• (cs) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Union employees are still "At Will" employees in "At Will" states.

    Perhaps. So let me narrow my definition. What about public school teachers? It's not just a cliche that they can be impossible to fire.

    http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338 This should come as no surprise if you remember that public education in the United States is a government monopoly. Don't like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad. That's why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse. <snip class="interesting stuff" />

    So an At-Will Employee had an employment contract, was incompetent, and kept his job. Does that mean you think NYC should have invalidated the employment contract? What does it mean for libertarianism if an organization can't negotiate a binding contract with another?

  • (cs) in reply to GettinSadda
    GettinSadda:
    Ozymandias:
    The REAL WTF is all the commenters that are so Luddite as to be afraid of a little electricity. I have been shocked by 110 electricity multiple times.

    As long as it is a "one-hand" shock you are fine -- its not crossing your heart or anything.

    As a qualified electrician - your comments scare me. Not a lot though because I will get a kick out of seeing you nominated for a Darwin Award for trying to prove this!
    I've been shocked by 110VAC several times too. But remember that PHASE to NEUTRAL isn't the only pathway; if any other part of your body is properly grounded, you're in for a shock! I once was discussing with a friend about the dangers of falling into the subway tracks, potentially coming into contact with the live guideway. (rubber-tyred subway in Mexico City, so the guidelines are the ones with the juice.) He insisted that touching only one of these would not give you a shock, until I asked him... "Would YOU touch the live guide?"

    "Of course not."

    I was kind of expecting a Darwin Award nominee by then, but it seems like common sense prevailed after all. The "one wire won't kill you" myth is dangerous indeed...

  • Dead Squirrel's Switch (unregistered) in reply to danixdefcon5
    danixdefcon5:
    I was kind of expecting a Darwin Award nominee by then, but it seems like common sense prevailed after all. The "one wire won't kill you" myth is dangerous indeed...

    One wire won't kill you if that is the only thing you are touching. This is why birds can sit on power lines.

    However if a squirrel takes a run along a line and runs over an insulator - one power system squirrelcided.

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to poopdeville
    poopdeville:
    So an At-Will Employee had an employment contract, was incompetent, and kept his job. Does that mean you think NYC should have invalidated the employment contract? What does it mean for libertarianism if an organization can't negotiate a binding contract with another?

    No, the problem is when the government uses tax money to establish an essential monopoly in a certain field. The same holds true for government bailing out companies that put themselves into horrid situations from their own incompetence. In libertarianism there would be NO government run school system. If a given school (or group of schools) negotiated a crippling and idiotic contract than the solution is quite simple. Parents simply send their kids, and their money, to other schools which did not mess up that badly.

  • Paul Johnson (unregistered)

    My Uncle Alan hit a union problem early in his career as a draughtsman (i.e. a human employed to do with pen and ink what a CAD program does today). He'd gone down on to the shop floor to talk to the man who would be cutting a sheet of metal as shown on a drawing. So he picked up a handy piece of chalk and sketched the lines on the metal.

    Pandemonium! All work on the shop floor stopped. The Union Steward came over and demanded the instant presence of management on pain of walkout. Management came down and were shown the offending chalk marks. The Steward cited Union demarcation agreements which clearly stated that marking up work from drawings was the responsibility of the machinist. Young Alan was therefore in violation of Union agreements. What was to be done? Eventually management calmed things down by humbly apologising for having let young Alan onto the shop floor without explaining the rules, and everyone got back to work.

    Then Mrs Thatcher got elected and globalisation started to roll. That kind of Union became history, often along with the companies their members worked at.

  • Aen (unregistered) in reply to spacix

    Only in America...

  • Saemundr (unregistered) in reply to pscs
    pscs:
    Paul:
    When I worked for a year as an electrician's mate (it's not as kinky as it sounds), the electrician taught me to check for live wires by touching them lightly with the back of my hand.

    We were taught to use the back of a finger.

    It is the safest way to test using only what you were born with. If the wire is live, the muscular spasm will pull your finger/hand away from the wire.

    What NOT to do is to touch with the front of your hand/finger. If you do that, the spasm will clamp your hand around the wire, which isn't healthy...

