Everytime there is an emergency, at least the managers should be on call with the technicians
Do you REALLY want the managers around, especially on a late night call? I think they're likely, even if they're a "good manager", to make a situation where you're tired, cranky, and under pressure even worse.
When I was in the army, I ran a sat-com system. I specifically chose the night-shift on exercises because all the people who thought they were important were there during the day. There were far fewer nosy officers, NCOs, and visiting dignitaries about at night than the day. Who wants to work with the people who think they're too important to work at night and high enough in rank they CAN get their beauty sleep?
He probably got the idea from the blimps all along the US border with Mexico. I'd have to dig through my old army photos, but I have pictures of one you could see from Ft. Huachuca.
Word is they were to watch the border, but who really knows WHAT they're looking and listening for.
No, I complain about people talking face to face, and it is the same people. I, for one, think there is no reason to advertise ones own stupidity.
Uhoh, I'm doing it myself.
I can see that - I don't necessarily hate people on cellphones... I just hate people.
So the question that really needs to be answered is why do people feel they need to talk louder into cellphones? I even catch myself doing it. You can talk at a normal volume and they work just fine. I wonder if it's from people watching all these army movies where the guys have to yell into the radios? Maybe we're just conditioned into thinking mobile radio requires yelling to work?
The interesting one is causing GPS to lose satellite lock, which can be serious if using GPS approaches, since the plane must abort and divert (won't happen at big airports with traditional ILS, but smaller ones who find that a GPS approach is far cheaper than the expensive ILS equipment).
Why would they allow a GPS landing system that is so fragile? It seems like all someone would need are some directional antennas and transmit the right frequencies towards approaching planes and they'll be forced to land somewhere else.
Shouldn't the GPS for Aviation manufacturer have to build their device to a higher standard that it's able to handle a little interference?
Unless we ban people talking to the people beside them, allowing phone conversations is not making things that much worse. The only thing that's different is that you can't hear the other side of the conversation.
THANK YOU! How many people on here today are whining about other people talking on cellphones? Yet they don't complain about 2 people carrying on a face-to-face conversation (which actually has twice the noise locally).
I honestly believe that the key reason for this annoyance is because they feel socially excluded. They might not see it that way.
I also think it has to do with a resentment of the rich. Today, of course, almost anyone can have a cheap cellphone. But they started out as a trapping of rich people. I believe that latent resentment is still there.
I'm definitely not saying it would be easy. But this is exactly the kind of thing that could be done with the OSS model. I'm guessing there are more than a few people who know how to build a font who might be interested in helping teach others how to do this work and help ensure the quality. A talented project leader could help tie it all together.
Easy? No. Hard work? Yes. But that's true of any substantial project.
With your example of houses, consider projects like Habitat for Humanity. Here you have many volunteers working on building a house. Most of them are unskilled laborers. A few are experts in different aspects of house building. Fewer yet are actually architects and project planners. But with the right combination of workers willing to learn and leaders able to teach and lead, you could very well end up with some interesting, useful, and quality results.
As for fonts, I personally have some hobby experience and know that it's no easy task. I tried to develop an Arabic true-type font for an Arabic program I once wrote. It was not easy (Fontographer was not the easiest to use) and the results weren't terrific.
"Traditional fonts usually included several hundred kerning pairs. Hoefler & Frere-Jones' fonts are super-fussy - they can include 10,000 pairs to get every combo of letters exactly right. "
That's work, and that's only a small part of what's known as typography.
Consider this:
"Linux operating systems usually include several hundred additional programs. The Slackware is particularly fussy - as it an include more than 10,000 different programs just to get every combo of installations correct"
That's work, and it's only a small part of what's known as operating system construction.
I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but building high-quality fonts is EXACTLY the kind of thing that the open source movement should be able to handle well. I know a couple typographers (well, 1 now.. one committed suicide) and they're both computer geeks too. I'm sure there have to be more than a handful of them that would be interested in contributing to the commons that way.
The instructions and standards would be fairly easy to lay out and a small handful of people could handle quality control of the finished product.
I say all this without looking to see if there is an open source font project...
Or lose good money paid as tuition. Let's suppose he's paying $2000 for each class and it meets 16 times (a semester), he's losing $125 for each class session they make him miss.
If they're going to force him out of class for their benefit, they need to pay him for his losses.
