Cyclists ARE a menace, to themselves.

I recently saw a cyclist come from the sidewalk on my right, cross an intersection diagonally across me (between two left-turning lanes of north/south traffic), get back up onto the sidewalk, and then later get into the bike lane going the wrong way, at an alarming speed.

As a motorist and a cyclist, I was completely stunned. It's cyclists like that why motorists hate cyclists.

Nobody can avoid killing you if you don't even pretend to follow the rules of traffic. But many many drivers forget that they are required by law to not run over cyclists, even if they are inconvenient.

I have seen more cyclists do ridiculous things than I could count. I give them a wide berth, but, I have to admit, some of them seem like they're trying to get killed.

Likewise, a lot of drivers more or less don't give a damn and will practically run them over, or off the road, or door them. Sometimes buses don't even obey bike lanes.

I won't ride a bicycle on city streets anymore.

An extragalactic origin, if correct, would put the source likely millions of light years away. An artificial radio source detectable over that distance would take a truly phenomenal amount of power, on par with stellar events like supernovae or black hole mergers. Or it would need to be very narrowly beamed, in which case how does ET know to point in our direction?

Bear in mind that the entire RF output of our planet (radio waves streaming into space) would not be detectable by Arecibo even 10 light years away. Move the source to a million light years, and remembering the inverse square law, gives you a sense of how much more power you'd need to make an isotropic emitter detectable. It's hard to imagine why an ET would want to do this, assuming they could marshall the stellar energies involved.

Oh, I automate deployments, and I automate some monitoring. Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to automation.

Like all programmers, I'm lazy and would rather code it once instead of doing it by hand many many times.

That doesn't mean I'd walk away from it and leave it unattended. To me, that's just asking to get bit in the ass.

These days, anything which is low risk maintenance is stuff I do during the daytime because it's not Production. For our Production environments, everything is considered high risk because the systems are mission critical. Any change at all is high risk, because if it breaks, it costs the company large amounts of money to be down.

You have to understand what your threshold of risk is, and what your actual risks are before you do any automation. Some systems you can play fast and loose with. Others, not so much.

Or, worse, guyliner.

Your best is to get out of Managed Services and into Professional Services. You just build out new environments / servers / apps and hand them off to the MS guys. Once its off your hands, you never have to worry about a server crashing, maintenance windows, or being on call. Plus, you are generally paid more.

In my experience (personal and professional), those people do a half assed job of building those systems, have no concept of what will be required to maintain them, and are then subsequently unavailable when their stuff falls apart.

They're hit and run artists.

But, they sure to get paid lots of money.

This raises the question of why people don't just avoid the pedantic bickering by saying "raises the question".

Because, generally speaking, pedants are tedious and annoying, and nobody else cares about the trivial minutia they like to get bogged down in because it's irrelevant to the topic at hand.

At least, that's what my wife tells me. ;-)

Everyone here is going to tell you that a human needs to be there because that is their livelihood.

No, many of us will tell you a human needs to be there because we've been in the IT industry long enough to have seen stuff go horribly wrong, and have learned to plan for the worst because it makes good sense.

I had the misfortune of working with a guy once who would make major changes to live systems in the middle of the day because he was a lazy idiot. He once took several servers offline for a few days because of this. I consider that kind of behavior lazy and incompetent, because I've seen the consequences of it.

If you consider "doing our jobs correctly, and mitigating business risk" to be job security, you're right. If you think we do these things simply to make ourselves look useful, you're clueless about what it means to maintain production systems which are business critical.

Part of my job is to minimize business risk. And people keep me around because I actually do that.

BUT if the maintenance gets botched and services are still down or under-performing through normal business hours, nobody outside of IT will notice

Then you're maintaining trivial, boring, and unimportant systems that nobody will notice. If your job is to do that ... well, your job is trivial and unimportant.

The stuff that I maintain, if it was down or under-performing during normal business hours ... we would immediately start getting howls from the users, and the company would literally be losing vast sums of money every hour. Because our stuff is tied into every aspect of the business, and is deemed to be necessary for normal operations.

Sorry, but some of us actually maintain stuff which is mission critical to the core business, and people would definitely notice it.

As one of the technical people who does cover after hours maintenance ... if a technical person suggested we automate our changes and not monitor them, they wouldn't get a sympathetic ear from me either.

There may be systems like you describe. And, as I said before, if that's the case, do your maintenance windows in the middle of the day.

Be warned: All of the above theories could also be wrong. These fast radio flashes could just as easily turn out to be something entirely unpredicted.

We've listed several things which could do it, but we really have no freakin' idea of what causes them, so this is all purely speculation.

I'm seeing this increasingly often......misuse of the phrase "begs the question". Why don't you look it up?

There are now two distinct phrases in the English language:

There is the logical fallacy of begging the question.

Sometimes, an event happens which begs (for) the question of why nobody planned for it.

You might think you sound all clever and stuff, but you're wrong. They sound similar, but they aren't the same. The second one has been in common usage for decades now, and has nothing to do with the logical fallacy.

Some of us would argue that doing maintenance unattended is preparing for failure -- or at least giving yourself the best possible chance of failure.

I work in an industry where if we did our maintenance badly, and there was an outage it would literally cost millions of dollars/hour.

If what you're doing it so unimportant you can leave the maintenance unattended, there's probably no reason you couldn't do the outage in the middle of the day.

If it is important, you don't leave it to chance.

You don't monitor maintenance windows for when everything goes well and is all boring. You monitor them for when things go all to hell and someone needs to correct it.

In any organization I've worked in, if you suggested that, you'd be more or less told "too damned bad, this is what we do".

I'm sure your business users would love to know that you're leaving it to run unattended and hoping it works. No, wait, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't.

I know lots of people who work off hours shifts to cover maintenance windows. My advise to you: suck it up, princess, that's part of the job.

This just sounds like risk taking in the name of being lazy.

I for one would like to be the first of these space mercenaries!

Even now I am thinking up cool sounding names to call ourselves... :)

Dorks in space? ;-)

Yeah. It's not exactly "boldly going where no man has gone before", is it?

Oh, I don't know ... this just seems to be one more step in codifying the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition as the law of the land and setting the tone for future space exploration.

Possession is 90% of the law, defense is the other 10%

You know, I've seen this cited several times lately.

Show us, exactly, where the law says this.

It's illegal to be in possession of stolen goods. This is not grade 3.

If you can get it and defend it, it's yours.

So, you believe if I can take it from you by force, it's mine?

Well, here's hoping someone takes your stuff from you, and then we'll see if you stand by that statement.