"Marine Carrier"

Vince wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:At least as much fun as staring at a programming problem for 5 hours, having someone walk up behind you, point at a line on the screen, and ask "Why did you do that?", and realizing "OMG, that's what's wrong" . Leads to considerable dents in the forehead from the keyboard.

That last one is part of Murphy's Law of Computation, SNAFU Equations (JB's Scholastic Laws): "In any human endeavor, once you've exhausted all possibilities and fail, there will be one solution, simple and obvious, highly visible to everyone else."

Everyone who has ever programmed a computer has personally experienced this law in action.

Vince wrote:

Relax wrote:Yea, I only did one FoR.

Screwed the pooch.

Added extra screwup on the graph as I did a m/V graph instead of m/KE graph...

Figured it out at 2am last night as I couldn't get to sleep laying in bed with a bum sore shoulder from cutting firewood.

SWM wrote:Don't you hate it when you finally figure out mistakes at that hour!

fallsfromtrees wrote:At least as much fun as staring at a programming problem for 5 hours, having someone walk up behind you, point at a line on the screen, and ask "Why did you do that?", and realizing "OMG, that's what's wrong" . Leads to considerable dents in the forehead from the keyboard.

That last one is part of Murphy's Law of Computation, SNAFU Equations (JB's Scholastic Laws): "In any human endeavor, once you've exhausted all possibilities and fail, there will be one solution, simple and obvious, highly visible to everyone else."

Everyone who has ever programmed a computer has personally experienced this law in action.

mark wrote:And that is why I, when stuck, I'll just try to dump the problem on someone else. Just explaining it will usually be enough to not have to dump it on someone else after all...

kzt wrote:

mark wrote:And that is why I, when stuck, I'll just try to dump the problem on someone else. Just explaining it will usually be enough to not have to dump it on someone else after all...

Our security engineer used to run a development group and described one senior programmers trick for people coming to him: he had a toy duck on his desk and he insisted you explain exactly what the problem was to the duck. Usually people got 1/2 to 2/3rds of the way through and then they realized what was wrong.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

kzt wrote:snipped quote of me
Our security engineer used to run a development group and described one senior programmers trick for people coming to him: he had a toy duck on his desk and he insisted you explain exactly what the problem was to the duck. Usually people got 1/2 to 2/3rds of the way through and then they realized what was wrong.

Once worked with someone who spent 30 excruciating minutes explaining to our boss why what he wanted was absolutely impossible for the assembler to do, and that there was no way in the world to accomplish the task. He then wondered off, and three days later handed in the code to do what was needed. It did require using the assembler in some very unusual ways, but did the task admirably. He said he saw how to do the job as he was explaining why it couldn't be done.

Vince wrote:

The E wrote:As for your question, why would any civilian shipping enterprise, even today, build in any safety mechanisms that would compromise cargo capacity? Insurance. Lawsuits (and the fear of them). Shipbuilding regulations. What's more of a danger to the bottom line, a few places lost to safety equipment and redundancy, or (for example) being told that vessels of that class cannot operate in a given jurisdiction?

The goal is safety of the passengers and crew-members. The question is how much money/mass/volume should devoted to achieving that goal.

Let's look at a current example in the real world, the automobile.

The speed limit for cars range up to 65 miles per hour on most Interstates in the United States.

Should automakers be required to have safety mechanisms built into cars that would allow the driver and passengers to survive a crash with a stationary object when the car is traveling at 130 mph (a 2x safety factor)?

Do they currently?

Are they required to do so, or face not being allowed to sell the car that can't ensure the safety of the lives of the driver and passengers?

If they don't, are not required to do so, why should they?

What keeps them from doing so, if they don't?

I would say that providing a 2x safety margin is cost prohibitive.

Keep in mind the Honorverse is not the Apollo program, where duplicating systems imposed a relatively smaller cost/mass/volume penalty, and where cost was less of an issue than the safety of the astronauts. Civilian passenger liners and freighters have to show a profit, or they just won't run (as explained to Admiral Caparelli by Klaus Hauptman earlier in Honor Among Enemies).

Also, consider what a 20% life support safety margin would be for an Atlas that normally carries 5,000 passengers. It is the amount of life support that 1,000 additional passengers would utilize. Since life support is distributed throughout the ship, if you loose the environmental capability to support 1,000 passengers, I would say you have probably suffered damage to your ship that has effectively destroyed it (remember, the Atlas is a civilian ship, without the armor coffer-damning scheme of a military vessel).

n7axw wrote:
I just drove across SD, WY, and about 300 miles of MT on I-90. Standard speed limit is 75. In fact there is a stretch between Gillette WY and the SD line where the limit is 80. Crazy, I think, but there it is.

Don

fallsfromtrees wrote:

n7axw wrote:
I just drove across SD, WY, and about 300 miles of MT on I-90. Standard speed limit is 75. In fact there is a stretch between Gillette WY and the SD line where the limit is 80. Crazy, I think, but there it is.

Don

Same thing across Texas 75 and 80 (particularly West Texas, which is mostly comprised of miles of miles). NM is 75, Arizona is 70-75. I don't remember what i_80 across north Nevada is, but I suspect its 75.

n7axw wrote:
I just drove across SD, WY, and about 300 miles of MT on I-90. Standard speed limit is 75. In fact there is a stretch between Gillette WY and the SD line where the limit is 80. Crazy, I think, but there it is.

Don

fallsfromtrees wrote:Same thing across Texas 75 and 80 (particularly West Texas, which is mostly comprised of miles of miles). NM is 75, Arizona is 70-75. I don't remember what i_80 across north Nevada is, but I suspect its 75.

JeffEngel wrote:If you've got wide open roads, good visibility, decent road conditions, not much traffic, and an absence of nutjobs, that's entirely workable and safe enough. Try that in Pennsylvania (where the highways are so 19th century) or New Jersey (where the drivers despise all human life, their own included, and they are all on the road worshiping death and rage), and it's all over.

I don't want to call Texans sane, but at least the population density is low....