There's more to it than just bending the paths of the digs as you reach the middle. The linked article only shows how they tried to make the paths meet once they were in the middle. But, it doesn't talk about how they got them even that close to each other in the first place.
The linked article doesn't mention how they knew how to make sure the tunnels even started out at the right angles and positions in the mountain so that they would indeed meet in the middle. And due to conditions of the rock, they couldn't go in a strictly straight line in the tunnel. It also doesn't describe how they managed to keep the tunnels level.
It's an interesting problem. Given that the workers on each side of the mountain can't see each other, how do you make sure they start digging in a location and at an angle that will meet? If you start out being off by more than a meter or two and the whole thing could be messed up, even if you do the widening and changed angles in the middle.... and how do you know you're in the middle?
Quoting the article, "His precautions in the vertical sense proved unnecessary, since measurements show that there was practically no mistake." It doesn't talk at all about how they got where they did without even needing the precautions.
Most cargo doesn't care if it takes 2 hours or 2 weeks though, so long as it gets there in one piece.
As someone who's tried to coordinate the delivery of products from multiple factories in Asia to stores in the US so they all arrive on the same day, I'll disagree...
But, if you can chop 10 days off my transit time while keeping the costs the same, I'll be very happy!
And really, they key thing is that the actual transit time matches the scheduled transit time. Yes, in that case, I don't mind how long it takes.
This could be a very interesting project. I work for a company that uses a lot of factories in Asia. Ships spend about 2 weeks on the water getting to the US.
I don't know much about trains, but if a train could sustain 80 MPH all day long, then it can go about 2000 miles in a day. The corridor they mention is 3700 miles (about 2 days), and I'm not sure what it would take to get from, say, a factory in Viet Nam, to a port in say, Seattle, but it very well could be faster than a ship... and maybe cheaper.
And considering the seaports in the US are in such a badly deteriorated condition, it might be an interesting way to help diversify our transportation network. Though, I understand the rail system is pretty bad too...
That reminds me that the "Chunnel" was completed by starting on both ends and meeting in the middle, and IIRC, when they met, after several miles of digging in both directions, they were off by about a foot in one direction and 2 inches in the other (i.e., horizontal vs. vertical).
That IS quite remarkable. And it reminds me of a similar project on the island of Samos in the 6th century BC. They dug an aqueduct through a mountain over a km long. They dug it from both ends, though from what I read of it, nobody knows for sure how they managed to synchronize their digging.
Clones are, when all is said and done, nothing else but a time-shifted identical twin.
Except, as several people have pointed out, the clones tend to have shorter life spans and weaker immune systems. They might have identical genes, but something else is going on that is not identical. There's apparently more to the genes in a cell than simply the GATC spelling of the DNA.
Until it's worked out, I'd rather have a label telling me that the food may be from a compromised animal.
I so wish it was that easy. I suppose the problem is not so much the "getting up" but rather the "getting to sleep".
I'm a night person - I always have been. When it gets dark, I become more active, I think more clearly, am more creative, and generally more productive.
It's really hard for me to sleep at night, but it's easy for me to sleep through the early morning. So I know that it's not that I'm unable to sleep. If I have no schedule demands, I will normally stay up until about 5:00am and then wake up at noon... without an alarm clock - I LOVED grad school, since it was all evening classes. And I remember as a 1st grader having trouble getting up in the morning. It's never been easy.
To make it worse, even if I do manage to sleep through the night, I'm still pretty worthless in the morning. I feel like a dull pencil. Even after 4 years of getting up early while I was in the army did not "cure" me.
It's not even that I'm lazy - my boss and coworkers all think I work too much. I just work better at night. I'm lucky that my current boss doesn't mind that I get a lot done at night but that I come in later in the morning. This is handy because I can work in "real-time" with our colleagues in Europe and Asia.
My parents are opposites in this. My dad falls asleep by 9:00pm and is up before 5:00. Mom's up until 3:00 or 4:00 and gets up mid morning. I'm in a timezone 2 hours earlier, but when I'm up late, I can call home at 2:00am and talk to mom before she goes to bed and I can call 2 hours later and talk to dad after he's gotten up.
I've started taking Rozerem to get on a regular sleep schedule. It helps because I tend not to wake up as often. But clearly, it's not entirely effective, as it's 1:35AM and I'm typing this e-mail.
So the long answer to your question is that for some people, it's VERY hard to wake up in the morning. It's a morning person's world and I would love to be a morning person - but I'm just not wired for it.
