The "misguided student" crash was Charles Bishop in Tampa, FL. It happened on Jan 5, 2002. I was in the area after it happened, and saw the tail of the plane sticking out of the building.
He had a hand-written note on him when they recovered the body. He flew around erratically (like, he didn't know where he was going, not as an evasion). The police helicopter followed him and they were trying to make radio calls to him, which he ignored.
He did fly over MacDill AFB, but couldn't find a target. The buildings there are pretty nondescript. There's nothing with a target on the roof saying "Attack here". He turned and went East, finally crashing into the Bank of America building. Some windows were smashed out, a wing (or both sides, I don't remember) fell off, and ended up on the sidewalk below.
There are crazy people out there, and applying the "terrorist" label to everyone who does anything wrong, and trying to associate them in with loosely organized groups (like "Anonymous" or "Al Qaeda") really doesn't do anyone any good. If someone is crazy, suicidal, and desperately looking for attention through their suicide, they may just get it. Unfortunately, they should have received mental health treatment instead. Well, the kid is famous (and dead from the crash), but people are still talking about him. I guess he got what he wanted.
As I recall, it took them a while to extract the plane from the building. It was stuck on the 23rd floor
I don't remember having a geiger counter in any classes in high school, but it's possible. It's been a long time. I do vaguely remember discussions about their operation, and purpose, along with understanding what radiation is, the half life of various materials, etc.
The most important bit that I remember is that geiger counters usually have a test source with them, to verify functionality. If there is an emergency where you need one, it's stupid to grab one, say "it reads 0, I'm safe.", and then go walking around check radiation levels and never detecting anything because you didn't verify functionality.:)
What people need to consider when buying one is, is it checking 4 bands, or just one. Is it calibrated, and can it be calibrated. There are plenty of the old Civil Defense units out there, where they haven't been calibrated since they were manufactured , decades ago.
I heard that if you walk around a grocery store with one, it'll go nuts on various aisles, such as fresh produce. I've wanted one for years, but any good ones are rather expensive, considering it's just going to be a novelty toy. I don't mind having electronic toys, but it's nice to be able to use them once in a while. I picked up a no-contact infrared thermometer ("laser guided thermometer", as I like to call it). I tested my cat, my monitors, the walls of the house, and my girlfriend.:) Beyond being a novelty toy, I use it to test the air conditioning in cars. I was fixing the cooling system in two different cars in the last couple weeks. It was safer to point it at the radiator, than to touch it and see if it hurt.:)
Take a look at a rhyming slang dictionary. You'll find that most of the terms used are pretty nonsensical. Stop being a berk. Enjoy some British culture:
Maybe I'm more like The Doctor than Mr. Logic. Your quaint traditions are very unusual, and I don't believe I'll ever become accustomed to them. But, let me try this out. Your mother is a whore. Did I do that quite right?
It still appears to be a tremendous leap from being called "Skippy" to being called sewage.
Maybe friendly jest between... well... friends, is seriously different. It isn't like it started with "oh, I call my American friend septic sometimes, we laugh, and then drink a pint", it was said to a complete stranger. And now repeated over and over.
It doesn't matter how you attempt to rationalize an insult, it's still an insult.
But what would the English know about politeness, where the whole island is inbred anyways. Just sayin'
Because you read the article. Or at least the summary. So you and I both know that there's someone out there that plays sports, that had an affair with a smoking hottie (scroll up for the name). So clearly, you can't say "Tiger Woods".
Yes, one could have also used "Sherman" as a reference to Yanks, as Sherman is easily understood to be a "Sherman tank" and tank rhymes with Yank. Congratulations, you now understand Cockney Rhyming Slang.
The difference there would be that the word "Sherman" comes from the name of the American General William Tecumseh Sherman. The tank itself was well respected as a strong and efficient machine.
"Septic", on the other hand, still refers to a box full of shit.
If you think someone is lacking in respect when referring to Americans as septics, then you truly are very American indeed.
It takes an American to bother understanding the language they speak, and can recognize an insult built upon another insult? Interesting. I guess I honestly have some misconceptions of how the rest of the world operates.
So, septic tank, rather than say gas tank, petrol tank, oxygen tank, external fuel tank (like the ET on the all-American Space Shuttle), water tank. Or drifting away from containers, battle tank, M1 Abrams tank, Sherman tank,.... Or frank (like frankfurter, a generally phallic reference),
But why focus on just term "yank" anyways? If you follow the etymology of it, it originates from a disparaging term for Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam, and around the time of the colonial war (err, American Revolutionary War), it was used as a disparaging term for anyone in the colonies (to be the United States of America). That could be considered rather rude.
But I guess it's all good, since any time a limey, buck toothed, pale skinned, small dicked, citizen of the Queens empire calls me a "yank", I just smile and say "Good show chap. Oh look, it's time for tea and a punch up".
Hmm, it has been a while since anyone's called me a yank. Most prefer to call me Mr. Smythe, and I respond politely to them in kind. It's called respect, which it seems some people still haven't learned.
We do get smacked a lot. Have you ever seen a shooting star? We have a nice thick dense atmosphere, but nothing like the gas giants. Luckily, most burn up on the way in, or are barely pebbles when the bump into the ground, or plop into the oceans.
From what I understand of the birth and lifespan of a solar system, it begins with a dense object and slowly objects fall towards it. In time as they swirl, objects fall into the denser spots. The largest and densest can become a stars when there is sufficient mass. As the remaining debris floats around, it can smash together and stick, They can smash together and shatter. The debris may form another planet, moons, or bounce off into space, or just float around in similar circles.
There's a lot we have to learn about the universe, and even our own solar system. Are those rocks that we see as just random chunks of nothing, or are they pieces of larger bodies long since broken up? Is that the fate of the Earth? Unlike many beliefs that we have, I doubt the earth is "too big to fail". An eccentric celestial body could destroy us. Then again, space is a very very large place, and the chances are... well, there are a virtually infinite number of bodies out there. And an infinite amount of time where they could intersect with our path. In such a given time, it would be logical to believe that there is a chance at some point the Earth may become an asteroid belt, and then part of another planet sometime in an infinite number of years. I doubt any of that will happen within my lifetime, as the lifespan of the human form is far too short. The most I can hope for is the ability to travel even to just our nearby celestial bodies with the hope of guessing their history. I guess it would be a trip with an astrogeologist (exogeologist?). The titles aren't that cool now, but wait until they're flying around the solar system checking out asteroids.:) Imagine what could be found...
