There's been the odd idiot wearing headphones mowed down on train tracks. The trains air horn didn't get the message through.
The Air Zound is wonderful. You can get pedestrians' attention with light toots. I reserve the full blast for developing danger or people who didn't get the message from the toots.
Survival depends on being heard in a car with closed windows with possible loud radio or squabbling kids.
It may have been intentional. More than one suicide by train has involved the person who died by suicide wearing headphones as they walked on the tracks (it was clear that it was a suicide and not intentional as engineers have reported the person looking at the train when the horn was sounded but not leaving the tracks).
Here in Canada a Family Protection clause is common in insurance policies which covers you and your family in the case of hit and run, uninsured or under insured up to your liability limit.
We'd actually paid for an "uninsured motorist coverage" endorsement but discovered that it really didn't cover anything material. Shame on me for not digging into the details when I added the endorsement. I've become a more savvy insurance consumer.
Assembler programs are written for different environments: Ordinary applications, Accessing OS facilities the compiler language can't access, extending the OS, Device control, enhancing boot process...
As an ancient mainframe Assembler programmer, I first learned Assembler from studying the code generated by the compiler. There are traps in compiler languages calling user written Assembler routines. The first one I encountered was a routine that could return to different addresses in the calling program. That worked as long as the address was in the same routine, but if the return address was farther up the calling chain (eg. A > B > C < A). A would crash running B's registers.
The application programmers ended up with a dump and had no idea on how to diagnose the problem. I once walked up to a programmer puzzled by a dump and solved it in about three minutes (practice helps) putting out of joint the nose of the senior programmer who was being consulted.
The compiler library handled this situation just fine, but the guru who wrote the Assembler program insisted that programmers had to be more careful.
I wrote another routine to intercept the calls and use the subroutine library when needed.
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.
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).
I feel that neither justifies 2 generations of separatist blackmail, and the use of holocaust terms for constitution failures between two Quebecois men (Lesvesque and Trudeau) is inappropriate — but completely and utterly unsurprising for the overwrought self-pitying elite of the province. Moreover, it is no surprise that Quebec rejects the constitution but simultaneously uses the Not Withstanding clause to block language and religious rights. It is like the bully in Doraemon — what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine.
That said I do grudgingly admire Lesvesque and felt he was much better than all of his successors. You could tell he had a philosophy of a Quebec that could be an actual nation, not merely a collection of childless people who spoke French and simply emulated France.
There is no Lesvesque in Alberta and that is why Alberta will never be a nation; only a gas station for the US. Still, if the only thing people value is income maybe that's the better outcome.
Quick research, but it appears that the population are descendents of the Emirate of Sicily from 1000 AD, which was colonised by people from Tunisia, who would be considered Arabs generally. So a splinter group cut off from the main body for a thousand years (if my reading is correct).
Are they still Arabs? That's subjective.
I'd consider America and England two capitals of the Anglo empire much like Roman and Constantinople, but there is lots of room for nuance. (Romans & Byzantines saw themselves as the same, whereas Americans and English see themselves as different... but I chalk that up to the tyranny of small differences, just look at how the elites jump back and forth across the pond and how their politics harmonise, Trump/Farage, Reagan/Thatcher, Clinton/Blair).
The Air Zound is wonderful. You can get pedestrians' attention with light toots. I reserve the full blast for developing danger or people who didn't get the message from the toots.
Survival depends on being heard in a car with closed windows with possible loud radio or squabbling kids.
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