And I do believe it's wiring. As an anecdote, I have two friends who are twins and natural "morning people". It's very funny to be with them in the evening because at about 9:45, like clockwork, they both start to fall asleep - whether they're watching TV, at the dinner table, or whatever. It's really funny.
So, here I am in a professional dilemma of sorts. Do I continue to seek jobs where I can have the flexibility to come in late and work late - and probably limit my career... or do I use pills and caffeine to force myself into an 8:00 to 6:00 work-schedule where I'll be a lot less effective for the first half of that.
There's nothing "random" about strapping 10lb of high explosive and ball bearings around your torso and detonating them in the middle of a crowded market full of civilians.
Nor is there anything random about dropping a clusterbomb from an aircraft in the middle of a crowded market full of civilians. Both are equally heinous, but in one case, the perpetrator will not offend again.
My apologies for being more complete. A major theme of the movie is a pharmaceutical company secretly testing a drug on Africans and quietly disposing of the patients who didn't survive. It was very well done, in a cinematic sense (it was gorgeous on the big screen), and I think it's one of the better adaptations of a Le Carre book.
I agree with you. This would appear to have no harmful side effects, yet even in testing it, some patients could receive a benefit that they otherwise wouldn't. I don't see any severe ethical short-comings. Though I'm certainly no medical ethicist, but even if it did have ethical problems, I think they would rate pretty low on the scale; if it's possible to rank the unethicality of a list of options.
I got my undergrad at Portland State and have recently started taking graduate classes "for fun"... it's been more than 5 years since I attended.
The particularly obnoxious thing is not getting credit card offers... no... your student i.d. IS a credit card! It's a mastercard. You have to go online to activate it and when you do, you have the option (if you check the box every time it pops up) to NOT have a credit account attached to it.
In my mind this is even more insidious than the 5 credit card booths between the registrar's office and financial aid, and the pile of credit card apps in your bookstore bag.
There's no way to avoid getting the card and you have to work to not make it a credit card.
Is it really so hard to understand that it's a transaction that generates a tax, not the objects or money themselves?
System Dynamics talks about stocks and flows. A stock is something that accumulates things - or holds value independent of time, like a tank full of water. A flow is is dependent on a rate of change - water flowing from one tank to another. If you look at a point-in-time snapshot of such a system, you can measure the stocks, but not the flows.
Income and Sales taxes both tax the "flow" of things. It is not the actual money being taxed but the fact that it's flowing. Income tax is like your employer having a tank of money and you have a tank of money. It's only the flow of money from one tank to the other that is taxed. The store has a tank too - and when you buy something, that flow is taxed as well. Sell that thing? The buyer has a tank and the money flows from his to yours.
So, the money is not getting taxed over over, but rather the flow of money from one place to another.
Property tax, on the other hand, is where you do get taxed over and over. The value of your house is like a stock. Yet, every year, the tax that value over and over.
It really shouldn't be that hard to understand, but most of us are taught to think in simple linear ways rather than systems that have complex interactions.
Of course, some people just don't want to pay taxes, regardless of whether they are owed or not, or fair or not.
You cannot deny that with the exception of the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton was (and to some extent, still is) the media's darling. Very rarely you would hear a report that was very critical of the Clinton administration, and even today, I don't recall anything nearly as bad as what some of the things that have been on CNN/NBC/CBS/etc about Bush.
Ummm... Whitewater? Vince Foster? Travel Gate? Jessica Flowers? And that's just off the top of my head without looking anything up.
He was hardly scandal-free nor a media darling. More eloquent than Bush? Yes. More likely to be charming? Definitely. But he hardly got a free ride from the media.
I know all about the MUTCD, having worked with a professor writing "quick guides" and presentations based on it. 2.4 seconds is what someone standing on the side of the road with a video camera can measure by counting the frames. It was in the media and even covered by a local radio host.
Speed limit is 35 on the road with that intersection.
Slashdot Mirror
Everytime there is an emergency, at least the managers should be on call with the technicians
Do you REALLY want the managers around, especially on a late night call? I think they're likely, even if they're a "good manager", to make a situation where you're tired, cranky, and under pressure even worse.
When I was in the army, I ran a sat-com system. I specifically chose the night-shift on exercises because all the people who thought they were important were there during the day. There were far fewer nosy officers, NCOs, and visiting dignitaries about at night than the day. Who wants to work with the people who think they're too important to work at night and high enough in rank they CAN get their beauty sleep?