I was at KSC for the launch. We toured the visitors center while we were there. It's really sad to see the Apollo capsules, and the great advances to the Space Shuttle, and now we're looking "forward" to the Orion, which is just a slightly larger Apollo capsule.
We may have been advancing from 1957 through 1981, and then a final burst of activity in the 1990's with the ISS. What significant advances have we made in the last 20 years? No innovated new spacecraft. No new propulsion technologies. Everything that we've thrown into space from this rock we call home, was conceived decades earlier.
I've said for many years that we will keep advancing. We will innovate newer and better things. If we planned an interstellar craft in the 1980's and launched in the 1990's, in the following decade we'd have something bigger, better, and faster, to pick up the original crew with, and get there in a fraction of the time.
I guess it's good that a generational interstellar craft was never launched. In a few decades, we will have found ourselves traveling no farther than orbiting our own rock. There was some excitement about probes finally reaching the heliopause. In the direction that we're heading, no human will ever see it. In 100 years, we'll have forgotten about that mysterious place beyond our own atmosphere. In a couple hundred years, humans will probably believe the earth is flat, and the stars are marks high in our own sky, rather than understanding that they are really distant stars, planets, solar systems, and entire galaxies with billion of stars and planets in each.
Yes, in a couple hundred years, we will again be alone in the universe, because we took it on faith that we are alone, and ignored science. Science would have shown us that we aren't alone in the universe, because we would have colonized planets throughout our own galaxy. And then maybe, just maybe, we would have a bit of insight into how the universe really works, which is something we just guess at now.
But as you said, financial and market domination are for more interesting than knowledge and expansion of the human domain. More was lost in the stock market from Oct 2007 to Nov 2008 ($21 trillion) than was spent from 1958 through 2008 ($471 billion or $9.4 billion/year). If just 2.25% of that "lost" money had been put into NASA or an cooperative international space agency (a real cooperation, not competition between agencies), there would have been a budget surplus for almost 50 years. What kind of spacecraft would 50 years worth of budget built today? This conversation wouldn't be between people sitting on the same rock in space. We'd be discussing this between distant planets and possibly galaxies.
{sigh}
Unfortunately, the general public, or even the majority of the politicians and decision makers, will ever understand or comprehend this. They'll continue to want the newer car, nicer house, and fight over the limited resource of the year.
When the end of the human race comes, it won't be with a bang. It'll will be with a soft whimper. People losing their money, power, and fame, and a few of us crying with the knowledge that it could have been different. Theorized catastrophes such as "global warming" "next ice age", "killer meteorite" or other ELE's wouldn't be the end of humanity as we know it. It will only be a reason to evacuate to another home. Future archeologists may find that we were on a good path for surviving these, and completely failed at our own ability to save ourselves.
No, the aliens left the tool. The humans were dumb enough to hit the button. Little did they know, it wasn't really a terraforming tool, it was a self destruct. The movie ended before you saw the entire crust of the planet dissolve after the ice layer melted, letting the magma reach the surface.
Some things are there for a reason, and they shouldn't be messed with. That, and you shouldn't trust a parasitic mutant.
I almost got bored with that. I skipped ahead from the middle to close to the end, and saw the big green ring, so I had to go back and watch the missing parts.
It's really amazing. But I have to think, we don't watch inwards of our own path enough. If there are that many objects outward of our own orbit, from the sun, there should be quite a few more inward. I know, I know, the infinite expanse of space, versus the distance between our own star and our dinky little planet. Still, you'd think for future space exploration, we'd end up mining at least some of those objects, and the area between Venus and Mars would be more likely to mine, rather than Earth to Jupiter.
Too bad the scale isn't right. It looks like all we should see at night is the cloud of asteroids surrounding us. Every point on that video is much larger than the true size of any of them. I like this video which gives a good idea of relative sizes. All those asteroid dots on the map would be imperceptible once you got up to even the first star size.
Ya, a lot of things get a low priority if they aren't causing problems all the time. So an engine stalls occasionally, or the pitot tube freezes sometimes, it's not catastrophic. Pilots learn work-arounds until the problem is fixed. Well, until we see something catastrophic like this.
I agree, it does sound like the pitot tube failure. Being where it crashed, I don't think we'll be able to find out exactly what happened. It could have been ice (most likely), but it could have been bugs hit on takeoff that finally got pushed back into the sensor, or even a wire came loose. If it was the first, a pitot heater would resolve it. If it were the other two, then the pitot heater would have just been a decoration.
Still, I'm sure pilots and passengers alike would prefer to know that the best bug fixes had been put into place. Really, how long would it take to swap the tube? It could be done while the aircraft was stopped for the night between any trips. I shouldn't expect that more than a week would need to go by between releasing the fix, and implementation.
But, we see that all through IT too. So a drive throws an occasional error, or there are 100 cases of malware wiping out an OS. It isn't a problem until it becomes catastrophic. We like to hold airlines and nuclear power plants to a higher standard than our own industry, but we all do the same things.
I can't say that I recall ever seeing a broken WeatherPak connector. Well, unless someone took a screwdriver or hammer to it.:)
Back to your main topic (if you're reading this far), what are you using for an ODB-II reader? I've been thinking of putting together some kit (possibly over Bluetooth so it works with both my Droid and laptop) to better understand the workings of that truck, and to diagnose it on the go (if I'm going anywhere far, it's likely for work) and am interested in any opinions or anecdotes you have about specific gear. (And since I'm a sucker for helping folks out, I'll probably end up using it on a lot of different vehicles...)
I had looked at lots of options. I've wanted to integrate something into my primary vehicle (oddly enough, not the one I had problems with this weekend). I bought three that were ELM327 based. One was a knock-off from eBay. It didn't work when I received it. The next was one of the suggested commercial versions, connected via RS232. The first worked for about an hour. Restarting the car was enough to kill it. I'm guessing a power surge, but I'd never encountered a power surge in that vehicle. I returned it to the manufacturer, who replaced it with another, that failed after about 2 hours.
