Dropping at 2000 feet per minute is not quite free fall, but it's a long way from a drifting dandelion seed. I wonder if the balloon payload left a crater.
I've launched a handful of latex weather balloons to near-space. They all descend on a parachute and have a target impact velocity of ~2000 feet per minute. None have made so much as a dent in the earth so far.
I have no experience with balloons at all, but even a plowed field feels like a sidewalk to me when I run into it at the same speed under canopy. I leave a sizable mark, and I have seen friends break femurs, pelvises, etc at the end of a similar descent.
I took down an AS/400 server once by tripping over two Type 1 token ring cables[1] that had been plugged together in the middle of a walkway. No-one ever owned up to that setup.
Oh god, I’d blocked from my mind the pain of ring dropping. We had MAUs for the servers, but for some reason ran the rest of the office on CAT-5 TR gear from Madge without any MAUs. Just took someone to unplug and that section of the office would lose network connectivity.
Possibly the more important question is ‘Why were you running a token ring network in 1999?’! I have no idea why our network was structured like that, this was my first job in the industry and I was a lowly PC tech at the time. If I had to guess, the word that springs to mind is ‘legacy’.
Eh, I was a user on a token ring university network almost that late, and it was superior to the congestion-crippled ethernet networks at more 'advanced' institutions. That said, I definitely didn't enjoy all the practice I got in building token ring-enabled Linux kernels.
>Will this be the decade where I get to experience being struck by falling routers and switches,
especially if the falling equipment identifies you as the softest landing spot in the vicinity (thus providing for lesser damage to / higher chances of the equipment survival :)
> far from any data center?
until off course it is the air borne (near-space) datacenter itself.
One happy benefit of being able to read Russian is being able to use Yandex as a second or third point of view when researching a topic primarily through Internet search.
There also seems to be variation between Wikipedia articles in different languages that I would not ascribe to incompleteness. Does generally-accepted cultural "truth" about a topic or incident really differ so much?
"The Dark Playground is a place every procrastinator knows well. It’s a place where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn’t actually fun because it’s completely unearned and the air is filled with guilt, anxiety, self-hatred, and dread."
A truly delightful name for such a dreadful place.
We forget so soon. Labor movements within recent memory were fought at great cost to secure the possibility of shorter working hours. People were killed at factory gates trying to get labor laws enacted, in part to reduce employer demands for long working hours.
One argument in favor of capping work hours: unrestricted overtime discriminates against workers unable or unwilling to compete. A race to the bottom is not in the long-term best interests of any participant or the society.
An imbalance in society might show up as (under|un)employment in groups outside the core demographic -- in this case, anyone who is non-20-something, non-male, or non-white, who is not "crushing it" at work after nine on weeknights.
In contrast with early labor movements the modern IT workforce seems to be quite happy with 60-80hrs and reacts aggressively to suggestions that 40hrs is better for them. I guess capital has learned a thing or two about managing the workforce. Don't give them money, give them more hours and JavaScript book to read before bed. Marx would shave his beard if he saw that.
As they used to say in the army, no matter how good you are, no matter what you accomplish, you'll burn out in 10-15 years and be replaced by a young 20-something willing to do what you can't.
A careto is a costumed thief character from an ancient pagan ritual in Portugal.
"Caretos are masked young men dressed in suits made of yellow, red, black, blue and green fringe wool quilts, wearing brass, leather or wooden masks and rattles in their belts. ... They appear in groups from every corner of the village running and shouting excitedly, frightening the people and “robbing” all the wineries." [0]
The trojan referred to in this story is known by another name. [1]
[0] netbsd.org/ports