Son just called to tell me that his new desktop computer went into full meltdown (including glowing motherboard) when he plugged in the USB cable from his printer. Apparently took out the keyboard too. I can’t test this from 4000 miles away, but my guess is that the wiring in his new apartment is bad and that the ground is live. (Everything was playing nicely together in his previous apartment last week.)
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I’m going to add “multimeter” to the list of things to make sure I have handy and accessible when I move to a new place.
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Welcome to the future…
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yeah-- it really has no way of accurately estimating when it will be done. The best it can do is periodically run code that says-- I"M ALIVE.
And a progress bar that invites a user to press a caliper against the screen is not the answer.
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Honestly I was expecting more flying cars. Or a desolate nuclear wasteland where people battled for food and medicine. Depending on who won the election.
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If we’re not careful and elect trump, he’ll happily make the US a nuclear wasteland if he doesn’t get a good enough nanny to soothe his hurt butt when putin makes fun of him.
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While I agree with what you’re saying, this phrasing makes it sound like electing trump is like backing out into a dumpster. Something that happens by accident. When the reality is it will be a lot more like walking behind a Waffle House and eating garbage out of that dumpster of our own volition. Only to discover that half that garbage came from the Petco next door.
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More like half the garbage came from a hospital and we have to use special tools to even get the container open.
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Let us now praise Human ingenuity
21 October 1994
The three brothers, RiH, RaH and IH, visited the waste disposal facility in the early hours of the morning. They approached the facility through the forest, climbed over the 1.5m high fence, and broke into the repository and climbed down into the pit. In doing so, they overrode the electrical alarm system on the steel doors of the source vaults and cut through the retaining padlocks. RiH climbed down into the first section of the vaults, found the metal container with the source, and passed it up to his brothers. While he was doing this a metal cylinder fell out of the open tube in the container. This cylinder, approximately 18 cm long and 1.5 cm in diameter, was thrown back into the pit by RaH. A shorter cylinder of similar diameter, which subsequent investigations showed to be the radioactive source, was picked up by RiH and placed in his coat pocket. The brothers also entered the liquid waste storage facility, which was not fitted with an alarm, and removed several aluminium drums, after emptying their contents into the facility. While they were doing this, one of the drums fell against RiH’s leg, causing minor injury. The drums and the metal container were carried 50 m through the wood to the road, where they were left while the brothers collected a car. The container was then placed in the boot of the car and taken to Tallinn where it was sold as scrap metal. On the way to Tallinn the brothers stopped first at RaH’s house and then at RiH’s house in Kiisa. RiH had begun to feel ill shortly after entry into the repository and a few hours after the unauthorized entry vomited repeatedly. He continued to feel unwell in the evening and went to bed. The other occupants of the house were the man’s stepson (RT), the boy’s mother (BK) and the boy’s great-grandmother (AS).
In the subsequent investigations, the two surviving brothers maintained that they had entered the facility looking for scrap metal to sell and were not aware that the metal container contained a radioactive source. It is not known why RiH kept the source cylinder that fell out of the container. The record of periodic dose rate measurements made around the disposal facility by the technical staff both before and after the theft indicates that the cylinder that was thrown back into the pit was probably an inactive spacer in the source assembly (see Annex I). From the similarity between the dose rates measured close to the source, both at the time of its discovery at EMEX and at the time of its eventual recovery, it can also be inferred that the container contained only the one radioactive source, and hence nobody has been at risk from the subsequent handling of the container, which has never been recovered. At some stage in the day the source was placed in a drawer in the kitchen of RiH’s house
.
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The Goiana incident, right?
That story is one of the few that give me recurring nightmares.
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The initials don’t work.
It sounds like a different incident.
*Shudder*
Tallin is in Estonia.
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I know an Estonian guy. I’ll have to ask him if he learned about this in school.
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actually, that happened in Estonia.
October 21, 1994 – a large caesium-137 source was stolen by scrap metal scavengers in Tammiku, Männiku, Saku Parish, Estonia.[37]
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That sounds much more illustrative of the maxim
“It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others”.
On September 13, 1987, taking advantage of the absence of the guard,[7] Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira illegally entered the partially demolished facility. They partially disassembled the teletherapy unit, and placed the source assembly – which they thought might have some scrap value – in a wheelbarrow, taking it to Alves’s home.[1] There, they began dismantling the equipment. That same evening, they both began to vomit. Nevertheless, they continued in their efforts. The following day, Pereira began to experience diarrhea and dizziness and his left hand began to swell. He soon developed a burn on this hand in the same size and shape as the aperture – he eventually underwent partial amputation of several fingers.[8]
On September 15, Pereira visited a local clinic where his symptoms were diagnosed as the result of something he had eaten, and he was told to return home and rest.[1] Alves, however, continued with his efforts to dismantle the equipment. In the course of this effort, he eventually freed the caesium capsule from its protective rotating head. His prolonged exposure to the radioactive material led to his right forearm becoming ulcerated, requiring amputation. [9]
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Yeah. A lot of these are improperly disposed of medical devices.
Which means that whoever threw this shit out must have know just how dangerous they are. Talk about cruel.
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Actually, the incident in Brazil involved a business dispute, but the doctors involved tried to recover the radiation source, because they knew it was a hazard, but they were told not to enter the building and after assurances there would be security, they relented. The security guard called in sick the day of the incident. (He was actually taking a day off.)
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That’s still mindblowing. I mean, the Brazilian government should have at least been involved with tracking all these sources and checking in once in a while to make sure things are disposed of properly. That’s how they do it in the UK.
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There’s also a lot of incidents from the third world and soviet bloc countries where improperly disposed radiation sources found their way into steel and concrete plants and people ended up living in radioactive buildings.
Another common theme is miscalibrated medical equipment that give massive doses, as well as ignoring protocol when alarms go off.
Oh, and that one case in LA where a radio tech did ~150 CT scans of the same 3mm wide band of an infant’s head over the course of an hour.
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Rather than complain about the thread going OT, I just edited the title 
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I think it was the phrase “melt down” that got me off chasing that squirrel.
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