Heh, I've got a 480v story for you. I work in IT for a manufacturing company. We had an apparently faulty air conditioner take out most of the plant, which is no small feat.
First, a little background info. It's an old building. The electrical is a mess of old and new circuits, some three phase 480 delta, some 240/120 single phase, and one major branch circuit even with a high leg. The former maintenence manager was of the mind to "get things working", rather than "get things right". After he was fired, I started helping out a little with the maintenence staff when emergency things came up, since I know a little about electronics, mostly to help them with computerized and digital control systems.
Anyway, from the street, there are 5000 amp fuses, huge suckers, then 1200 amp fuses on a few main branches. From there to a 1200 amp panel breaker for a major section of the plant (the one that the server room is on), along with most of the manufacturing. In that 1200 amp panel there is a 250 amp 3 phase breaker for the air conditioner. This is all 480v delta 3 phase.
Somehow, that air conditioner breaker failed. It vaporized part of the busbar, tripped the 1200 amp panel breaker, and blew the 1200 amp fuse for one of the phases, leave us down a phase. For the benefit of those who do not know, 3 phase motors running with one dropped phase tend to burn up... quickly! Ideally there is an thermal overload circuit to shut them down before that happens, but that doesn't always work. So bang.. the lights are off, and motors start to burn up in various places around the plant.
Once the maintenence staff figures out what is going on, that we are down a phase, they throw the mains on the service entrance panel for that 1200 amp branch. All seems to be good. We just need to replace that 1200 amp fuse and the faulty breaker right?
Heh. Well, it happened that we didn't have any spare 1200 amp fuses. A 1200 amp fuse isn't something you can run down to your hardware store and get. We send an employee to the next town where a store has exactly three of them in stock. $400 each. We tell him to buy all three. He comes back with one.
We replace the fuse, and the maintenence staff replaces the breaker. Upon reenergizing the circuit everything seems fine... until they go to put the protective metal cover back on.
The panel literally explodes. I wasn't in the room at the time thankfully, but the guys that were there say is was bright, loud, and scary. Apparently what happened was pieces of molten busbar had dripped near the bottom breaker in the panel and were close to shorting out the phases. The slight movement caused by putting the cover back on jarred the chunks of metal and shorted out the phases.
So... the 1200 amp panel breaker trips.... but not fast enough to save the upstream 1200 amp fuses near the service entrance. The ones we didn't have spares for. Again. And now it blew all three of them. And the store only had two in stock.
So we get back on the phone. We find another store that has two in stock, so we send an employee out to get all five, from both stores. He gets it right this time.
We finally replace the three fuses, triple check EVERYTHING, and throw all the breakers back on. We had sent all the employees home hours before... they couldn't do anything without power. But we are finally up... nearly 6 hours later.
Needless to say, some things have changed as a result of this, and it really underscored why the former maintenence manager was fired. We called the electrical engineering firm that had most recently surveyed our power systems, and had them run some more short circuit computer simulations, things like that.
Upon reading their report, I learn that our service panel has a ground fault interrupter, but it was turned all the way up to 1500 amps to prevent nusience trips, after it tripped several times due to our really bad "normal" phase imbalances.
Things are definitely improving, and we are much safer now then we ever were. It goes to show how one bad maintenence manager with a reign of terror, and a long tenure, can really screw things up though. I compare it to a programmer that never comments their code, and uses lots of goto statements, only the stakes are much higher.
I know very few people who don't smoke or drink, or both. We are talking about a large chunk of the population there, well more than 50%.
Ask her how many of her patients she knew over the years that never ate food. I bet she would have to think a lot harder. The clear conclusion is that food causes cancer!
I'm not saying there isn't a correlation, or even possibly causation.. but it's very easy to slip in post hoc ergo prompter hoc type arguments with this stuff.
What I have a problem with is people trying to justify the ownership of a deadly weapon that has no other function but to kill. (or practice your killing skill, if you want to bring up target shooting.)