    Of course, it's safer to use other means to test for a live wire, but I always tend to pull the fuse, test with an "electricians' screwdriver", then as a final test either touch it with the back of a finger, or if I'm feeling wimpy, just touch the live wire to the earth wire.

    i recommend carrying a capacitor, decent sized one. place it so it can get some charge, then take it to an unsuspecting victim to see if that unit was live :)

  • Mr'; Drop Database -- (unregistered) in reply to GettinSadda
    GettinSadda:
    Did he get his compensation for a potentially fatal electrocution?
    Fatal electrocution? Is there any other kind?
  • Reaperducer (unregistered)

    Sounds familiar. I once worked in a place where I wasn't allowed to eject my own disks because it was a union job.

    At another place there were different unions working on different floors and some tasks were actually impossible because items weren't allowed to be physically transported from one floor to the other because of union turf wars. You could electronically transfer something -- like a copy of a file over a modem -- but you couldn't carry a disk from the first floor to the second floor because it would cross over a union boundary.

    And the unions wonder why productive people hate them so.

  • (cs) in reply to Saemundr
    Saemundr:
    i recommend carrying a capacitor, decent sized one. place it so it can get some charge, then take it to an unsuspecting victim to see if that unit was live :)

    Two electricians on the pole. An old lady walks by.

    "Ma'am, can you please hand us that wire?"

    "Of course, have it"

    ("See, I told you the wire is not live")

  • (cs)

    Unions have become big business, and have become corrupted. But I will always be pro-union out of respect for the thousands of people who gave their health, their livings and their lives to fight big business and give the average worker a chance at a decent living. If you talk about American heroes, Union Organizers from a hundred years ago are at the top of my list.

    I think a lot of people take for granted what they have today, and don't realize what it took for workers to enjoy a 40 hour work week, paid vacation and sick time, a living wage, no "company towns" with "company stores", a safe work environment, job security, not getting cheated out of paychecks, no child labor, health insurance, no black-balling, and not getting the crap kicked out of you for demanding what is lawfully yours.

  • Alan (unregistered) in reply to spacix

    There's so much wrong with that it's just funny.

    1. V = R * I. There's no such thing as a 50V, 1A source. Sure, a power supply may say '50V, 1A', but that means it can supply at most 1 amp of current at 50V. The only way you could get 1A of current from that source would be if your body offered a mere 1 ohm resistance. A glass of salt water would offer more resistance than that.

    At 100Vac, the average resistance of the body is ~3000ohm, arm to arm. At 220Vac, it's ~2100ohm.[1]

    At 230Vac, you'd need to be in contact with the wire for ~500ms before it'll start really having an affect on you.

    1. Sure, maybe 25mA across your heart might kill you, but luckily for you, your arm != your heart. While you may measure 25mA going through a wire, it will 'spread out' when it enters your body and so will not all go directly across your heart (unless you're unlucky enough to be bench-pressing a live power cable).

    2. 7Vrms is nothing. You would barely notice that if you connected it across the meat and two veg. I suggest you go grab one of this 9-volt batteries and test this theory.

    3. In ireland between 1990 and 1999 (inclusive) a mere 13 people in private residential households died from electrocution[1]. It is actually pretty hard to electrocute yourself at home.

    [1]http://www.reci.ie/newsspring2001.htm

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to DOA
    DOA:
    wee:
    A .223 round isn't "similar" to 5.56 NATO, it's the exact same thing. And "M-16" isn't part of the caliber designation, it's a rifle (and an old one at that). A .22 LR will kill a human, if the bullet is put in the right place. Reagan nearly died from a .22 round.

    Don't bother talking about stuff you know nothing about.

    Nominated for this year's nitpicking comment award

    It doesn't feel like nitpicking when your rifle blows up literally in your face because you used 5.5s in a .223 chamber.

  • (cs) in reply to Alan
    Alan:
    There's so much wrong with that it's just funny.
    1. V = R * I. There's no such thing as a 50V, 1A source. Sure, a power supply may say '50V, 1A', but that means it can supply at most 1 amp of current at 50V. The only way you could get 1A of current from that source would be if your body offered a mere 1 ohm resistance. A glass of salt water would offer more resistance than that.

    At 100Vac, the average resistance of the body is ~3000ohm, arm to arm. At 220Vac, it's ~2100ohm.[1]

    [1]http://www.reci.ie/newsspring2001.htm

    Your ignorance is visible at the first paragraph. A power supply rated 50 V/1A means it gives 1A on 50 Ohm load, while giving 50V. 1A limitation caused not by its internal resistance, but by overheating hazard.

