probably drive less often, which can be much much cheaper than building more roads.)
Whether there is any actual DIFFERENCE in risk at roundabouts, compared to the level of risk at any intersection, is a different question to whether people are more afraid of one design or the other. And probably the levels of risk are not much different between crossroads, light-controlled crossroads and roundabouts. I see broadly similar amounts of broken glass on both. The statisticians could probably have a field day arguing which is actually the riskiest, but the psychologists would quickly home in on "the unfamilar" as being the scariest.
Did you follow the link I posted to the "Magic Roundabout"? It's not a joke, and I well recall the terror with which I first encountered it, shell shocked from seeing the approach signs describing it's layout. It's an absolutely terrifying place, and it had me slow right down to navigate it. Far more than I'd expected to. Very effective. Of course, it's probably just annoying to the people who traverse it four times a day, so perhaps they should also randomly close some lanes.
The norm in Britain, where they've always been popular, is to call them a "roundabout" (all one word). I recall an American friend taking a detour to "the only roundabout in New England" just so he could have a laugh about how difficult his countrymen found it to handle the idea. That was 1990 or 1991, so I gather that things haven't changed much.
Confusion, fear, uncertainty, doubt ... leading I hope to reduced driving speeds. Sounds to me as if the roundabout is working as intended. It's their job to make drivers think harder and pay closer attention to the actions of other road users. That generally leads to lower speeds, which in turn leads to fewer accidents, less injury and damage in each accident, and (this is the bit that people find counter-intuitive) higher throughput of traffic.
Did someone lie to you when you were a trainee driver, and leave you with the impression that driving was meant to be easy or fun? Probably - it's in the nature of driving instructors to do that - I certainly do so when I'm trying to teach the wife to drive. But you know it's a lie really, don't you?
I remember when I was student at university, about 5 years before I started to learn to drive myself, meeting a car driving around a roundabout in the wrong direction. The meeting was head-on, and I climbed off my pedal bike, leaned in through the drivers window and told him just what a plonker I thought he was, before pedalling off into the distance. Even where we've had roundabouts for many decades, people still get them wrong and so you have to treat them with caution.
Try this little beauty for size : Swindon's "Magic Roundabout". Think that'd go down well in your neck of the woods?
Enlighten me please : you and the submitter use the term "rolling stop", which obviously means something in the States, but is flat-out nonsensical here. In British English, to "stop" means to cease movement, whereas to "roll" is a form of movement. So a "rolling stop" is a complete contradiction in terms. If you've not brought the vehicle to a halt while de-clutching the engine, put your gearbox into neutral and are ready to swap foot brake for parking brake, then you've not "stopped" ; you are still moving.
Does the term have some meaning in the US equivalent of the Highway Code? Or, for that matter, in the European equivalents, as I'm likely to drive in Europe on many occasions in the future.
You seem to realise what the parent post doesn't clearly express (or seem to care about) : a speed limit is the maximum speed that it is considered safe for any vehicle to travel on that section of road under ideal conditions. Practically any deviation of conditions from ideal would therefore mean that the safe driving speed is lower, often substantially lower, than the speed limit.
People need to pass their driving tests more often.
He volunteered to go there. If he gets killed fighting America's wars for them, tough shit.
(I write as one whose nephew is trying to get into the British army, and who knows that many members of his family think that he's wrong for doing it.)
Well, it's certainly a contender. Up there with QC and recruitment manager in a brothel. And ... umm, I can't think of many others as attractive.
Interesting factoid in the article that the US market for dope is given as $18 billion/year. That's about $60pppy. which isn't too bad.
So, the big question: has taking this group of users of previously illegal drugs out of the illegal drug market and into the legal pharmaceutical market had any noticeable effect on the illegal (unlicensed/ untaxed) dope market?
And does this tell us anything about the oft-made claims that dope is a "gateway" drug, which leads people into contact with (and by implication, use of) other illegal drugs?
Did I get another first post? WGAF?
One case, one single solitary case, of an under-age-of-consent person signing on in $LOCALE , and then waving their dangly bits around to be captured by (I've already forgotten the service's name - SlashRoulette, or something like that?) SlashRoulette's servers, is going to have the owners, administrators etc hauled up on the old pyre of public opinion and burned at the stake as child pornographers.
"And quite rightly," I should say as I feel our unthinking-knee-jerk-reacting overlords focus their baleful glare upon me, like the Eye of Sauron.
Hang on - is this what was being copied in that stupid, irritating piece of shit that SlashDolt had going a few months ago. That is a staggeringly stupid idea. I mean, that is industrial grade stupidity. Who built the Beowulf cluster of lobotomised hydrocephalous abortions that thought up that one? That (the dumbBeowulf) was an idea impressive in it's technical achievement, but practically a complete waste of money, b rains (OK, not brains) and time.