What I'm using now is an Actron OBDII scanner. It was sold on clearance for $100 a few years ago. It physically resembles the CP9185. It's been dropped, tossed in the back of cars, trunks, stepped on, run over (BTW, don't loan tools out, they'll get run over). Despite all of that, it works great. It does the code scanning perfectly, and live sensor monitoring. I've used the live sensor monitoring to catch problems with TPS (throttle position sensor), O2S (Oxygen sensor), and VSS (Vehicle speed sensor). The good part has been, it's *not* mounted in the vehicle. I toss it in my toolbox. Sometimes my "toolbox" is just a cardboard or plastic box, if my back is acting up, and I can't lift my regular toolbox. I have lots of damage in my back. Unfortunately, the only monitoring that I have for that are my own head, and MRI's.:)
I fixed a friend-of-a-friend's truck a while back. His TPS was bad. He'd be driving, and the truck would stall intermittently. 3 shops, including the dealership, couldn't diagnose it. They were more than happy to fix things that weren't broken though. I had my educated guess (between understanding engines, but no specific knowledge of his truck, and the OBDII information) in about 5 minutes, and went back to his place the next morning with the parts. The last I heard, it was still running perfectly.
All in all, I've probably replaced more sensors and electronic controls than actual mechanical parts. It's almost like they intend these parts to fail, to keep the work-load up at the dealership. The crankshaft position sensor that failed last weekend, when I pulled it out, I showed my girlfriend. She was in the passenger seat waiting for me to fix it, or call AAA for a tow. The inside part of the the sensor had started to come apart, which probably resulted in the "intermittent" functionality. it probably broke a wire inside. I put it back in the box, and threw it in my toolbox for later "examination" (with cutters and a hammer).
Well, most automotive sensors I've seen for essential purposes (like engine and drivetrain monitoring and controls), are "Weatherpack" connectors, which do an excellent job. I don't know how the sensors I replaced were damaged, but it was physically obvious on the interior portion. I haven't seen a failed weatherpack connector yet. I have seem some that weren't attached correctly (stuffed in "good enough", but not electrically sound).
Most aviation connections that I've seen are screw on connecters. That is, they push into place, and then the ring is tightened to secure it in place. I don't do much with aviation, but I've observed these used quite frequently.
Neither takes into account stupidity of people who think they know what they're doing. I've seen duct-tape wrapped wires (hint: conductive), wires, and wires just twisted together and jammed under the carpet. Those always make for fun diagnosing problems. For some reason, I swear every friend of mine that has bought a used car, gets one that someone had put an amp and sub in the rear, and never thought out the design. I was helping a friend with his SUV, and found a huge (2 AWG, I believe) wire screwed to the positive battery terminal with a sheet metal screw, passed through a hole with no grommet (but yes, sharp metal), snaked through the cabin, finally ending under the carpet by the rear doors. The last 4" were stripped (why? I don't know), and it was precariously close to bare metal. Well, precariously as in there was evidence of arcing. There was no fuse anywhere from the batter to the end of the wire.
Sometimes I wish they didn't sell all the parts for any idiot to play with their wiring. Then again, it would make it more difficult for me to get parts and set things up correctly.:)
You can't honestly say that you work on code that has functions that don't take up a significant amount of vertical space. If you do, you must really be enjoying your entry level work. When you grow out of that, you'll find that vertical space is wonderful to have.
I usually try to keep my code to 80 columns wide, and yes, I use short names. There is simply no reason to have a function named "this_function_sanitizes_some_variable_that another_function_could_not_handle_so_it_is_done_here() ". That's not to say I don't see it though. I end up looking at horrible code all the time.
BTW, I had an underscore between "that" and "another". Even Slashdot agrees, it's bad practice.:)
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there.
There are two reasons for horizontally arranged eyeglasses.
First, people tend to look for things on the same plane that they are on. Most people don't pay attention to what is up or down. They pay attention to their horizontal plane, which would be where predators or attackers would normally come from. This is due to behavior training through their life. People tell their kids to look left and right before crossing the street. No one ever says "look up and down", which incidentally is what makes potholes at street curbs that much more entertaining.
It is a fairly simple behavior modification to extend their plane of perception to the vertical plane. It works out very well for law enforcement though, as people tend to not look up for helicopters following them.:)
The second is... fashion. You can buy completely round glasses, which support correction around the full field of view. To remain somewhat fashionable, eyeglasses for vision correction are rarely made to cover the full field of view. This also makes it a bastard to play pool with glasses that are not cut to give enough field of view (been there, done that, bought new glasses after losing because I couldn't clearly focus on the whole table)
You can easily test for the first reason at many optometrists offices. They can (and will) test for "blind spots" in the field of view. If you look at the resulting graph, the area is round, not a horizontal oval or square. Well, unless you have serious eye problems.
Trust me, it's not modern airline pilots who are screaming that.
Not to make light with a car analogy, but....:)
I was driving out to watch the shuttle launch this weekend (yes, it was cool, even though there were low clouds). About 45 minutes into the trip, my truck stalled. It took a few tries, and it started back up. I happened to have my OBD-II reader with me, so I stopped at the next exit and checked for codes. No current codes, but a pending code for an intermittent fault with the crank position sensor. Hrm. It hadn't done that before. I stopped by a local parts store (found via GPS, not by knowing the shitty area), grabbed one, and continued on the trip. The car was acting fine for over an hour, and suddenly nothing.
So just over an hour, and just about 100 miles from home, the engine cut out, and wouldn't restart. 5 minutes of finding the right tool in the back (I travel prepared), and 2 minutes changing the parts, and I was on my way.
Cruising along on the Interstate, everything was fine. When we got close to Titusville, it started shifting funny, and the speedometer became erratic at anything below highway speeds. No codes, no pending codes, nothing. The common solution, the vehicle speed sensor (VSS). There happen to be two VSS sensors (transmission and transfer case). Two VSS sensors later, and all is fine again.
The computer uses the VSS, TPS, and a few other things to determine what gear the transmission should be in. Cruising along at 45mph it'll up and down shift as it sees fit, which is much less than ideal.
So manually shifting the automatic to 3rd gear to drive at 45mph or below, and shifting to 4/OD to drive above 55 was much less than ideal.
There's nothing like fucked up sensor to ruin your day. If I hadn't been lucky enough to catch the pending code and pick up the crank position sensor, I would have been towed to a shop would would have been very happy to overcharge me for changing it.
The engine is based on one with a great lineage, and the older pre-computerized parts are interchangeable, and the swap would be about $300 in parts. That would take care of any engine stopping problems. I haven't found a compatible transmission option that fit with the transfer case and drive shaft lengths. {sigh}.