That's a significant issue for someone like my grandmother who may be entering her combo in front of customers she doesn't want to offend.
Nobody should be ashamed by keeping secure things secure... and nobody should be offended when somebody else tries to do so.
It's just like I shouldn't be ashamed to go behind a door to "adjust the hardware"... and nobody should be offended that I do so.
He probably got the idea from the blimps all along the US border with Mexico. I'd have to dig through my old army photos, but I have pictures of one you could see from Ft. Huachuca.
Word is they were to watch the border, but who really knows WHAT they're looking and listening for.
No, I complain about people talking face to face, and it is the same people. I, for one, think there is no reason to advertise ones own stupidity.
Uhoh, I'm doing it myself.
I can see that - I don't necessarily hate people on cellphones... I just hate people.
So the question that really needs to be answered is why do people feel they need to talk louder into cellphones? I even catch myself doing it. You can talk at a normal volume and they work just fine. I wonder if it's from people watching all these army movies where the guys have to yell into the radios? Maybe we're just conditioned into thinking mobile radio requires yelling to work?
The interesting one is causing GPS to lose satellite lock, which can be serious if using GPS approaches, since the plane must abort and divert (won't happen at big airports with traditional ILS, but smaller ones who find that a GPS approach is far cheaper than the expensive ILS equipment).
Why would they allow a GPS landing system that is so fragile? It seems like all someone would need are some directional antennas and transmit the right frequencies towards approaching planes and they'll be forced to land somewhere else.
Shouldn't the GPS for Aviation manufacturer have to build their device to a higher standard that it's able to handle a little interference?
Unless we ban people talking to the people beside them, allowing phone conversations is not making things that much worse. The only thing that's different is that you can't hear the other side of the conversation.
THANK YOU! How many people on here today are whining about other people talking on cellphones? Yet they don't complain about 2 people carrying on a face-to-face conversation (which actually has twice the noise locally).
I honestly believe that the key reason for this annoyance is because they feel socially excluded. They might not see it that way.
I also think it has to do with a resentment of the rich. Today, of course, almost anyone can have a cheap cellphone. But they started out as a trapping of rich people. I believe that latent resentment is still there.
I'm definitely not saying it would be easy. But this is exactly the kind of thing that could be done with the OSS model. I'm guessing there are more than a few people who know how to build a font who might be interested in helping teach others how to do this work and help ensure the quality. A talented project leader could help tie it all together.
Easy? No. Hard work? Yes. But that's true of any substantial project.
With your example of houses, consider projects like Habitat for Humanity. Here you have many volunteers working on building a house. Most of them are unskilled laborers. A few are experts in different aspects of house building. Fewer yet are actually architects and project planners. But with the right combination of workers willing to learn and leaders able to teach and lead, you could very well end up with some interesting, useful, and quality results.
As for fonts, I personally have some hobby experience and know that it's no easy task. I tried to develop an Arabic true-type font for an Arabic program I once wrote. It was not easy (Fontographer was not the easiest to use) and the results weren't terrific.
"Traditional fonts usually included several hundred kerning pairs. Hoefler & Frere-Jones' fonts are super-fussy - they can include 10,000 pairs to get every combo of letters exactly right. "
That's work, and that's only a small part of what's known as typography.
Consider this:
"Linux operating systems usually include several hundred additional programs. The Slackware is particularly fussy - as it an include more than 10,000 different programs just to get every combo of installations correct"
That's work, and it's only a small part of what's known as operating system construction.
I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but building high-quality fonts is EXACTLY the kind of thing that the open source movement should be able to handle well. I know a couple typographers (well, 1 now.. one committed suicide) and they're both computer geeks too. I'm sure there have to be more than a handful of them that would be interested in contributing to the commons that way.
The instructions and standards would be fairly easy to lay out and a small handful of people could handle quality control of the finished product.
I say all this without looking to see if there is an open source font project...
Sorry, I missed the "high" and thought he was just using a lot of drugs.
Marching band practice might only be 16 times a semester/quarter...
Could be private school.
Gotta love the Nazis...
Or lose good money paid as tuition. Let's suppose he's paying $2000 for each class and it meets 16 times (a semester), he's losing $125 for each class session they make him miss.