I bet if you asked biathalon gold metalists in the olympics if their sport had anything to do with killing you would be laughed out of there. Firearm sports are a huge (and organized) thing. It has nothing to do with killing any more than golf has to do with killing.
I'm with you to a degree, but how does chemical weapons or the like fit into that view?
Chemical weapons as a technology are neither good nor evil. Mustard gas was an early chemotherapy for cancer. I'm sure you meant chemical weapons in devices meant to deploy them in massively deadly ways, however. Inherently, even the weapons are neither good nor evil, but that isn't particularly relevant.
You are asking me to draw a defensible practical limit to the rights... OK!
If chemical weapons had leigitmate sporting uses, or legitimate personal self defense uses, then I would fight for the right to own them too. Obviously a military level chemical weapon cannot be deployed in personal self defense ways, nor used in sport in any meaningful way. They are rightly classified as weapons of mass destruction.
You will likely argue that some guns fit this criteria also. I agree. Fully automatic firearms, exploding bullets, armor penetrating bullets... that stuff is already illegal. No need for new laws on that account.
You've also obviously been brought up in a house that supports the idea that every man deserves the right to keep a deadly weapon.
You are correct. I'm not likely to be dissuaded. I don't have a vested interest in "keeping guns on the street" though. My dad's hobby hardly qualifies as a vested interest (He's retired).
From your comment, I assume that every man should not have any deadly weapons. That will make it pretty difficult to cut meat in the kitchen, or drive to work, or shave, or control pests in their garden, or hammer a nail. Guns have a functional use other than killing, and so do all those other tools that enable those legitimate activities, however all can be used for killing.
Judging a technology based on how it can be used by people is something that most people on Slashdot are very much against. It should be no different with guns. Technology is never good or evil.
Most people don't understand that just throwing more computing power at the daemon doesn't help. Apache does not come in a default configuration that is ready for heavy use production. The default config is pretty conservative, to prevent it from crashing the whole OS.
Under the new plan, which is subject to regulatory and shareholder approval, current holders of Sirius common stock will together hold 8 percent of the new common stock.
More interestingly, the free market may rule in every way.
Imagine this, the first MMORPG that actually has it's own auction site where players are even encouraged to trade game items for real money. Of course that creates all kinds of legal hassles, but some sort of in-game escrow would be pretty trivial to implement, reducing arguments.
The way I see it, in real life, money can buy you better equipment, etc, but it can't make you a better player of the game. When these games evolve to the point where it isn't centered around equipment (and the quest to get better equipment), but rather on real game skill, then is when we will see the really big things happen.
Billy: Four minutes and counting. Jim: O.K. Billy: They pressed the button, Jim. Jim: They pressed the button Billy, what button? Billy: The big red one. Jim: You mean THE button? Billy: Goodbye, Jim. Jim: Goodbye! Oh yes. This ain't aurevoir, it's goodbye! Ha! Ha! Jim: This is KAOS. It's a beautiful, balmy, Southern California summer day. It's 80 degrees... I said balmy... I could say bomby... Ha! Ha!...O.K. I'm Jim and this is Radio KAOS and with only four minutes left to us, let's use this as wisely as possible. Molly: Everybody got someone they call home. Jim: Out at Dodger Stadium. It's the bottom of the seventh, the Dodgers are leading three to nothing over the Giants, and for those of you who are looking to go surfing tomorrow, too bad.
Why does everyone have to take something fun (a game) and try to assign real life value to it?
Because people spend tons of real life time on the game, which is worth real money. After someone works 5 hours for an item, they expect to have some ownership of said item. That doesn't always work out, but subconsiously they feel they own it.
people reveal that they are willing to pay money to be constrained.
This is an interesting observation. As many of us know, cheating takes all the fun out of the game for most normal people (15 year olds that crave attention and respect in an unhealthy way excepted). In art, self-imposed contraints are what makes good art. Without contraints, the games become meaningless.
I think when bugs are discovered in games that allow rampant cloning of items or free money to spread, is parallel to what would happen in society when and if we discover a way to make a "replicator" type device.
