It’s been a long time since I played, but king+queen+bishop should be pretty achievable?

Oh, I’ve had the name for a lot longer than that.

As Someone Somewhere, I urge you to post more.

People with autism don’t do well with unwritten social rules.

“This is a Nazi salute; don’t do it” seems like about the most expressly taught social rule there is.

I’m pretty sure that autistic people have as little excuse for doing it as anyone else.

It is not some kind of signal that you are born knowing or subconsciously learn from your peers, and people on the spectrum instead have to carefully analyse. People know what a Nazi salute is because they are shown pictures of Nazis performing them, and told that doing this is not OK.

If there’s a written Manual for Human Interactions, this is explicitly in it.

Where on earth do they get the ‘AYD’ from?

Seems like spifk, sporf, or knorkoon might be more sensible.

It’s often a disaster recovery type of thing.

Flags shall be flown from a balloon tethered to the top of the flagpole.

Normally I’d be against the waste of helium but I’m prepared to make an exception.

Native speaker here and I took forever to get it; I wasn’t looking for a pun like that.

My NZ accent would pronounce both the same.

603 for maglevs, 574.8 for steel rail, set in France in 2007 by a hotted up, modified TGV.

China holds the record for a stock train at 487, set in 2010.

(all per Wikipedia)

It looks like the article might be implying that they will be the fastest trains operating in revenue service when they enter service, but that surely needs to be demonstrated with a production train in revenue service.

There’s still a lot of flights through Russian territory.

Korean 007 could have been intentional (I believe the pilot involved still claims it was a military plane) but Hanlon’s razor still applies here. They’re firing a lot of SAMs at many targets without good controls.

The US is barely better; they shot down one (nearly two) of their own fighters about a week ago and then there’s the Vincennes incident.

NZ law just says it has to be adequate for the intended purpose: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/0035/latest/whole.html#DLM154837

(1) Subject to subsection (2), a legal requirement for a signature other than a witness’ signature is met by means of an electronic signature if the electronic signature—

(a) adequately identifies the signatory and adequately indicates the signatory’s approval of the information to which the signature relates; and

(b) is as reliable as is appropriate given the purpose for which, and the circumstances in which, the signature is required.

(2) A legal requirement for a signature that relates to information legally required to be given to a person is met by means of an electronic signature only if that person consents to receiving the electronic signature.

“I want this to finish at 6PM” can be easier maths than 11h 15m from now.

1. Most of these are in a metal box, which blocks signal. Adding careful routing to get an antenna in an unshrouded position where it’s still physically protected is a pain. Also, in the middle of an apartment building can give you pretty terrible reception in the first place.

2. GPS doesn’t provide time zones or daylight savings info. The appliance would know where you are and what UTC time it is, but not which time zone you’re in. The manufacturer could pre-program shape files in (yay, more memory) but they become obsolete the next time a politician decides to move time zones or change daylight savings. If this happens to you, your device will keep repeatedly changing to be an hour fast/slow no matter how often you reset it.

   You could have the GPS satellites continually broadcast shape files for the time zone but this would be a big change, use up a lot of the limited bandwidth, and it would take your clock half an hour to set itself.

3. it’s like an extra $5-10 in parts and unlike a WiFi module, the manufacturer can’t make any big data or ad revenue from it.

On underground lines, the PSDs are mostly for air-sealing. It allows you to air-condition the platforms without trying to cool the tunnels, and it helps the piston effect of moving trains pull air through the tunnels, rather than just swirl air around each platform.

Also probably helps for fire engineering.

I was thinking she was only going to live long enough to see two Christmases…

Depends on the size of the plane. For bigger jets, yes, but for smaller planes the width of runway you need to do a u-turn is about the same as the width you need to safely land of a gust pushes the plane a bit sideways.

Usually you do a 180 rather than reversing blind.

The Elizabeth line is already built with platform screen doors, although I believe they’re only on underground sections. I don’t know enough about this station to say whether it had them; I expect not.

Platform screen doors tend to be used underground mainly for airflow management. They are not primarily for safety.

They work less well outside. No overhead structure to anchor to, weather has a larger impact (particularly snow/ice), and they can become something to climb rather than an obstacle.

I am confused…