In my case, a faulty sensor or three just made the trip difficult. In the case of an airliner,... well... non-running engines, or inability to receive accurate airspeed readings are rather catastrophic. In the case of computer *ASSISTED* systems, the pilot can fly by the seat of his pants. Great, so the IAS is 0 knots. Big deal. We see clouds going by, the stick isn't shaking, and the physical stall horns aren't sounding. IAS of 999 knots means throttle back, and pull up to bleed some speed off. If that IAS is wrong, you're going to discover what it was like to be the apple falling at Newton's head.
The car with failed sensors like this doesn't make the news. Well, not any more than me bitching about it. In a commercial aircraft, it'll make the news for years, a fortune being paid out to the victim's families.
I'm not trying to argue that my car is more important than an airliner, but we see improperly implemented technology does cause lots of problems, which cannot be resolved by any degree of operator skill.
You know, that's why I learned it in the first place. I was young, dumb, and thought I could make a difference from inside. It took a little time for me to realize that regardless of how good I was, I'd likely work the jails or street patrol for an awful long time. I'd only make a difference to those who I interacted with, and even then, there's a percentage that would prefer I be dead than to interact with me. Getting shot for low pay really isn't really as cool as it sounds. So now I do IT. Good pay, very very little risk of getting shot, and I still remember enough to keep myself out of trouble.
Well, not to pull some of the most overused gov't quotes, but "national security", "threat level" and "terrorism threat".
The location was near a port. Not a huge one, it's a port that freighters, tankers, and cruise ships use. And you can say to yourself now, "Hmmmm, people on cruise ships take lots of pictures", and you'd be absolutely right.
We stopped before a guard shack that said "no admittance". Hmmm. Looking at Google Maps, they didn't send the street view cam all the way down the road, but there's nothing indicating "don't go past here". Not until the guard shack. We pulled our U-turn in that loop you see just East of the guard shack, but only did it on the road part. I like my car, and running over rail road tracks in a dirt parking lot isn't always a good idea.
The structure was... well, something. I never did figure it out. Lots of geometric shapes, which is why I was shooting it. You can see it being demolished in the satellite view on the North side of the road.
When all the polizei showed up, they were a bit miffed that my car doors were locked. The deputy asked "Why did you lock your doors? Did you think someone was going to break into it out here?" I answered the only honest way I knew how. "Sir, you tried to open the door." Open doors are fair-ish game for no-warrant searches. Basically, the argument is that they can say they thought they saw something that looked like a weapon, so they had probable cause. They can't compel you to open a car without a warrant. They took our IDs, ran them through, found we weren't wanted nor terrorists, and 15 minutes later they left us alone. Since our side of the story was "we're just taking pictures", and the story never changed, they had nothing to work with. The best they could come up with was "that's private property over there", and I reminded him that we were still standing on public property. Well, with:
Him: "That's private property over there."
Me: "Over there, off this road, right?" Him: "Right".
Me:"And this isn't his property, right?" Him: "Right".
Me: "So I'm still on public land, right?" Him: "Well, you're in front of his private property."
Me: "But this is still a public road. I didn't see any signs saying otherwise." Him: "But you turned around in his driveway"
Me: "By state law, any road, driveway, private street, etc, that connects to a public road may be considered a public road for temporary purposes, such as turning around. I spent less than a few seconds there. And that's a commercial building, during normal operating hours, which makes that parking lot and that driveway legal for anyone to transit, right."
(side note: You can be ticketed for running a stop sign or exceeding the posted speed limit in a grocery store parking lot, because of this rule. You also can't be charged with trespassing unless you have been explicitly told by the owner, or a representative of the owner, that you are not allowed there. If you get told to leave the property of a store, that includes the parking lot, which is then considered trespassing. )
Him: "Well, you can't be here. Homeland security told me you are doing something wrong."
Me: "So, am I being charged, or am I free to go?" Him: "Do you have anything illegal in your car?"
Me: "Nope. Do you have a warrant to check it? Or am I free to go?" Him: "You're free to go."
I guess I forgot to mention, I know an awful lot about the law in this state, due to previous employment. I could have refused to
I guess we've always had good doctors. With them, they were clear that c-sections were a last resort measure. Of everyone I've known, they've had a 100% survival rate through infancy, except for one early miscarriage. That was easily attributed to lifestyle (heavy illegal drug use).
I was always told by doctors that having a baby after over 35 was dangerous to the mother. That's from several American doctors, who were our OB/GYN's for my 3 children. My mother also said she was told the same concerns when she was carrying my sister and I. They won't say "no, go abort it", but they strongly suggest against it, if you are planning to have a child. I don't believe it had anything to do with religious beliefs, but these days I wouldn't doubt it. None expressed religious beliefs to us, and we never did to them, which I appreciated. I want a doctor who understands the science he is practicing. I don't want a faith healer.
I can think of a few places that may not have phone service. I'd call them, but... well, you get it.:) It's kind of like when you drive out beyond what you thought was the last city on some back county road that looks like it goes nowhere, and then hang a left on a side road, and then just keep going for 30+ miles... People forget that such places exist, but they do. Some places only electricity is generator power, and they bring in food and fuel by boat or plane, since it's easier than driving, if possible at all.
You can't even take pictures of planes near airports anymore in the US without getting arrested.
I'm actually *very* surprised that I haven't had a few words said to me when I've been stuck in airports. I'll go around shooting pictures of whatever interests me. I like aircraft, so I end up with an awful lot of pictures of random aircraft. I've been considering uploading them all to airliners.com, but... well... I'm too lazy.:) I still haven't figured out who these belong to. Lots of white, no airline markings. I was told they're possibly embassy flights.
I'm still surprised the flight crews don't go ape-shit when people take snapshots through airplane windows during flights.
They will tweak out if you have a camera in your hand, even if it's a SLR, when electronics are suppose to be off. To film takeoff and landing, you have to wait for them to sit down and buckle in. The way I see it, if there's a crash, at least there's a chance they'll find the recording and get a better picture of what happened.
I got some half-way decent video transiting over New York City. It was dumb luck. I spotted a city, thought about how long we were in the air and said "Hmmmm, that's probably New York". We were high enough, nothing was distinguishable, but with the zoom all the way in I could see the Statue of Liberty.:) I never manage to get aircraft passing above or below us though. By the time I notice them, they're going the other way too fast to get a camera up.