These games do make an interesting microcosm for sociologists to study. Identifing the differences is more interesting, since once we identify how it is different from the macro-society, we can use it as a model.
It does. On another message board, a former IBM employee posted a formula he came up with for valuation of lives based on the future earnings and an interest discount percentage. Surprisingly, the management didn't like his proposal balancing money and lives, even though the logic was flawless, the formula correct.
http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=17949338
Go there if you have a fool.com membership. You can sign up for a free trial.
Fair Use Exerpts: It is impossible to do a safety evaluation until you figure out the real cost of doing nothing. And, since "the worst case senario" of doing nothing is death, I had to calculate the "Present Value" of a human life.
The answer is: Every life has a different value based upon the earning capacity of the individual which varies with education level, normal life expectancy, salary at the time of death, personal health, individual motivation, promotability, the job market, interest rates, inflation rates, monetary policy, taxes, and expected retirement age.
Anyway, this was the gist of the discussions I had with IBM safety about the subject. However, they would never agree with any "numbers" because they argued that a human life is priceless. I learned then that you just cannot have a technical discussion with a liberal. They do not care about the costs...they just want everything they can think of for free.
However, I decided that annual salary times two and a half divided by the 10 year bond yield was completely fair for anyone who was killed by an industry in an accident! Today, the number would be $3 to $7 million for just about everyone in America.
Credits to BMW on the Fool for this. This is only the highlights of a pretty long message.
Given a set of operations to carry out, someone using a GUI file manager and someone else using a command line, I bet more than 9 times out of 10 the command line is faster.
It also has one big advantage, it's inherently scriptable.
designed to put a projectile into (or through) an object usually a human being.
What gave you that idea? You have been watching too many movies or something.
I understand people like to shoot at targets and find that enjoyable, that's fine. Why can't they go to somewhere setup for this kind of activity?
Most people do.. For a lot of people who live in rural areas, their back yard is fine. How do you go from banning guns to (I assume) just arguing against concealed carry?
I personally think it would be safer all round if neither of you had a gun.
That's never going to happen. Criminals don't follow laws, by definition. The only person gun laws take guns away from is the law abiding person.
You point a gun at him, it either you or him - someone is getting hurt.
Any introductory self defense class will teach you to never "point" a gun at someone. If you need to use your gun, you draw and fire at the center of mass. There is no big standoff.
I'm for limited freedom, that is freedom upto the point where my freedom unjustly curtails the freedom of others.
How does my freedom to own a gun in accordance with the law curtail anyone's freedom anywhere?
The reason it's becoming popular is because we have so many intolerable laws on the books, that if they were all enforced 100%, we would like in a complete facist state, and probably 50% or more of the population would be in jail at any one time.
Sorry, but I think computers are dangerous. I know they weren't used in Sept 11. But I do think that the ease that computers can be obtained in the US is questionable at best. I know a lot of people get a lot of quite innocent pleasure from using computers, and I think this pass time should be protected, but I personally don't see the need for normal citizens to own computers. I'm American, so perhaps I have a different perspective on this.
It would be easier to stop someone from misusing a computer, if you could stop him from (legally) owning it.
-- You are either for freedom or against it. You can't have it both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Those don't look like photoshopped blurs, it looks like a piece of frosted plexiglas type material, like you would see on a light covering.
Heh, I've got a 480v story for you. I work in IT for a manufacturing company. We had an apparently faulty air conditioner take out most of the plant, which is no small feat.
First, a little background info. It's an old building. The electrical is a mess of old and new circuits, some three phase 480 delta, some 240/120 single phase, and one major branch circuit even with a high leg. The former maintenence manager was of the mind to "get things working", rather than "get things right". After he was fired, I started helping out a little with the maintenence staff when emergency things came up, since I know a little about electronics, mostly to help them with computerized and digital control systems.
