Lot of past tense there. Unfortunately for you I have similar credentials including the Cerenkov glow. Freaked me out the first time I saw it.. The plants I worked at were fully inspected so looks like we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'll have to assume that your plant was kind of special in it's construction that prevented it or that you didn't have the required technology or expense.

Oh I'm going to have to disagree with your eyeballs comment too. Our eyes and judgement are horrendous compared to actual measurements. That's not to say that actual measurements are always 100% right, but they are a damn sight closer to someone's judgement.

Finally I suggest you work your way through the videos the CSB publish on their website. The CSB nearly always find a source of a problem was something that was not inspected, often against recommendations, and often even after an early negative finding. Not that something is unable to be inspected.

What makes things impossible to inspect is profit motive, nothing more.

Most drones won't take two trips in the air without screws falling out of the airframe.

In which case any properly configured even $300 piece of shit drone would go into a programmed failsafe. In a group of really crowded people the sensible programmed failsafe is either to return home to a location or slowly descend, land and disarm.

I bet the pilot either lost control or the device suffered a malfunction and the pilot is doing the "It's everyone's fault except for mine" dance.

Yes but correlation does not discount causation either. Furthermore causation with one element does not discount causation with another.

The fall of religion is in-line with the rise of free thinking people seeking out knowledge post depression. The internet is one of the greatest sources of a wide variety of different views, and information, speculation, and out right lies from all sources. With out it religion may still decline, but I'd wager not as quickly.

Just from my own experience the only kernel panic I've ever encountered was due to a failed SATA controller. But conceivably bugs in new beta file systems (you jumped on the brtfs bandwagon yet?), hardddisk failure, SATA failure, or failure in the PCI controller.

Mind you that's not a reason not to do it, just that there are times when it's not useful. The same machine with the dead SATA controller also had Windows on it which managed to bluescreen without creating a crash dump.

You don't need to. You shut it down in place and build another next to it. That's what happens when you can't demolish, you build a new one next to it.

Also you're partially right that no one can look at things inside some plants, as in you can't crawl in and shine a torch on it. But that's not how inspection works. Very little inspection is visual. Inspection is a lot like looking for oil. There's a myriad of different ways including inducing ultrasonic vibrations in cement and measuring the results which give you things like thickness and density. We induce high frequency current in metals and measure the eddies. Hell simply testing the water in the cooling loop will be able to tell you your corrosion rate of metals as well as if the corrosion is likely to be uniform or pitting. Measuring surface temperature vs inside temperature can also show how cement is being degraded by neutron bombardment. That's also how furnaces are inspected without shutting them down, a simple thermal camera will show the state of internal refractory lining.

No one would put their name to a piece of paper that would hold them criminally liable if something goes pop. Yet inspection endorsements happen for plants constantly because while we can't see into the plant we can definitely still tell if it's in good condition.

Sorry I don't buy that. In industry these days there's nothing that can't be inspected or replaced somehow. Sure sometimes it comes at great expense like system utilities such as HV feeders or main steam raising plant, but that's what full plant turnarounds are for, that's what replacement vessels are for.

In some countries is it legally required that all pressure vessels be inspected and endorsed. When I think about things like the NDK Crylstal Inc explosion in 2009 all I can think of is that the government would have shut us down 4 years after we built our plant if we followed their maintenance regime. No literally, we would have had our licence to operate revoked. In the USA all you get is "recommendations". That's the problem. No one would voluntarily xray every vessel in a processing plant, no one would voluntarily thickness test every dead leg every 6 months. Inspection and testing is expensive.

Yet everything is able to be endorsed in some way, even underground foundations, and the insides of large reactors. Saying something is always inaccessible is effectively saying we won't try and won't expense it.

No sorry. The architect says this xxxxxx will stand for xxxxxx years with xxxxx specific maintenance.
Company runs xxxxx for the xxxxx years and then calls 3rd party inspectors to endorse xxxxxx for yyyyyy number of years based on yyyyy maintenance.
Providing you perform yyyyy maintenance and seek re-endorsement periodically you can continue ad-infinitum.

Most industrial plants have a design life of around 10 years. Most will happily run for 60 years providing you replace bits that have corroded, monitor corrosion, inspect them inside and out periodically. Most fatal industrial accidents happen from either poor design, or lack of inspection. Running things for too long doesn't come into the equation.

No but they claim to have a monopoly on the definition, and their cronies in the senate are following that definition. Just think back to every gay marriage debate ever and you'll find someone with a funny hat saying that god said man and woman. Hell you hear that at every bloody ceremony.

Let them marry their horse. What's it to you?

If you're about to talk about bestiality then know that marriage and intercourse have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and marrying a horse doesn't make it legal to bang a horse in Washington or many of the other states.

The horse may however get a tax break.

1. I use the word Church and religion synonymously.

2. Yes governments decides who can be together. My point was that governments should not be allowed to decide who *can't*. To do so is discrimination by the state. Interesting discrimination too in a world where government documents are forced to specify "neither" as an option when asking for gender.

3. Yes this would not be a change from what is happening now.

4. No. People don't care about the word married. People care about equality. People care that the common couple can be "married" while my boyfriend and I can only be in a "civil union". People care about the fact that under law "marriage" and "civil unions" are treated differently despite representing the exact same thing.

I say let the church have their word, and let the government treat all people as equals. Based on the arguments both sides are making this is a perfectly valid solution to the problem. Now if the Church then comes out and changes their engagement then we can shout about hypocrisy and call them out for the discriminating shits they are, but thus far the argument has always boiled down to marriage apparently being defined in the bible.

I understand the Church seems to think it has a monopoly on marriage as they are they most common institution to perform the ceremony. I also understand that many politicians will read the biblical definition of marriage between a man and a woman. However it is not the government's role to decide who can and can't be together.

So why not abolish marriages from governments?

Have the government only recognise civil unions. Treat all civil unions equally. Introduce a reciprocal relationship with the Church's marriage so that any marriage performed by the church ends in a government recognised civil union. Finally provide other non religious methods of registering civil unions.

Everyone's happy. Except for those in government who think the Church's view that two dudes shouldn't touch each either. But to them I say one of the tenants of modern democracy is the separation of Church and state and go find another job where your bias and lack of impartiality doesn't affect the people who you are supposed to represent.

We have 8 Windows NT4 machines where I work. Although we are upgrading one next year. The cost isn't too bad, $180000 will get us a Windows 7 machine. The machine runs software which is tied to specific and very expensive hardware via very restrictive certification from TUV. The software runs just fine on Windows 7 and I've even got a 10base2 network card working to connect to the old system, however doing so would be illegal. So we're stuck with it.

The old system works well. It's no longer supported but with each system we upgrade we get a shitton of spares to support other old systems. I vote you get to tell management we want to spend $1.4m just to upgrade 8 perfectly working machines because you don't like the fact that they run an out of date OS on them.

And if it flew south it would have either crashed into the ocean (most likely) or landed in Australia and been noticed (it hasn't) or landed on some tiny island in the middle of nowhere (actually crashed on the island, given none of the islands in that part of the world have flat land thanks to being formed by volcanic movement.

Sorry to break it to you but whatever terrorist conspiracies are about, the plane is most probably at the bottom of a very deep ocean.

Sure it is, but that's because of the sheer amount of stuff which is loaded in a modular fashion. Just try compiling every option in the kernel and see what kind of a kernel size you end up with (if it even works). Then also take into account the different architectures the kernel supports and you'll see while what ships and loads at boot time may be rather sleek, the project itself is indeed massive.