Those are all fine, but shoot something like this, and you'll get all kinds of nice men with guns and badges (DHS and local sheriffs department) asking lots of questions, even though you were standing on public property taking them. They way I see it, if I can see this sign, and I'm still on the paved part of a public road, I'm not doing anything wrong. I guess I should mention, we were just out taking pictures for some stock photography. We didn't find anything interesting, and I decided it was best not to start shooting pictures of the officers.
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The "misguided student" crash was Charles Bishop in Tampa, FL. It happened on Jan 5, 2002. I was in the area after it happened, and saw the tail of the plane sticking out of the building.
He had a hand-written note on him when they recovered the body. He flew around erratically (like, he didn't know where he was going, not as an evasion). The police helicopter followed him and they were trying to make radio calls to him, which he ignored.
He did fly over MacDill AFB, but couldn't find a target. The buildings there are pretty nondescript. There's nothing with a target on the roof saying "Attack here". He turned and went East, finally crashing into the Bank of America building. Some windows were smashed out, a wing (or both sides, I don't remember) fell off, and ended up on the sidewalk below.
There are crazy people out there, and applying the "terrorist" label to everyone who does anything wrong, and trying to associate them in with loosely organized groups (like "Anonymous" or "Al Qaeda") really doesn't do anyone any good. If someone is crazy, suicidal, and desperately looking for attention through their suicide, they may just get it. Unfortunately, they should have received mental health treatment instead. Well, the kid is famous (and dead from the crash), but people are still talking about him. I guess he got what he wanted.
As I recall, it took them a while to extract the plane from the building. It was stuck on the 23rd floor
I don't remember having a geiger counter in any classes in high school, but it's possible. It's been a long time. I do vaguely remember discussions about their operation, and purpose, along with understanding what radiation is, the half life of various materials, etc.
The most important bit that I remember is that geiger counters usually have a test source with them, to verify functionality. If there is an emergency where you need one, it's stupid to grab one, say "it reads 0, I'm safe.", and then go walking around check radiation levels and never detecting anything because you didn't verify functionality. :)
What people need to consider when buying one is, is it checking 4 bands, or just one. Is it calibrated, and can it be calibrated. There are plenty of the old Civil Defense units out there, where they haven't been calibrated since they were manufactured , decades ago.
I heard that if you walk around a grocery store with one, it'll go nuts on various aisles, such as fresh produce. I've wanted one for years, but any good ones are rather expensive, considering it's just going to be a novelty toy. I don't mind having electronic toys, but it's nice to be able to use them once in a while. I picked up a no-contact infrared thermometer ("laser guided thermometer", as I like to call it). I tested my cat, my monitors, the walls of the house, and my girlfriend. :) Beyond being a novelty toy, I use it to test the air conditioning in cars. I was fixing the cooling system in two different cars in the last couple weeks. It was safer to point it at the radiator, than to touch it and see if it hurt. :)
Volcanoes are easy.
Step 1: Stay far away from anything substantially higher than air temperature.
Step 2: Stay far away from anywhere the lava may flow.
In the end, you win or lose. Winners survive. Losers ... well ... don't survive.
Maybe I'm more like The Doctor than Mr. Logic. Your quaint traditions are very unusual, and I don't believe I'll ever become accustomed to them. But, let me try this out. Your mother is a whore. Did I do that quite right?
It still appears to be a tremendous leap from being called "Skippy" to being called sewage.
Maybe friendly jest between ... well ... friends, is seriously different. It isn't like it started with "oh, I call my American friend septic sometimes, we laugh, and then drink a pint", it was said to a complete stranger. And now repeated over and over.
It doesn't matter how you attempt to rationalize an insult, it's still an insult.
But what would the English know about politeness, where the whole island is inbred anyways. Just sayin'
Because you read the article. Or at least the summary. So you and I both know that there's someone out there that plays sports, that had an affair with a smoking hottie (scroll up for the name). So clearly, you can't say "Tiger Woods".
Wait... Who were we talking about again?
The difference there would be that the word "Sherman" comes from the name of the American General William Tecumseh Sherman. The tank itself was well respected as a strong and efficient machine.
"Septic", on the other hand, still refers to a box full of shit.
It takes an American to bother understanding the language they speak, and can recognize an insult built upon another insult? Interesting. I guess I honestly have some misconceptions of how the rest of the world operates.
So, septic tank, rather than say gas tank, petrol tank, oxygen tank, external fuel tank (like the ET on the all-American Space Shuttle), water tank. Or drifting away from containers, battle tank, M1 Abrams tank, Sherman tank, .... Or frank (like frankfurter, a generally phallic reference),
But why focus on just term "yank" anyways? If you follow the etymology of it, it originates from a disparaging term for Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam, and around the time of the colonial war (err, American Revolutionary War), it was used as a disparaging term for anyone in the colonies (to be the United States of America). That could be considered rather rude.
But I guess it's all good, since any time a limey, buck toothed, pale skinned, small dicked, citizen of the Queens empire calls me a "yank", I just smile and say "Good show chap. Oh look, it's time for tea and a punch up".
Hmm, it has been a while since anyone's called me a yank. Most prefer to call me Mr. Smythe, and I respond politely to them in kind. It's called respect, which it seems some people still haven't learned.
We do get smacked a lot. Have you ever seen a shooting star? We have a nice thick dense atmosphere, but nothing like the gas giants. Luckily, most burn up on the way in, or are barely pebbles when the bump into the ground, or plop into the oceans.
From what I understand of the birth and lifespan of a solar system, it begins with a dense object and slowly objects fall towards it. In time as they swirl, objects fall into the denser spots. The largest and densest can become a stars when there is sufficient mass. As the remaining debris floats around, it can smash together and stick, They can smash together and shatter. The debris may form another planet, moons, or bounce off into space, or just float around in similar circles.
There's a lot we have to learn about the universe, and even our own solar system. Are those rocks that we see as just random chunks of nothing, or are they pieces of larger bodies long since broken up? Is that the fate of the Earth? Unlike many beliefs that we have, I doubt the earth is "too big to fail". An eccentric celestial body could destroy us. Then again, space is a very very large place, and the chances are ... well, there are a virtually infinite number of bodies out there. And an infinite amount of time where they could intersect with our path. In such a given time, it would be logical to believe that there is a chance at some point the Earth may become an asteroid belt, and then part of another planet sometime in an infinite number of years. I doubt any of that will happen within my lifetime, as the lifespan of the human form is far too short. The most I can hope for is the ability to travel even to just our nearby celestial bodies with the hope of guessing their history. I guess it would be a trip with an astrogeologist (exogeologist?). The titles aren't that cool now, but wait until they're flying around the solar system checking out asteroids. :) Imagine what could be found...