Anyway, from the street, there are 5000 amp fuses, huge suckers, then 1200 amp fuses on a few main branches. From there to a 1200 amp panel breaker for a major section of the plant (the one that the server room is on), along with most of the manufacturing. In that 1200 amp panel there is a 250 amp 3 phase breaker for the air conditioner. This is all 480v delta 3 phase.
Somehow, that air conditioner breaker failed. It vaporized part of the busbar, tripped the 1200 amp panel breaker, and blew the 1200 amp fuse for one of the phases, leave us down a phase. For the benefit of those who do not know, 3 phase motors running with one dropped phase tend to burn up... quickly! Ideally there is an thermal overload circuit to shut them down before that happens, but that doesn't always work. So bang.. the lights are off, and motors start to burn up in various places around the plant.
Once the maintenence staff figures out what is going on, that we are down a phase, they throw the mains on the service entrance panel for that 1200 amp branch. All seems to be good. We just need to replace that 1200 amp fuse and the faulty breaker right?
Heh. Well, it happened that we didn't have any spare 1200 amp fuses. A 1200 amp fuse isn't something you can run down to your hardware store and get. We send an employee to the next town where a store has exactly three of them in stock. $400 each. We tell him to buy all three. He comes back with one.
We replace the fuse, and the maintenence staff replaces the breaker. Upon reenergizing the circuit everything seems fine... until they go to put the protective metal cover back on.
The panel literally explodes. I wasn't in the room at the time thankfully, but the guys that were there say is was bright, loud, and scary. Apparently what happened was pieces of molten busbar had dripped near the bottom breaker in the panel and were close to shorting out the phases. The slight movement caused by putting the cover back on jarred the chunks of metal and shorted out the phases.
So... the 1200 amp panel breaker trips.... but not fast enough to save the upstream 1200 amp fuses near the service entrance. The ones we didn't have spares for. Again. And now it blew all three of them. And the store only had two in stock.
So we get back on the phone. We find another store that has two in stock, so we send an employee out to get all five, from both stores. He gets it right this time.
We finally replace the three fuses, triple check EVERYTHING, and throw all the breakers back on. We had sent all the employees home hours before... they couldn't do anything without power. But we are finally up... nearly 6 hours later.
Needless to say, some things have changed as a result of this, and it really underscored why the former maintenence manager was fired. We called the electrical engineering firm that had most recently surveyed our power systems, and had them run some more short circuit computer simulations, things like that.
Upon reading their report, I learn that our service panel has a ground fault interrupter, but it was turned all the way up to 1500 amps to prevent nusience trips, after it tripped several times due to our really bad "normal" phase imbalances.
Things are definitely improving, and we are much safer now then we ever were. It goes to show how one bad maintenence manager with a reign of terror, and a long tenure, can really screw things up though. I compare it to a programmer that never comments their code, and uses lots of goto statements, only the stakes are much higher.
You think logical fallacies are only something that apply to philosophical arguments?
I know very few people who don't smoke or drink, or both. We are talking about a large chunk of the population there, well more than 50%.
Ask her how many of her patients she knew over the years that never ate food. I bet she would have to think a lot harder. The clear conclusion is that food causes cancer!
I'm not saying there isn't a correlation, or even possibly causation.. but it's very easy to slip in post hoc ergo prompter hoc type arguments with this stuff.
What I have a problem with is people trying to justify the ownership of a deadly weapon that has no other function but to kill. (or practice your killing skill, if you want to bring up target shooting.)
I bet if you asked biathalon gold metalists in the olympics if their sport had anything to do with killing you would be laughed out of there. Firearm sports are a huge (and organized) thing. It has nothing to do with killing any more than golf has to do with killing.
I'm with you to a degree, but how does chemical weapons or the like fit into that view?
Chemical weapons as a technology are neither good nor evil. Mustard gas was an early chemotherapy for cancer. I'm sure you meant chemical weapons in devices meant to deploy them in massively deadly ways, however. Inherently, even the weapons are neither good nor evil, but that isn't particularly relevant.
You are asking me to draw a defensible practical limit to the rights... OK!
