the inch changed in 1959 from exactly 1/39.37 m to exactly 2.54 cm; the survey foot is for compatibility with large-scale measurements based on old inches.
the story seems to be set in a world that uses gas to weld steel as part of a production process, making a blue flame. are there any torches that can weld steel and make a blue flame? does anyone use manual gas welding in automotive production‽
The blue light is from a arc welding process be it stick rods or gas shielded continuous wire. A flame would not have the on and off as described as well as being hard to detect at any distance. The most common steel welding flame process, oxy acetylene flame has an inner blue hue but the welding pool is probably brighter, so I doubt even at 10 feet a person could notice any particular colour hue, for anything hand held.
part of the deal with cable tv a few decades ago was that the cable channels didn't have ads because you paid for them directly every month. (local stations obviously had their usual ads).
sunos4 disk devices were named like xy0a or xd2h or sd1b. the first 2 letters were the controller (xy/xd were different types of xylogics smd controllers, sd scsi), the number was the unit number, and the letter was the partition, with some fairly strong conventions (a=root, b=swap, c=whole disk, d..h=other)
i recently got an electronic product that said 中國 instead of 中国 on the label (traditional vs simplified characters). i wonder if this was meant as a subtle indication that it was from traditional-character land.
the search is to generate a valid signing key pair, where "valid" means the last 28 bits are as specified. once a poster generates such a key, they can use it for as long as it's valid.