    Body resistance mostly depends on skin. Under that, your blood is just salty liquid with quite good conductance. In very dry conditions (arctic winter indoors), people are known to sample 220VAC with bare fingers.

  • JJ (unregistered) in reply to spacix

    Or adding a tag to his toe.

  • Alan (unregistered) in reply to alegr
    alegr:
    Your ignorance is visible at the first paragraph. A power supply rated 50 V/1A means it gives 1A on 50 Ohm load
    Well spotted. Turns out i can't do maths at 1am in the morning. My hat's off to you, you can.
    alegr:
    1A limitation caused not by its internal resistance, but by overheating hazard.
    I never said that the 1A limit was due to internal resistance, in fact i never mentioned internal resistance. That 1A limit can be implemented in a dozen different ways, the most trivial being a fuse which will trip if >1A flows. Alternatively you could go for a solenoid based circuit breaker. It all depends.

    So whoops, i divided 50 by 1 and got 1. Turns out thats what 4 years of Electronic Engineering does to ya.

  • streklin (unregistered) in reply to Salami
    Unions have become big business, and have become corrupted. But I will always be pro-union out of respect for the thousands of people who gave their health, their livings and their lives to fight big business and give the average worker a chance at a decent living. If you talk about American heroes, Union Organizers from a hundred years ago are at the top of my list.

    It is all well and good to respect those that that once fought for those things - but this is not a good reason to be pro-union (IMHO). Thing should be judged on what they are NOW, not on what they once where. Once long ago, some people did some great stuff and made the world the better place, now in their memory you kindly support an organization running in their name you claim to be corrupt - this isn't a good thing. Corrupt behaviour should not be be supported just because the previous generation did a good job.

    Another way to think about it is this - suppose you worked hard to create an institution of some form which was meant to help people and then your successors turned it into something corrupt - would you actually want people still to support it? I don't think I would.

  • (cs)

    Nice story. I hope the luser who failed to install that relay cover got prosecuted.

    There is an awful lot of misinformation about electric shocks, their causes and their effects. Most of the shocks people have described here is the AC voltage 'talking' with their body's capacitance. They are pretty well insulated by their shoes, and were not touching any conductive earth. Talk of a 30kv, 30ma supply is, in this context, misleading. When you make contact with it, a part of the equipment is at 30kv, and that part has a capacitance. That capacitance drains away quickly, with a peak current of possibly thousands of amps. That is what you feel, and it hurts. But once that capacitance is drained, all you get is what that supply can source into a low resistance, like you. Maybe - 60ma, dc-ish, 4 or 5 volts (pure guesses). You won't feel that. And, as for testing for high voltage with the back of your hand - It's all very safe, until you collapse with a heart attack one day. Still, it's good as an I'm-sure-this-is-off-but-before-I-grab-it test.

    And there is only one place for your left hand when working live - In your pocket. I've got so much into the habit that you'll see me with my hand in my pocket when doing all sorts of things. (Except for static protection when working on PCs.

  • (cs) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Once, his school used school funds to fund a real trashy gay porn magazine.

    Was his problem with the "real trashy" part or the "gay" part?

  • (cs) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    That "its the amps that kill" thing is so misleading. Voltage provides the force that makes current fatal.

    To use the analogy of a gun. Voltage = the gases expanding and pushing the slug. Current = the momentum of the slug. Unless there is a great voltage, the current will not exist. I cannot throw a .222 slug hard enough to hurt someone seriously. I fire that same slug out of a gun and I can tear off limbs.

    So yes, the current does do the killing, just like the momentum of the slug, but you have to have the force(voltage) present first.

    Okie, let me just help you out and prove this theory.

    Here's a 9v PP3 battery ... touch it to your tongue and it tingles, right? Now touch these two wires to your tongue ... they're connected to a voltage regulated power supply, limited to 5 volts... you shouldn't feel a thing, right?

    Just ignore the bit where it says 28A max output ... it's the voltage that kills, right?

    Maybe you'd feel safer with the 12V supply? That's only rated as 18A

    Ya see where your analogy falls down is a minor misunderstanding on what the whole "current kills, not voltage" thing is about.

    A correct analogy would be bb pellets. A BB pellet fired from a normal bb gun stings like heck. That's a minor shock. Increasing the voltage is like loading the pellet in to something with more punch, it hurts a lot more, but it's still just one pellet. Increasing the current is like getting a rapid fire automatic bb gun and hitting the same spot with a couple of dozen bb pellets.