If chemical weapons had leigitmate sporting uses, or legitimate personal self defense uses, then I would fight for the right to own them too. Obviously a military level chemical weapon cannot be deployed in personal self defense ways, nor used in sport in any meaningful way. They are rightly classified as weapons of mass destruction.
You will likely argue that some guns fit this criteria also. I agree. Fully automatic firearms, exploding bullets, armor penetrating bullets... that stuff is already illegal. No need for new laws on that account.
How did you get into the Rambus boardroom, and more importantly, how did you make it out with that transcript?!?
You've also obviously been brought up in a house that supports the idea that every man deserves the right to keep a deadly weapon.
You are correct. I'm not likely to be dissuaded. I don't have a vested interest in "keeping guns on the street" though. My dad's hobby hardly qualifies as a vested interest (He's retired).
From your comment, I assume that every man should not have any deadly weapons. That will make it pretty difficult to cut meat in the kitchen, or drive to work, or shave, or control pests in their garden, or hammer a nail. Guns have a functional use other than killing, and so do all those other tools that enable those legitimate activities, however all can be used for killing.
Judging a technology based on how it can be used by people is something that most people on Slashdot are very much against. It should be no different with guns. Technology is never good or evil.
I'm an idiot.
Most people don't understand that just throwing more computing power at the daemon doesn't help. Apache does not come in a default configuration that is ready for heavy use production. The default config is pretty conservative, to prevent it from crashing the whole OS.
There was a story a year ago about sircam running on Wine.
If this takes off, then they've created the first PC-based "razor-blade" market....
Forgetting ink jet printers?
Under the new plan, which is subject to regulatory and shareholder approval, current holders of Sirius common stock will together hold 8 percent of the new common stock.
:)
Uh, yeah, I know I'd vote for that.
Are you trying to say every gun owner in the US is a licensed sports shooter?
There are no licenses to own a firearm for sport, just as you don't need a license to own golf clubs for sport.
The other legitimate use of guns is self defense, which is the main other reason people own firearms.
No wonder you have no problems with violent crimes involving firearms
I have serious problems with violent crime. I think violent crime should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
Put a gun in the hand of a pussy, and he instantly thinks he is a tough guy.
Uh, OK.
I can guess you own one.
Not right now. My dad is the treasurer at the local gun club, and is also a gunsmith though. I've done my share of shooting for sport.
There would have to be little left up to chance, or it could be ruled gambling. It does raise a whole new grey area to the law.
There are plenty of sports that involve firearms. What is a golf club if not for smashing someone's head in? That's how you liberals sound.
Heh, then take it a step further, all matter is just information. It's only a matter of time, as it were.
More interestingly, the free market may rule in every way.
Imagine this, the first MMORPG that actually has it's own auction site where players are even encouraged to trade game items for real money. Of course that creates all kinds of legal hassles, but some sort of in-game escrow would be pretty trivial to implement, reducing arguments.
The way I see it, in real life, money can buy you better equipment, etc, but it can't make you a better player of the game. When these games evolve to the point where it isn't centered around equipment (and the quest to get better equipment), but rather on real game skill, then is when we will see the really big things happen.
Billy: Four minutes and counting. ... I said balmy ... I could say bomby ... Ha! Ha! ...O.K. I'm Jim and this is Radio KAOS and with only four minutes left to us, let's use this as wisely as possible.
Jim: O.K.
Billy: They pressed the button, Jim.
Jim: They pressed the button Billy, what button?
Billy: The big red one.
Jim: You mean THE button?
Billy: Goodbye, Jim.
Jim: Goodbye! Oh yes. This ain't aurevoir, it's goodbye! Ha! Ha!
Jim: This is KAOS. It's a beautiful, balmy, Southern California summer day. It's 80 degrees
Molly: Everybody got someone they call home.
Jim: Out at Dodger Stadium. It's the bottom of the seventh, the Dodgers are leading three to nothing over the Giants, and for those of you who are looking to go surfing tomorrow, too bad.
