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Comment Re:Getting a handle on the issue (Score 1) 181

Sort of, not really.

The Fire Service hasn't had a ton of experience with these vehicles yet, as there aren't that many of them on the road, fewer that crash, and fewer that require extrication. There is training to force entry into lots of vehicles, as depending on the class and type, they will fail more easily in certain ways. And by "fail" I mean "succumb to the tools that the FD carries and lets us get into the passenger compartment". Vehicle-specific training is common.
I've had to force a door on exactly one Tesla so far, and it was no harder to force than any other passenger car. The Cybertruck wouldn't give me pause, either. Stainless steel skin vs. several dozen tons of force means it wrinkles up differently than a normal car. The Saturns were more of a pain in the ass.

Almost all of the modern cars are "harder" to get into than the cars a generation ago, and that's a good thing. The passenger compartments are stronger and less likely to have intrusion, making it more likely for the passengers to survive. Beat up, sure, but survive. Techniques we used 20 years ago just don't work as well, but other techniques work just fine. For instance: the glass. A generation ago, all of the side-windows were tempered glass, with only the windscreen being laminated glass. Tempered glass fails with a simple glass punch; laminated glass requires the use of a saw of some sort (a Sawzall with carbide teeth works fine. There are specialty tools, too). Nowadays, we're seeing laminated glass in side windows from all sorts of manufacturers (Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Tesla). Is it slower for emergency services to get though this? Yes. Is it a problem? No. Is it a problem for a car in the water and the occupant has to self-extricate and there's no mechanical system to unlach the door? Hell yes, that's a problem.

Comment Re:Kinda pointless due to cell damage (Score 1) 87

Not exactly the same thing, and I'll warn you that if you're squeamish, don't keep reading:

In preclinical pharmaceutical animal testing, there is a chemical fixation/preservation technique known as perfusion. There are a couple of ways of doing it. Common way: a mouse is put under a deep, deep, plane of anesthesia and held there. The chest is opened. A catheter of aldehyde fixative is introduced into one of the aorta's and the one of the major ventricles cut. The heart, still pumping away, pumps the fixative around the entire body before it,too, becomes chemically fixed. The animal is held under the plane of anesthesia the entire time and does not suffer. With the heart stopped beforehand there are ways to do this artificially (syringe pumps, gravity perfusion), but they vary in effectiveness.

Point being: you could do this with a human and some kind of biocompatable antifreeze (glycerine?) if you had the time to plan, the money, and....eh, the will?

Comment Re: Science (Score 1) 211

I'm being lazy and you can pick this apart all you want, but the evidence is that it worked and was very well into statistical significance range:

Interpretation
Our results showed that US counties with higher proportions of persons 12 years of age fully vaccinated against COVID-19 had substantially lower rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths—a finding that showed dose response and persisted even in the period when Delta was predominant.

From:
https://www.thelancet.com/jour...
County-level vaccination coverage and rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States: An ecological analysis

Comment Re:Cold weather? (Score 1) 138

Rhesus Macaques are carriers of Macacine alphaherpesvirus 1, better known as B-Virus. In non-human primates, it's annoying, roughly the same as a cold sore in a human. In humans, however, it has something around an 80% case fatality rate with limited treatment options available.

The colonies are routinely tested for B-Virus by PCR, but it's possible that the virus is dormant in a given animal, resulting in a negative test. While that animal wouldn't be able to infect a human AT THAT MOMENT, they could start shedding virus at any time afteward. All Old-World Primates are assumed to be B-Virus carriers, with appropriate protection for the humans always exercised.

So, no, while they may not have been used in any procedures that would introduced a transmissible disease to them, they can be a threat to human health anyway.

Comment Re:US Politics has gone to shit (Score 1) 1605

"WASHINGTON, July 27 (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told Christians on Friday that if they vote for him this November, "in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote."

There are many ways to interpret this line. I like to think in 4 years we can vote again.

Comment Re:Honestly I think we do have bots (Score 1) 166

Different web, different place. I miss the old /. with the longass threads of discussion and some well-considered answers that would go on for a page or two. Usually learned something, too, even if it was a perspective I didn't agree with.

We're all still on a list, yes. The intertubes don't forgive or forget. .....slashdotting: back in, eh, 97-98, one of my friends had a little site on the school's server. He gets a call from the admin screaming one day, saying that the traffic had gone up something like 100000x in 4 hours on his little page and he was shutting it off because it was eating most of the school's bandwidth and capacity. DDOS, indeed. WTF?
Yup, slashdotted. Still a funny memory.

Comment Re:Ran out of brakes... (Score 1) 351

Ah, the Audi 5000 mess:
https://www.curbsideclassic.co...

TL;DR: It wasn't Audi. It wasn't even an engineering problem. It was the fact that it was unusually narrow spacing between the gas and brake pedals, and the fact they were nearly the same size. Great for heel-and-toe shifting, really bad for American drivers used the 9" wide brake pedal on a Buick. The car didn't have an override for the gas and brake being pressed at the same time, so even if someone was laying on the brakes, it was possible they were stepping on the gas at the same time. The harder they pressed the brakes, the harder the car would pull. The brakes would eventually overpower the engine, but not until the driver was scared somewhat shitless.

Audi was confused as shit about this problem originally, as the entire engine control system was the same as the cars sold in Germany, and they hadn't had a single reported case of this in the country. It was something that only was happening in the American market. Eventually they figured it out, but not until well after the PR damage was done.

Comment Re:Don't say gay (Score 1) 330

You weren't paying attention.

I had a Miss Bistany in 1st grade.
Later that year, the name tag was Mrs. Bistany.

Wasn't hard to figure out.

"Because they were professionals and stuck to their topics. Their private life was not a school to[ic."
The K-12 educator that manages to keep their entire private life separate from school is rare. College is different.

Comment Re:Don't say gay (Score 1) 330

"The teacher's job is to instruct in reading, math, science, etc."

On paper, sure.
In reality, a K-8 teacher is mom,dad,counselor,cook,friend,comedian,historian,protector,psychologist,teacher,confideant
This is not new. This isn't even 1930's new. This is one of the reasons that so many of the teachers found the underpaying job so, so, rewarding: it's never been just about the teaching.

Comment Re: Don't say gay (Score 1) 330

Disney isn't the first, or last, for any of that kind of public-private game. This isn't exactly the same thing, but I'm too lazy to really find the right links now:
https://rethinkq.adp.com/artif...

We do have a long, storied, history in the USA about companies in then-remote areas setting up shop with very "special" rules. Disney was smart enough to capitalize on that for decades after building in the middle of Alligator Alley.

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