    See the more voltage you've got, the bigger difference in sting between current levels, but it's the current that actually stings.

    So, on to the health impacts ... electrocution is fatal if it passes through the brain or heart. If you get a sizable shock to the brain you've probably got bigger things to worry about. Current across the heart: As memory serves ... the body is divided in to two zones by a line that goes roughly from shoulder to waist (I think it's left shoulder to right waist, but it's been quite a few years) Any current that crosses that line goes through the heart.

    Admittedly, there are other hazards to electrocution other than heart arythmia. Ignoring contact burns from power passing through a small area of skin (a tens unit can burn you if you touch the wires rather than the pads), and the far worse RF shocks and burns... your body is full of these wonderful things called nerves. They are designed to conduct electricity. They sustain damage from excessive shocks. That's the numbness after a shock, nerve overload.

    It is, of course, many years since I actually studied electronics, biology or electrical health and safety, so qualified nurses and sparkies, please feel free to correct me :p

  • SimonTeW (unregistered) in reply to Nawak
    Nawak:
    The "funny" thing with fibrillation is that it is not reversible without equipement

    Coincidentally, last week I read an article in my local newspaper written by a woman who has suffered multiple partial (spontaneous) fibrillations. When it first happened she was taken to the hospital for defibrillation. Now, as she gets older, the incidents are more common (every few months) and she can manage them with modern drugs. No need for equipment.

    She also mentioned a well-known sportsman who suffered fibrillation on the sports field. The coach knew what to do and hit him hard between the shoulder blades with an ice pack, which defibillated his heart. Apparently that is an alternative method of dealing with the problem if there is defibrillation equipment around.

  • SimonTeW (unregistered) in reply to PerdidoPunk
    PerdidoPunk:
    Khanmots:
    Ozymandias:
    The REAL WTF ... As long as it is a "one-hand" shock you are fine -- its not crossing your heart or anything.

    I had the joy of grabbing hold of copper tubing ... with my other hand.

    I've had a healthy respect for electricity ever since... "one-hand" shock or not :P

    TRWTF is that a "one-hand shock" isn't a one-hand shock... Your body completes a path to ground, whether it be through your other hand touching the pipe (two-hand!) or through some other part of your body touching ground. A "one-hand shock" would mean that the path to ground goes entirely through your hand, and you'd be touching both a live wire and ground with the same hand.

    In an earlier life I was an electrical and electronic engineer. A "one-hand shock" was a shock where only one hand was involved (as opposed to two). It basically meant any electrical shock that did not pass through your chest (or heart).

    Some of the best advice I got was to always work on equipment (whether we believed it to be live or not) with one hand in a back pocket. It looks really dumb when you see someone working this way but I've had shocks at up to 385 Volts and I'm still here. A friend of mine who is an industrial electrician often checks to see if light fittings, etc, are live by sticking his (heavily calloused) thumb into them. Not something I'd recommend but it hasn't done him any harm.

  • SimonTeW (unregistered) in reply to danixdefcon5
    danixdefcon5:
    The "one wire won't kill you" myth is dangerous indeed...

    One wire won't kill you if you can't complete the circuit (via another wire or via a path to ground). Birds on a wire prove this every day.

    My dad grew up in South London, which has suburban electric railways picking up electricity from a third, live, rail. When he was young, my dad and a friend noticed that birds weren't electrocuted when landing on the third rail but that cats and small animals were. They worked out that the birds were safe because they weren't touching the ground, only the rail. To test this theory, Dad and his friend climbed down to the railway and, on the count of three, jumped onto the live rail. Both lived to tell the tale.

    This is something I'm not brave enough to do, and I'd certainly not want my son trying it. But I do admire their bravery and scientific deduction.

  • (cs) in reply to Paul
    Paul:
    Wimp. Running to the nurse with a boo-boo caused by a little electric shock.

    When I worked for a year as an electrician's mate (it's not as kinky as it sounds), the electrician taught me to check for live wires by touching them lightly with the back of my hand. I still do that when I do some electrical work - it made for some awe among the straight-from-high-school students when I moved on to do engineering at college.

    Still, this guy was a Ukranian immigrant who reminisced about warming himself up standing right beside the radar domes while doing guard duty in Siberia during his military service ...

    And you took the advice of this guy with the french fried brain after you learned this fact about him?