Roger Waters - Four Minutes.
Why does everyone have to take something fun (a game) and try to assign real life value to it?
Because people spend tons of real life time on the game, which is worth real money. After someone works 5 hours for an item, they expect to have some ownership of said item. That doesn't always work out, but subconsiously they feel they own it.
people reveal that they are willing to pay money to be constrained.
This is an interesting observation. As many of us know, cheating takes all the fun out of the game for most normal people (15 year olds that crave attention and respect in an unhealthy way excepted). In art, self-imposed contraints are what makes good art. Without contraints, the games become meaningless.
I think when bugs are discovered in games that allow rampant cloning of items or free money to spread, is parallel to what would happen in society when and if we discover a way to make a "replicator" type device.
These games do make an interesting microcosm for sociologists to study. Identifing the differences is more interesting, since once we identify how it is different from the macro-society, we can use it as a model.
(I suspect this already happens,
It does. On another message board, a former IBM employee posted a formula he came up with for valuation of lives based on the future earnings and an interest discount percentage. Surprisingly, the management didn't like his proposal balancing money and lives, even though the logic was flawless, the formula correct.
http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=17949338
Go there if you have a fool.com membership. You can sign up for a free trial.
Fair Use Exerpts:
It is impossible to do a safety evaluation until you figure out the real cost of doing nothing. And, since "the worst case senario" of doing nothing is death, I had to calculate the "Present Value" of a human life.
The answer is: Every life has a different value based upon the earning capacity of the individual which varies with education level, normal life expectancy, salary at the time of death, personal health, individual motivation, promotability, the job market, interest rates, inflation rates, monetary policy, taxes, and expected retirement age.
Anyway, this was the gist of the discussions I had with IBM safety about the subject. However, they would never agree with any "numbers" because they argued that a human life is priceless. I learned then that you just cannot have a technical discussion with a liberal. They do not care about the costs...they just want everything they can think of for free.
However, I decided that annual salary times two and a half divided by the 10 year bond yield was completely fair for anyone who was killed by an industry in an accident! Today, the number would be $3 to $7 million for just about everyone in America.
Credits to BMW on the Fool for this. This is only the highlights of a pretty long message.
cp, mv, rm, grep, locate, scp
Given a set of operations to carry out, someone using a GUI file manager and someone else using a command line, I bet more than 9 times out of 10 the command line is faster.
It also has one big advantage, it's inherently scriptable.
designed to put a projectile into (or through) an object usually a human being.
What gave you that idea? You have been watching too many movies or something.
I understand people like to shoot at targets and find that enjoyable, that's fine. Why can't they go to somewhere setup for this kind of activity?
Most people do.. For a lot of people who live in rural areas, their back yard is fine. How do you go from banning guns to (I assume) just arguing against concealed carry?
I personally think it would be safer all round if neither of you had a gun.
That's never going to happen. Criminals don't follow laws, by definition. The only person gun laws take guns away from is the law abiding person.
You point a gun at him, it either you or him - someone is getting hurt.
Any introductory self defense class will teach you to never "point" a gun at someone. If you need to use your gun, you draw and fire at the center of mass. There is no big standoff.
I'm for limited freedom, that is freedom upto the point where my freedom unjustly curtails the freedom of others.
How does my freedom to own a gun in accordance with the law curtail anyone's freedom anywhere?
The reason it's becoming popular is because we have so many intolerable laws on the books, that if they were all enforced 100%, we would like in a complete facist state, and probably 50% or more of the population would be in jail at any one time.
Sorry, but I think computers are dangerous. I know they weren't used in Sept 11. But I do think that the ease that computers can be obtained in the US is questionable at best. I know a lot of people get a lot of quite innocent pleasure from using computers, and I think this pass time should be protected, but I personally don't see the need for normal citizens to own computers. I'm American, so perhaps I have a different perspective on this.
It would be easier to stop someone from misusing a computer, if you could stop him from (legally) owning it.
--
You are either for freedom or against it. You can't have it both ways.