If they're going to force him out of class for their benefit, they need to pay him for his losses.
There's more to it than just bending the paths of the digs as you reach the middle. The linked article only shows how they tried to make the paths meet once they were in the middle. But, it doesn't talk about how they got them even that close to each other in the first place.
The linked article doesn't mention how they knew how to make sure the tunnels even started out at the right angles and positions in the mountain so that they would indeed meet in the middle. And due to conditions of the rock, they couldn't go in a strictly straight line in the tunnel. It also doesn't describe how they managed to keep the tunnels level.
It's an interesting problem. Given that the workers on each side of the mountain can't see each other, how do you make sure they start digging in a location and at an angle that will meet? If you start out being off by more than a meter or two and the whole thing could be messed up, even if you do the widening and changed angles in the middle.... and how do you know you're in the middle?
Quoting the article, "His precautions in the vertical sense proved unnecessary, since measurements show that there was practically no mistake." It doesn't talk at all about how they got where they did without even needing the precautions.
Most cargo doesn't care if it takes 2 hours or 2 weeks though, so long as it gets there in one piece.
As someone who's tried to coordinate the delivery of products from multiple factories in Asia to stores in the US so they all arrive on the same day, I'll disagree...
But, if you can chop 10 days off my transit time while keeping the costs the same, I'll be very happy!
And really, they key thing is that the actual transit time matches the scheduled transit time. Yes, in that case, I don't mind how long it takes.
This could be a very interesting project. I work for a company that uses a lot of factories in Asia. Ships spend about 2 weeks on the water getting to the US.
I don't know much about trains, but if a train could sustain 80 MPH all day long, then it can go about 2000 miles in a day. The corridor they mention is 3700 miles (about 2 days), and I'm not sure what it would take to get from, say, a factory in Viet Nam, to a port in say, Seattle, but it very well could be faster than a ship... and maybe cheaper.
And considering the seaports in the US are in such a badly deteriorated condition, it might be an interesting way to help diversify our transportation network. Though, I understand the rail system is pretty bad too...
That reminds me that the "Chunnel" was completed by starting on both ends and meeting in the middle, and IIRC, when they met, after several miles of digging in both directions, they were off by about a foot in one direction and 2 inches in the other (i.e., horizontal vs. vertical).
That IS quite remarkable. And it reminds me of a similar project on the island of Samos in the 6th century BC. They dug an aqueduct through a mountain over a km long. They dug it from both ends, though from what I read of it, nobody knows for sure how they managed to synchronize their digging.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eupalinian_aqueduct
Clones are, when all is said and done, nothing else but a time-shifted identical twin.
Except, as several people have pointed out, the clones tend to have shorter life spans and weaker immune systems. They might have identical genes, but something else is going on that is not identical. There's apparently more to the genes in a cell than simply the GATC spelling of the DNA.
Until it's worked out, I'd rather have a label telling me that the food may be from a compromised animal.
I so wish it was that easy. I suppose the problem is not so much the "getting up" but rather the "getting to sleep".
I'm a night person - I always have been. When it gets dark, I become more active, I think more clearly, am more creative, and generally more productive.
It's really hard for me to sleep at night, but it's easy for me to sleep through the early morning. So I know that it's not that I'm unable to sleep. If I have no schedule demands, I will normally stay up until about 5:00am and then wake up at noon... without an alarm clock - I LOVED grad school, since it was all evening classes. And I remember as a 1st grader having trouble getting up in the morning. It's never been easy.
To make it worse, even if I do manage to sleep through the night, I'm still pretty worthless in the morning. I feel like a dull pencil. Even after 4 years of getting up early while I was in the army did not "cure" me.
It's not even that I'm lazy - my boss and coworkers all think I work too much. I just work better at night. I'm lucky that my current boss doesn't mind that I get a lot done at night but that I come in later in the morning. This is handy because I can work in "real-time" with our colleagues in Europe and Asia.
My parents are opposites in this. My dad falls asleep by 9:00pm and is up before 5:00. Mom's up until 3:00 or 4:00 and gets up mid morning. I'm in a timezone 2 hours earlier, but when I'm up late, I can call home at 2:00am and talk to mom before she goes to bed and I can call 2 hours later and talk to dad after he's gotten up.
I've started taking Rozerem to get on a regular sleep schedule. It helps because I tend not to wake up as often. But clearly, it's not entirely effective, as it's 1:35AM and I'm typing this e-mail.
