When I was deployed in Afghanistan, everyone I knew had the same reoccurring dream- some other dream is happening, and then out of nowhere, you hear a gunshot/explosion, and wake in a cold sweat, absolutely certain that you just got shot or blown up. And the certainty persists for about five seconds after you wake, as you shakily pat yourself down for blood. Good times.
And the certainty persists for about five seconds after you wake, as you shakily pat yourself down for blood.
Unless you also happen to get sleep paralysis at the same time! Happened to a friend who fortunately was in a tent full of very understanding people when he woke us up screaming.
Because space is haunted. And buckshot’s superior spread helps ensure a hit while spinning around in zero-g. Solid slugs would go straight through the soyuz walls, duh.
Ditto. I had the option of taking a comp sci class in grade 11/12 which taught QBasic back in 2001/2002. Still got all the basic bitch programs I made for the class on a hard drive somewhere lol.
That’s part of it, but vehicular crimes specifically are often overlooked, many people aren’t concerned by high numbers of road fatalities, and often resort to victim blaming, as if it’s just a cost of living.
Hahahaha, that’s DC, Maryland, Virginia. Not Department of Motor Vehicles. I guess Maryland doesn’t have DMVs, but it fools local Virginians from time to time too, don’t feel bad
Similarly, In the divine comedy, predatory loan sharks are in the seventh circle of hell with the “sodomites” in the area designated as “sins of violence against god”. Interestingly, Dante the character seems rather chill about the “sodomites” when he talks with them.
I mean, if you lose the game, you lose the game. You don’t say “hey you made me lose the game! Don’t do that!” Because that’s not how the game works. If you “make” someone lose the game, tough luck.
Swatch Internet Time (or .beat time) is a decimal time system introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of their marketing campaign for their line of “.beat” watches.
I could be wrong, but I’m fairly certain watches existed in 1998.
Honestly, all we need to do is eliminate time zones. It wouldn’t solve all the problems with time systems, particularly for programmers, but it would go a long way to solving the practical problems humans face, as well as eliminating one of the biggest machine problems.
Just everyone switch to UTC. As I write this it is 10:51 UTC. Anyone in the world can convert that to their local purpose. In eastern Australia, 10:51 is mid evening. In the UK it’s late morning. In western United States it’s late at night. If we always used UTC, people would just be used to this pretty quick.
Eliminating time zones would make things worse. Right now you know that from 10am to 3pm local things will be opened with close to 100% certainty. Remove time zones and now you have to find out what are normal opening hours for the country where you’re trying to call.
Yeah removing them is not a good idea. But they do need a nice global time complement for anything that is international such as broadcasts on the internet. I hate converting time zones to figure out when an event or broadcast starts.
That would be listed in plain terms on a website no conversion needed. I really only deal with individuals though, so they list their hours on teams and only some of them follow business hours anyways.
Ok, it’s still more trouble than just remembering “France is +6 from where I am so I can call any business over there at 8am local no problem.”
The only proponents of getting rid of time zones are people who only think about how it fits their own situation while ignoring that in the vast majority of cases it makes things simpler to have time zones.
but regardless, imagine if you are meeting with 10 people all in different time zones. some in Arizona which doesn’t have DST. most don’t work 8-5 or whatever because thats old fashioned and sucks life from you. I’d rather know when you work on a single single clock. no confusion. it would take a couple months for everyone to adjust to their new clock and then everyone would be in sync. yeah its a fantasy, but things are more connected every day. think of the boon for travelers and airlines.
Yeah I tend to agree, I schedule things with people across the world regularly and coordinating the time zones and business hours is a pain. If everyone used the same clock it would eliminate part of that issue.
Then a simple fix would be to not plan any meetings or calls for first or last thing in a day. Also, all work is expected due by first thing in the morning. So send that shit off as soon as you are done with it and its not a problem.
approximately 0 people think about it outside of programmers
It comes up all the time. Any time people are scheduling something between different time zones and run into trouble figuring out “is that your time or my time?” That’s an issue that would be resolved by not having time zones.
My point is you use UTC to plan international meetings but keep timezones for day to day stuff. Better yet with computers meeting planning software takes timezones into account.
When I do a when2meet with my colleagues everyone fills it in their local time and it’s fine, and then the calendar event is timezone aware as well so it’s completely a non issue.
If all your system cares about is recording incoming events at a discrete time, then sure: UTC for persistence and localization for display solves all your problems.
But if you have any concept of user-defined time ranges or periodic scheduling, you get in the weeds real quick.
There is a difference between saying “this time tomorrow” vs. “24 hours from now”, because of DST, leap years, and leap seconds.
Time zones (and who observes them) change over time. As does DST.
If you allow monthly scheduling, you have to account for some days not being valid for some months and that this changes on a leap year.
If you allow daily scheduling, you need to be aware that some hours of the day may not exist on certain days or may exist twice.
If you poll a client device and do any datetime comparisons, you need to decide whether you care about elapsed time or calendar time.
I worked on some code that was deployed to aircraft carriers in the Pacific. “This event already happened tomorrow” is completely possible when you cross the international date line.
Add to all of this the fact that there are different calendars across the world, even if the change is as small as a different “first day of the week”.
Look okay so I have the basic theory behind the film alright?
Eventually the crew of the Enterprise realizes that every planet with intelligent life they’ve ever visited has some kind of bean.
Every star system.
Every galaxy.
Background:
Long before the dawn of humanity (and every other civilization in the known universe), billions of seeding ships full of a variety of gene-modified ruggedized advanced beans were sent out through the cosmos.
Who sent the beans? The last civilization of a distant supercluster, who had known several millennia of intergalactic stability and connection (over thousands of galaxies, countless people). But in the last few centuries they had suffered a horrible war with something invading from the deep black. A majority of the galaxies were wiped out within the first few decades, but a distant arm of the supercluster fortified hard and held out. They desperately hoped to overcome it, but they had only succeeding in slowing it.
Witnessing so much annihilation, many knew this was the end of life here. There were attempts to salvage life, many generation ships were sent out but they always prematurely lost connection.
…
But they sent beans.
GOOD beans.
They established life in corners of the universe where life would have otherwise been impossible! They grew in the most fucked up conditions, there were beanstalks in methane oceans and spreading around supervolcanoes.
There were beans on Earth, before there were single-celled organisms. They established the foundation for life.
We’re not here by divine decree.
We’re here, because the aliens sent beans.
(Potential addition/twist: Fungus. Rarely found beyond Earth, almost always seen as a poisonous pest, humans being uniquely similar to fungi becomes an important plot point. Recently there has been a horrble fungal pest on Earth ruining beans in particular, but also attacking many other plants at an increasing and alarming rate. Human and animal fungal infections have gotten far more aggressive. Eventually; Mushroom zombies.)
(Spolier alert: The enemy from the deep black was fungal in nature. It feeds on worlds and builds mycelium networks through fibrils stretching through cold space off anything it can. Solid planets, asteroids, gas giants. Touching them, growing on them, eventually slowing them through a weak but persistent and increasing resistance. Growing like mold, but ever larger, always reaching for the network it moves through. (Only thing it can’t touch are stars, but it can feed from them.) After consuming everything it can reach, it sends out spores and slowly dies as it has sapped all energy from its hosts.)
en.wikipedia.org
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