Klingons don't own iFeminineHygienePRoducts ; iFeminineHygienePRoducts own Klingons.
Err, well, maybe.
Now I know how Nessus felt after insulting a Kzinti dinner party.
Parsing the description of "iPad owners", I find myself at odds with the details of their conclusions :
I read that as evidence of a prolonged period as a successful thief or exploitative employer. There are counter examples, but they're a vanishingly small proportion.
Uh, huh - so they use the whole chicken instead of just one feather. Riiiight. "Perv" is what the denizens of my street would call them, punctuated by the impact of half-bricks on faces.
Compared to just which amoeba?
Nothing interesting to do with their lives, I almost feel sorry for them.
Still nothing better to do with their lives, but my feelings are receding from the area of mild sympathy.
Sound more like a bunch of miserable cunts to me. I wonder how many iFeminineHygieneProduct users have been mugged for their ego-boosters so far.
What was that rather disturbing image that I heard a few days ago on here? Oh yes, "golf clap". Tiger has been doing what he didn't oughta. Again.
OK, you didn't see the several other weights and measures puns I worked into the original version, before deciding that less is more, and deleting the lot. Sheesh, do people think that I just type the first random thought that comes into my head?
Somewhere out in the relatively close areas of the Milky Way, an alien race has it's own Alien-SlashDot, where Alien-ReligiousNutjobs are being discussed in terms of them converting the Aliens(to them, i.e. US) to $AlienReligion, or to fertilizer. And on AlienWorld there is an AlienHawking saying that "We Aliens ought to be careful about going Out There, in case we meet something as nasty, as xenophobic and as cowardly as ourselves and be destroyed by them."
Galaxies sterilised by different species of nut jobs, each proselytising in favour of it's own imaginary friend in the sky. What a gloomy prospect.
Ounces? Ounces? Haven't you had your religion metricated yet? Do you have no scruples?
Errr, since my level of worry about 2012-12-21 (ISO format date) was precisely zero above (or below) my worry about any randomly selected day of the week, does your reassurance mean that I can now be (guardedly) optimistic about that date?
What the hell is so special about that date anyway? It's not palindromic, unless you're in a locale that uses MM-YYYY-DD ; oh no, it's not even palindromic then. Does it spell something rude when typed into a base-13 calculator and turned upside down, or something?
Oh, hang on - this is SlashDot, and that's a date of cosmic importance and significance? So it's the date on which SlashDotters will get laid? I'll tell the wife to put it in her diary.
Did Canada ever "do" Tony H-H-H-Hancock ?
(A radio and later TV series from before I was born consisting of sketches from the rather shambolic life of the rather shambolic Mr Hancock. In one episode, he does exactly this. Disaster, predictably, ensues. Must have put a whole generation off the idea of ham radio.)
That's a PEBCAK class problem :
Problem
Exists
Between
Chair
And
Keyboard
Rent one when you're going out. Return it to the vendor when you get back. ;reception is appropriate ; available for rental without too much difficulty.
Weight is appropriate (I met an RAF mountain rescue team trialling an early one about 15 years ago ; eminently packable, though hardly light weight) ; dimensions are appropriate
Cost is the biggest reason for not owning one. Which is why there is a reasonable market for them for rent. Do roadworks in the middle of nowhere (cellphone-reception-wise, that can be almost anywhere) and it very quickly gets to be a justifiable business expense.
But frankly, I'd look at the human factors first. If you're on your own, what are you doing that you can't face the thought of crawling on a broken knee for a few days to get back to "civilisation" ? ; if you're in a group, why don't you have confidence in the ability of your group to get assistance and get you off? ; if you're leading a party, why don't you have confidence in yourself to get your party to safety while managing casualties. If you've not addressed those human factors, then you can be guaranteed that your technological fix will short a circuit (or have a flat battery) at precisely the wrong moment.
Murphy's Law : if it can go wrong, it will.
Extended Murphy's Law : if it can go wrong, it will go wrong, in the most inconvenient possible way, at the most inconvenient possible time.
Murphy was an optimist.
Quick primer on how the oil industry works :
This is the level at which the original issue was described. A TransOcean employee complaining about a TransOcean system on a TransOcean rig ; BP's (and Andarko, and Mitsui's) only involvement is to make space available on supply boats and/ or helicopters for parts and technicians.
The oil industry, like many other industries, is a nest of sub-contracting to specialisation. Which is not in itself a bad thing. The problems occur (and this may or may not be an issue in this specific case - I know enough to know that I don't know, so I'm only illustrating a general point here) when the chains of information and accountability between the companies break down.
In my work, I have an obligation (and get paid for doing) to report any concerns about excessive pore pressure in the formation. And I do report such things, partly because it's a part of my job, and partly because it's a matter of personal safety. But if the level above