So the long answer to your question is that for some people, it's VERY hard to wake up in the morning. It's a morning person's world and I would love to be a morning person - but I'm just not wired for it.
And I do believe it's wiring. As an anecdote, I have two friends who are twins and natural "morning people". It's very funny to be with them in the evening because at about 9:45, like clockwork, they both start to fall asleep - whether they're watching TV, at the dinner table, or whatever. It's really funny.
So, here I am in a professional dilemma of sorts. Do I continue to seek jobs where I can have the flexibility to come in late and work late - and probably limit my career... or do I use pills and caffeine to force myself into an 8:00 to 6:00 work-schedule where I'll be a lot less effective for the first half of that.
There's nothing "random" about strapping 10lb of high explosive and ball bearings around your torso and detonating them in the middle of a crowded market full of civilians.
Nor is there anything random about dropping a clusterbomb from an aircraft in the middle of a crowded market full of civilians. Both are equally heinous, but in one case, the perpetrator will not offend again.
My apologies for being more complete. A major theme of the movie is a pharmaceutical company secretly testing a drug on Africans and quietly disposing of the patients who didn't survive. It was very well done, in a cinematic sense (it was gorgeous on the big screen), and I think it's one of the better adaptations of a Le Carre book.
I agree with you. This would appear to have no harmful side effects, yet even in testing it, some patients could receive a benefit that they otherwise wouldn't. I don't see any severe ethical short-comings. Though I'm certainly no medical ethicist, but even if it did have ethical problems, I think they would rate pretty low on the scale; if it's possible to rank the unethicality of a list of options.
I got my undergrad at Portland State and have recently started taking graduate classes "for fun"... it's been more than 5 years since I attended.
The particularly obnoxious thing is not getting credit card offers... no... your student i.d. IS a credit card! It's a mastercard. You have to go online to activate it and when you do, you have the option (if you check the box every time it pops up) to NOT have a credit account attached to it.
In my mind this is even more insidious than the 5 credit card booths between the registrar's office and financial aid, and the pile of credit card apps in your bookstore bag.
There's no way to avoid getting the card and you have to work to not make it a credit card.
he bastards, sending a device they believe will work to hospitals with no alternative just because there is less government interference.
Ever see the movie Constant Gardener?
Is it really so hard to understand that it's a transaction that generates a tax, not the objects or money themselves?
System Dynamics talks about stocks and flows. A stock is something that accumulates things - or holds value independent of time, like a tank full of water. A flow is is dependent on a rate of change - water flowing from one tank to another. If you look at a point-in-time snapshot of such a system, you can measure the stocks, but not the flows.
Income and Sales taxes both tax the "flow" of things. It is not the actual money being taxed but the fact that it's flowing. Income tax is like your employer having a tank of money and you have a tank of money. It's only the flow of money from one tank to the other that is taxed. The store has a tank too - and when you buy something, that flow is taxed as well. Sell that thing? The buyer has a tank and the money flows from his to yours.
So, the money is not getting taxed over over, but rather the flow of money from one place to another.
Property tax, on the other hand, is where you do get taxed over and over. The value of your house is like a stock. Yet, every year, the tax that value over and over.
It really shouldn't be that hard to understand, but most of us are taught to think in simple linear ways rather than systems that have complex interactions.
Of course, some people just don't want to pay taxes, regardless of whether they are owed or not, or fair or not.
You cannot deny that with the exception of the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton was (and to some extent, still is) the media's darling. Very rarely you would hear a report that was very critical of the Clinton administration, and even today, I don't recall anything nearly as bad as what some of the things that have been on CNN/NBC/CBS/etc about Bush.
Ummm... Whitewater? Vince Foster? Travel Gate? Jessica Flowers? And that's just off the top of my head without looking anything up.
He was hardly scandal-free nor a media darling. More eloquent than Bush? Yes. More likely to be charming? Definitely. But he hardly got a free ride from the media.
Reaction times? That's what I would say if someone said they measured it with a stopwatch. How accurate is a human with a stopwatch?
It's harder to dispute the accuracy of the frame-count on recorded video.
I know all about the MUTCD, having worked with a professor writing "quick guides" and presentations based on it. 2.4 seconds is what someone standing on the side of the road with a video camera can measure by counting the frames. It was in the media and even covered by a local radio host.
Speed limit is 35 on the road with that intersection.