I was at KSC for the launch. We toured the visitors center while we were there. It's really sad to see the Apollo capsules, and the great advances to the Space Shuttle, and now we're looking "forward" to the Orion, which is just a slightly larger Apollo capsule.
We may have been advancing from 1957 through 1981, and then a final burst of activity in the 1990's with the ISS. What significant advances have we made in the last 20 years? No innovated new spacecraft. No new propulsion technologies. Everything that we've thrown into space from this rock we call home, was conceived decades earlier.
I've said for many years that we will keep advancing. We will innovate newer and better things. If we planned an interstellar craft in the 1980's and launched in the 1990's, in the following decade we'd have something bigger, better, and faster, to pick up the original crew with, and get there in a fraction of the time.
I guess it's good that a generational interstellar craft was never launched. In a few decades, we will have found ourselves traveling no farther than orbiting our own rock. There was some excitement about probes finally reaching the heliopause. In the direction that we're heading, no human will ever see it. In 100 years, we'll have forgotten about that mysterious place beyond our own atmosphere. In a couple hundred years, humans will probably believe the earth is flat, and the stars are marks high in our own sky, rather than understanding that they are really distant stars, planets, solar systems, and entire galaxies with billion of stars and planets in each.
Yes, in a couple hundred years, we will again be alone in the universe, because we took it on faith that we are alone, and ignored science. Science would have shown us that we aren't alone in the universe, because we would have colonized planets throughout our own galaxy. And then maybe, just maybe, we would have a bit of insight into how the universe really works, which is something we just guess at now.
But as you said, financial and market domination are for more interesting than knowledge and expansion of the human domain. More was lost in the stock market from Oct 2007 to Nov 2008 ($21 trillion) than was spent from 1958 through 2008 ($471 billion or $9.4 billion/year). If just 2.25% of that "lost" money had been put into NASA or an cooperative international space agency (a real cooperation, not competition between agencies), there would have been a budget surplus for almost 50 years. What kind of spacecraft would 50 years worth of budget built today? This conversation wouldn't be between people sitting on the same rock in space. We'd be discussing this between distant planets and possibly galaxies.
{sigh}
Unfortunately, the general public, or even the majority of the politicians and decision makers, will ever understand or comprehend this. They'll continue to want the newer car, nicer house, and fight over the limited resource of the year.
When the end of the human race comes, it won't be with a bang. It'll will be with a soft whimper. People losing their money, power, and fame, and a few of us crying with the knowledge that it could have been different. Theorized catastrophes such as "global warming" "next ice age", "killer meteorite" or other ELE's wouldn't be the end of humanity as we know it. It will only be a reason to evacuate to another home. Future archeologists may find that we were on a good path for surviving these, and completely failed at our own ability to save ourselves.
No, the aliens left the tool. The humans were dumb enough to hit the button. Little did they know, it wasn't really a terraforming tool, it was a self destruct. The movie ended before you saw the entire crust of the planet dissolve after the ice layer melted, letting the magma reach the surface.
Some things are there for a reason, and they shouldn't be messed with. That, and you shouldn't trust a parasitic mutant.
I almost got bored with that. I skipped ahead from the middle to close to the end, and saw the big green ring, so I had to go back and watch the missing parts.
It's really amazing. But I have to think, we don't watch inwards of our own path enough. If there are that many objects outward of our own orbit, from the sun, there should be quite a few more inward. I know, I know, the infinite expanse of space, versus the distance between our own star and our dinky little planet. Still, you'd think for future space exploration, we'd end up mining at least some of those objects, and the area between Venus and Mars would be more likely to mine, rather than Earth to Jupiter.
Too bad the scale isn't right. It looks like all we should see at night is the cloud of asteroids surrounding us. Every point on that video is much larger than the true size of any of them. I like this video which gives a good idea of relative sizes. All those asteroid dots on the map would be imperceptible once you got up to even the first star size.
Ya, a lot of things get a low priority if they aren't causing problems all the time. So an engine stalls occasionally, or the pitot tube freezes sometimes, it's not catastrophic. Pilots learn work-arounds until the problem is fixed. Well, until we see something catastrophic like this.
I agree, it does sound like the pitot tube failure. Being where it crashed, I don't think we'll be able to find out exactly what happened. It could have been ice (most likely), but it could have been bugs hit on takeoff that finally got pushed back into the sensor, or even a wire came loose. If it was the first, a pitot heater would resolve it. If it were the other two, then the pitot heater would have just been a decoration.
Still, I'm sure pilots and passengers alike would prefer to know that the best bug fixes had been put into place. Really, how long would it take to swap the tube? It could be done while the aircraft was stopped for the night between any trips. I shouldn't expect that more than a week would need to go by between releasing the fix, and implementation.
But, we see that all through IT too. So a drive throws an occasional error, or there are 100 cases of malware wiping out an OS. It isn't a problem until it becomes catastrophic. We like to hold airlines and nuclear power plants to a higher standard than our own industry, but we all do the same things.
I can't say that I recall ever seeing a broken WeatherPak connector. Well, unless someone took a screwdriver or hammer to it. :)
I had looked at lots of options. I've wanted to integrate something into my primary vehicle (oddly enough, not the one I had problems with this weekend). I bought three that were ELM327 based. One was a knock-off from eBay. It didn't work when I received it. The next was one of the suggested commercial versions, connected via RS232. The first worked for about an hour. Restarting the car was enough to kill it. I'm guessing a power surge, but I'd never encountered a power surge in that vehicle. I returned it to the manufacturer, who replaced it with another, that failed after about 2 hours.
What I'm using now is an Actron OBDII scanner. It was sold on clearance for $100 a few years ago. It physically resembles the CP9185. It's been dropped, tossed in the back of cars, trunks, stepped on, run over (BTW, don't loan tools out, they'll get run over). Despite all of that, it works great. It does the code scanning perfectly, and live sensor monitoring. I've used the live sensor monitoring to catch problems with TPS (throttle position sensor), O2S (Oxygen sensor), and VSS (Vehicle speed sensor). The good part has been, it's *not* mounted in the vehicle. I toss it in my toolbox. Sometimes my "toolbox" is just a cardboard or plastic box, if my back is acting up, and I can't lift my regular toolbox. I have lots of damage in my back. Unfortunately, the only monitoring that I have for that are my own head, and MRI's. :)
I fixed a friend-of-a-friend's truck a while back. His TPS was bad. He'd be driving, and the truck would stall intermittently. 3 shops, including the dealership, couldn't diagnose it. They were more than happy to fix things that weren't broken though. I had my educated guess (between understanding engines, but no specific knowledge of his truck, and the OBDII information) in about 5 minutes, and went back to his place the next morning with the parts. The last I heard, it was still running perfectly.
