BXLE_1-1-BitIs1's comments

Not yet discussed is that European countries have standards mandating lower hoods that are not as hazardous to pedestrians in a collision.

Getting hit by a pickup or high profile SUV is much more likely to kill you than a compact.

Adding bull bars to the front virtually guarantees a fatal head injury to a child.

While many IBM products are beautifully designed, IBM also has a long tradition of dreadful implementations. JES3 and COLT (Canadian On-line Teller) come to mind.

IBM had a tradition of not allowing customers to fall down. JES3 took down a bank in Buffalo. Fortunately for the guilty a major snowstorm had shutdown the city for several days. IBM sent in SEs on snowmobiles.

COLT was even worse as it could throw a mainframe into an interrupt cascade. You had to press System Reset, then IPL and pick up the pieces of transactions. It took me a few months to identify where a register got mangled over an interrupt. This was pseudo reentrant code which I came to utterly despise.

I characterized the code as the result of student intern self abuse.

I spent several months flogging that dead horse until I changed jobs. There were later opportunities at other banks that saw COLT on my résumé that I refused.

In the current millennium, IBM has been serially fomenting payroll disasters with Phoenix as it's known in Canada (I don't know what it's called in Australia).

You need to keep your nose on the grindstone for years to progress to glider cross country flying. Then you end up as an instructor and have to finagle time in your own glider. There's a bunch of time upgrading and updating flight instruments. You need a viable glider club to have enough people to get you in the air between working on club aircraft, equipment and airfield issues.

These guys had a big oxygen tank.

It's nice to see they were using an Air Glide S and managed to make their goal against the odd 56kt headwind.

A separated Alberta would become a de facto Puerto Rico in thrall to the US without any votes.

The Forever Canadia https://www.forever-canadian.ca/ petition collected over 400,000 signatures from Alberta electors.

Then Danielle moved the goalposts to make it easier for the Independence folks:

Signature collection period: January 3 to May 2, 2026 Number of signatures required for a successful petition: 177,732 (10% of the total number votes cast in the 2023 Provincial General Election).

Arabic speakers are not necessarily Arabs. Indigenous populations became Arabic speakers during the spread of Islam.

We saw the same in Latin America with Spanish and Catholicism.

This will open a giant can of worms. Hobbyists, bad actors and military will be taking advantage.

Once bacteria set up house deep inside a tooth, they are sheltered from the immune system while dispatching bacteria into the blood system. I've had infected tooth removed and found myself feeling a whole bunch better after.

Infection can spread to adjacent teeth or sneak in alongside a loose filling or underneath a crown.

A wobbly tooth is likely infected and you might want to get it out to protect adjacent teeth.

I had a root canal in my 20s that failed 10 years later and was replaced by a bridge that had to be replaced every decade or so until a tooth supporting the bridge failed; so I ended up with two implants.

Implant technology is really good today. You will ultimately save money and misery by going straight to an implant if a root canal or bridge is suggested. You will still need to floss to prevent gum loss.

The locked cockpit door has been implicated in a number of pilot suicides: German Wings, Egypt Air, MH370 and possibly others.

Then there's Helios that crashed near Athens. The pressurisation failed and the cockpit oxygen cylinder had been left closed. The preflight check of the crew oxygen mask flow had not been done. By the time a cabin crew member with portable oxygen figured out how to get through the door, the fuel was about to run out.

Nabokov writes so beautifully in English.

Not mentioned is that Russian is well populated with loan words from other European languages (especially technology terms) , but about the only Slavic loan word in European languages I know of is "robot" (work) - samizdat being a more recent arrival.

During Petzold’s preliminary hearing on Oct. 1, 2023, the Crown called RCMP [supposed] digital forensic expert Const. Wilson Yee to explain his analysis of the email on Marguerite’s laptop.

Petzold's defence lawyer Ian McKay then had a chance to cross-examine.

He asked Yee about the email “headers” — metadata contained in the digital file that is not typically seen by the end user unless they specifically go looking for it.

The email headers read, in part: "Received: From Emkei.CZ".

That website, based in the Czech Republic, describes itself as a "free online fake mailer” and allows users to send emails that can appear to come from any sender.

The US could issue a notice of an Alert Area where military operations are in progress AND could coordinate with Dutch airspace authorities.

US AWACS has the capability to identify civilian aircraft and route military traffic well clear of civil traffic.

I choose not to install any banking app and do my banking in incognito mode so that any malefactor who somehow gets into my device can't see where I bank.

Of course that leaves security in the hands of the browser.

Gyroscopic precession took the left engine to the right. In AA 191 the right engine departing to the right did not affect the center engine. Sadly the engine failure procedure at the time mandated slowing down to V2 which was below the stall speed with slats retracted. There's now revised procedure and hydraulic fuses.

I expect all remaining aircraft will be getting new rear pylon lugs with shortened inspection intervals - provided the replacement cost is below the value of continued usage.

They have a lot in common with housecats, except that they are more clever. Decades ago we heard a crunch crunch sound from the rear mudroom. We looked and saw a raccoon reaching in and eating dry cat out of a box with the cat looking on enviously.

Camping I heard a crunching sound, looked out from the tent to see a racoon helping itself to granola in the back of the car. Lock your doors.

There were times I took a dial up terminal home. Before that in university, we had to punch our own card decks.

I didn't need to be at the office to write programs. All I need is a pad of paper (with maybe a few manuals) and a nice place where I can concentrate without interruptions.

"The people writing COBOL and FORTRAN on mainframes - I got my start writing C and FORTRAN on DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes - didn’t speak about the joys of programming. They clocked in, clocked out and went on about their lives."

FORTRAN was my first language in the 60s and I ENJOYED using it until "better" languages came along.

I debugged COBOL and once taught SQL to COBOL programmers while refusing to write anything in it.

I had my best fun with mainframe Assembler and CMS Pipelines.

It's become a lottery similar to pursuing a professional sports career. Similar to professional sports, the career duration is short. There's always kids coming up trained in the technology du jour who will work long hours for peanuts that employers will happily hire while they dump the expensive old guys.

You can do extraordinarily well as a founder if you find an opportunity, get it to market and build a moat that competitors can't surmount.

The Immigration and Nationality Act is a moving target. Periodically it is amended, or the Supreme Court strikes down certain provisions.

Having been born to a Canadian father in the US and moved to Canada when I was nine, my US citizenship lapsed when I turned 25 in Canada (I was quite happy to stay in Canada during the Vietnam war during my twenties). At the time I was unaware of the INA provisions repealed in 1978 that lapsed my US citizenship.

New FATCA and IRS obligations motivated me to research my US citizenship status and I was happy to discover that it had lapsed.

US Customs officers sometimes ask questions when I show up with a Canadian passport with a US birthplace. Now I pull out my copy of State Department FAM 1200 APPENDIX C to explain my status, but the legalese is a challenge for people with just high school. .

Happily Canada has Close in Age exceptions depending on the age of the younger party.