All in all, I've probably replaced more sensors and electronic controls than actual mechanical parts. It's almost like they intend these parts to fail, to keep the work-load up at the dealership. The crankshaft position sensor that failed last weekend, when I pulled it out, I showed my girlfriend. She was in the passenger seat waiting for me to fix it, or call AAA for a tow. The inside part of the the sensor had started to come apart, which probably resulted in the "intermittent" functionality. it probably broke a wire inside. I put it back in the box, and threw it in my toolbox for later "examination" (with cutters and a hammer).
Required? No, I avoid it like the plague.
Well, most automotive sensors I've seen for essential purposes (like engine and drivetrain monitoring and controls), are "Weatherpack" connectors, which do an excellent job. I don't know how the sensors I replaced were damaged, but it was physically obvious on the interior portion. I haven't seen a failed weatherpack connector yet. I have seem some that weren't attached correctly (stuffed in "good enough", but not electrically sound).
Most aviation connections that I've seen are screw on connecters. That is, they push into place, and then the ring is tightened to secure it in place. I don't do much with aviation, but I've observed these used quite frequently.
Neither takes into account stupidity of people who think they know what they're doing. I've seen duct-tape wrapped wires (hint: conductive), wires, and wires just twisted together and jammed under the carpet. Those always make for fun diagnosing problems. For some reason, I swear every friend of mine that has bought a used car, gets one that someone had put an amp and sub in the rear, and never thought out the design. I was helping a friend with his SUV, and found a huge (2 AWG, I believe) wire screwed to the positive battery terminal with a sheet metal screw, passed through a hole with no grommet (but yes, sharp metal), snaked through the cabin, finally ending under the carpet by the rear doors. The last 4" were stripped (why? I don't know), and it was precariously close to bare metal. Well, precariously as in there was evidence of arcing. There was no fuse anywhere from the batter to the end of the wire.
Sometimes I wish they didn't sell all the parts for any idiot to play with their wiring. Then again, it would make it more difficult for me to get parts and set things up correctly. :)
You can't honestly say that you work on code that has functions that don't take up a significant amount of vertical space. If you do, you must really be enjoying your entry level work. When you grow out of that, you'll find that vertical space is wonderful to have.
I usually try to keep my code to 80 columns wide, and yes, I use short names. There is simply no reason to have a function named "this_function_sanitizes_some_variable_that another_function_could_not_handle_so_it_is_done_here() ". That's not to say I don't see it though. I end up looking at horrible code all the time.
BTW, I had an underscore between "that" and "another". Even Slashdot agrees, it's bad practice. :)
There are two reasons for horizontally arranged eyeglasses.
First, people tend to look for things on the same plane that they are on. Most people don't pay attention to what is up or down. They pay attention to their horizontal plane, which would be where predators or attackers would normally come from. This is due to behavior training through their life. People tell their kids to look left and right before crossing the street. No one ever says "look up and down", which incidentally is what makes potholes at street curbs that much more entertaining.
It is a fairly simple behavior modification to extend their plane of perception to the vertical plane. It works out very well for law enforcement though, as people tend to not look up for helicopters following them. :)
The second is ... fashion. You can buy completely round glasses, which support correction around the full field of view. To remain somewhat fashionable, eyeglasses for vision correction are rarely made to cover the full field of view. This also makes it a bastard to play pool with glasses that are not cut to give enough field of view (been there, done that, bought new glasses after losing because I couldn't clearly focus on the whole table)
You can easily test for the first reason at many optometrists offices. They can (and will) test for "blind spots" in the field of view. If you look at the resulting graph, the area is round, not a horizontal oval or square. Well, unless you have serious eye problems.
Trust me, it's not modern airline pilots who are screaming that.
Not to make light with a car analogy, but.... :)
I was driving out to watch the shuttle launch this weekend (yes, it was cool, even though there were low clouds). About 45 minutes into the trip, my truck stalled. It took a few tries, and it started back up. I happened to have my OBD-II reader with me, so I stopped at the next exit and checked for codes. No current codes, but a pending code for an intermittent fault with the crank position sensor. Hrm. It hadn't done that before. I stopped by a local parts store (found via GPS, not by knowing the shitty area), grabbed one, and continued on the trip. The car was acting fine for over an hour, and suddenly nothing.
So just over an hour, and just about 100 miles from home, the engine cut out, and wouldn't restart. 5 minutes of finding the right tool in the back (I travel prepared), and 2 minutes changing the parts, and I was on my way.
Cruising along on the Interstate, everything was fine. When we got close to Titusville, it started shifting funny, and the speedometer became erratic at anything below highway speeds. No codes, no pending codes, nothing. The common solution, the vehicle speed sensor (VSS). There happen to be two VSS sensors (transmission and transfer case). Two VSS sensors later, and all is fine again.
The computer uses the VSS, TPS, and a few other things to determine what gear the transmission should be in. Cruising along at 45mph it'll up and down shift as it sees fit, which is much less than ideal.
So manually shifting the automatic to 3rd gear to drive at 45mph or below, and shifting to 4/OD to drive above 55 was much less than ideal.
There's nothing like fucked up sensor to ruin your day. If I hadn't been lucky enough to catch the pending code and pick up the crank position sensor, I would have been towed to a shop would would have been very happy to overcharge me for changing it.
The engine is based on one with a great lineage, and the older pre-computerized parts are interchangeable, and the swap would be about $300 in parts. That would take care of any engine stopping problems. I haven't found a compatible transmission option that fit with the transfer case and drive shaft lengths. {sigh}.
In my case, a faulty sensor or three just made the trip difficult. In the case of an airliner, ... well ... non-running engines, or inability to receive accurate airspeed readings are rather catastrophic. In the case of computer *ASSISTED* systems, the pilot can fly by the seat of his pants. Great, so the IAS is 0 knots. Big deal. We see clouds going by, the stick isn't shaking, and the physical stall horns aren't sounding. IAS of 999 knots means throttle back, and pull up to bleed some speed off. If that IAS is wrong, you're going to discover what it was like to be the apple falling at Newton's head.
The car with failed sensors like this doesn't make the news. Well, not any more than me bitching about it. In a commercial aircraft, it'll make the news for years, a fortune being paid out to the victim's families.
I'm not trying to argue that my car is more important than an airliner, but we see improperly implemented technology does cause lots of problems, which cannot be resolved by any degree of operator skill.
You know, that's why I learned it in the first place. I was young, dumb, and thought I could make a difference from inside. It took a little time for me to realize that regardless of how good I was, I'd likely work the jails or street patrol for an awful long time. I'd only make a difference to those who I interacted with, and even then, there's a percentage that would prefer I be dead than to interact with me. Getting shot for low pay really isn't really as cool as it sounds. So now I do IT. Good pay, very very little risk of getting shot, and I still remember enough to keep myself out of trouble.
Well, not to pull some of the most overused gov't quotes, but "national security", "threat level" and "terrorism threat".
The location was near a port. Not a huge one, it's a port that freighters, tankers, and cruise ships use. And you can say to yourself now, "Hmmmm, people on cruise ships take lots of pictures", and you'd be absolutely right.
We stopped before a guard shack that said "no admittance". Hmmm. Looking at Google Maps, they didn't send the street view cam all the way down the road, but there's nothing indicating "don't go past here". Not until the guard shack. We pulled our U-turn in that loop you see just East of the guard shack, but only did it on the road part. I like my car, and running over rail road tracks in a dirt parking lot isn't always a good idea.
The structure was ... well, something. I never did figure it out. Lots of geometric shapes, which is why I was shooting it. You can see it being demolished in the satellite view on the North side of the road.
When all the polizei showed up, they were a bit miffed that my car doors were locked. The deputy asked "Why did you lock your doors? Did you think someone was going to break into it out here?" I answered the only honest way I knew how. "Sir, you tried to open the door." Open doors are fair-ish game for no-warrant searches. Basically, the argument is that they can say they thought they saw something that looked like a weapon, so they had probable cause. They can't compel you to open a car without a warrant. They took our IDs, ran them through, found we weren't wanted nor terrorists, and 15 minutes later they left us alone. Since our side of the story was "we're just taking pictures", and the story never changed, they had nothing to work with. The best they could come up with was "that's private property over there", and I reminded him that we were still standing on public property. Well, with:
Him: "That's private property over there."
Me: "Over there, off this road, right?"
Him: "Right".
Me:"And this isn't his property, right?"
Him: "Right".
Me: "So I'm still on public land, right?"
Him: "Well, you're in front of his private property."
Me: "But this is still a public road. I didn't see any signs saying otherwise."
Him: "But you turned around in his driveway"
Me: "By state law, any road, driveway, private street, etc, that connects to a public road may be considered a public road for temporary purposes, such as turning around. I spent less than a few seconds there. And that's a commercial building, during normal operating hours, which makes that parking lot and that driveway legal for anyone to transit, right."
(side note: You can be ticketed for running a stop sign or exceeding the posted speed limit in a grocery store parking lot, because of this rule. You also can't be charged with trespassing unless you have been explicitly told by the owner, or a representative of the owner, that you are not allowed there. If you get told to leave the property of a store, that includes the parking lot, which is then considered trespassing. )
Him: "Well, you can't be here. Homeland security told me you are doing something wrong."
Me: "So, am I being charged, or am I free to go?"
Him: "Do you have anything illegal in your car?"
Me: "Nope. Do you have a warrant to check it? Or am I free to go?"
Him: "You're free to go."
I guess I forgot to mention, I know an awful lot about the law in this state, due to previous employment. I could have refused to
I guess we've always had good doctors. With them, they were clear that c-sections were a last resort measure. Of everyone I've known, they've had a 100% survival rate through infancy, except for one early miscarriage. That was easily attributed to lifestyle (heavy illegal drug use).
I was always told by doctors that having a baby after over 35 was dangerous to the mother. That's from several American doctors, who were our OB/GYN's for my 3 children. My mother also said she was told the same concerns when she was carrying my sister and I. They won't say "no, go abort it", but they strongly suggest against it, if you are planning to have a child. I don't believe it had anything to do with religious beliefs, but these days I wouldn't doubt it. None expressed religious beliefs to us, and we never did to them, which I appreciated. I want a doctor who understands the science he is practicing. I don't want a faith healer.
Any OB/GYN's in the crowd to confirm or clarify?
I can think of a few places that may not have phone service. I'd call them, but ... well, you get it. :) It's kind of like when you drive out beyond what you thought was the last city on some back county road that looks like it goes nowhere, and then hang a left on a side road, and then just keep going for 30+ miles... People forget that such places exist, but they do. Some places only electricity is generator power, and they bring in food and fuel by boat or plane, since it's easier than driving, if possible at all.
I'm actually *very* surprised that I haven't had a few words said to me when I've been stuck in airports. I'll go around shooting pictures of whatever interests me. I like aircraft, so I end up with an awful lot of pictures of random aircraft. I've been considering uploading them all to airliners.com, but ... well ... I'm too lazy. :) I still haven't figured out who these belong to. Lots of white, no airline markings. I was told they're possibly embassy flights.
They will tweak out if you have a camera in your hand, even if it's a SLR, when electronics are suppose to be off. To film takeoff and landing, you have to wait for them to sit down and buckle in. The way I see it, if there's a crash, at least there's a chance they'll find the recording and get a better picture of what happened.
I got some half-way decent video transiting over New York City. It was dumb luck. I spotted a city, thought about how long we were in the air and said "Hmmmm, that's probably New York". We were high enough, nothing was distinguishable, but with the zoom all the way in I could see the Statue of Liberty. :) I never manage to get aircraft passing above or below us though. By the time I notice them, they're going the other way too fast to get a camera up.
I do manage to get the occasional good shot like this sunset over a city, or this sunset at high altitude.
Those are all fine, but shoot something like this, and you'll get all kinds of nice men with guns and badges (DHS and local sheriffs department) asking lots of questions, even though you were standing on public property taking them. They way I see it, if I can see this sign, and I'm still on the paved part of a public road, I'm not doing anything wrong. I guess I should mention, we were just out taking pictures for some stock photography. We didn't find anything interesting, and I decided it was best not to start shooting pictures of the officers.