  • (cs) in reply to Khanmots
    Khanmots:
    Ozymandias:
    The REAL WTF is all the commenters that are so Luddite as to be afraid of a little electricity. I have been shocked by 110 electricity multiple times.

    As long as it is a "one-hand" shock you are fine -- its not crossing your heart or anything.

    I had the joy of grabbing hold of copper tubing to stead myself (it was being used as a compressed air line) when I leaned over to turn on a miswired air compressor (one of it's 120V leads had been swapped with the ground...) with my other hand.

    I've had a healthy respect for electricity ever since... "one-hand" shock or not :P

    I'll one-up you. In Machines lab in college we were working with 220V 3-phase. It came time to switch taps on a current transformer, so one of my lab team closed the shunt switch, diverting the power away from the transformer. But he closed the wrong switch, so my transformer was still powered. I unscrewed the bolt on one of the cables and began to pull it out of the connector while simultaneously starting to unscrew the other bolt, thus hitting myself across the chest with 220V. I thought the lab instructor, who had been standing behing me, was shaking me by the shoulders. It's a miracle I'm alive today.

  • S (unregistered) in reply to Shawn G.
    Shawn G.:
    That's a nasty thing to know, but it explains a few things. I've worked on various electric devices since I could hold a screwdriver. I've even got scars from some of the nastier early toddler lessons in electricity. The incident with the power relay was just enough to get a good curse. The number of times I've been shocked is large, mostly in my youth, now I'm a bit more practiced. But correctly enough, I do have minor fibrillation problems.

    Actually, I'm a lot more careful than most about switches ever since that time when I was a little kid and I tried to plug in a night light. Suffice it to say, you shouldn't hold the metal prongs while doing that.

  • (cs) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    spacix:
    It takes less than 25mA arm to arm to kill you. Human skin requires >7 Vrms to break the skin...

    All joking in line and up front, I suggest you go grab a 50Vac with 1A current hand to hand and test this theory :D

    The real wtf could have been him sticking his hand into a live enclosure without shutting it's power off and adding a tag to cord ;)

    That "its the amps that kill" thing is so misleading. Voltage provides the force that makes current fatal.

    To use the analogy of a gun. Voltage = the gases expanding and pushing the slug. Current = the momentum of the slug. Unless there is a great voltage, the current will not exist. I cannot throw a .222 slug hard enough to hurt someone seriously. I fire that same slug out of a gun and I can tear off limbs.

    So yes, the current does do the killing, just like the momentum of the slug, but you have to have the force(voltage) present first.

    Right. I learned about this while working with a mainframe computer while in college. One day I went exploring, and found in the back of the CPU cabinet these large copper 5V buss bars leading from the power supply to the circuit boards. They were covered with yellow warning stickers. Totally safe to touch with the bare hand (due to the surface resistance of your skin), unless you slipped and cut your finger on the sharp edge, putting that 5V directly in contact with your low-resistance innards. In that case the high current capacity of the power supply could certainly kill you.

  • (cs) in reply to Saemundr
    Saemundr:
    i recommend carrying a capacitor, decent sized one. place it so it can get some charge, then take it to an unsuspecting victim to see if that unit was live :)
    If you are working with AC you need to solder a diode to one leg of that capacitor.
  • Matts (unregistered)

    I worked in a union plant, a GM factory, 20+ years ago. We had no problem at all with the union regarding the computers. This story is not only false, it is old and false.

  • Founder (unregistered) in reply to Nazca

    When I was in Primary School ( I was about 9 years old ) I was waiting with a friend at the bike racks when I saw the bike next to his had a combination lock. Being a problem solver, I tried to guess the combination by brute force ( 1-1-1-1, 1-1-1-2....) while I was waiting. The kid who owned the bike told a teacher I was trying to steal his bike. The teacher told me not to hang around the bike rack if I didn't own a bike, and I thought that was the end of it. Years later in High School, I found that it was put on my permanent record as "Caught stealing a bike".

  • Matt (unregistered)

    There's an old wisdom that says that the best way to get rid of stupid rules is to enforce them strictly. This story sort of proves it works.

  • (cs) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    It doesn't feel like nitpicking when your rifle blows up literally in your face because you used 5.5s in a .223 chamber.
    You live in a country where bullet calibers are important to civilians? You have my condolences.
  • Gordon JC Pearce (unregistered) in reply to spacix

    All joking in line and up front, I suggest you go grab a 50Vac with 1A current hand to hand and test this theory :D

    You won't even feel it. There's a reason why isolation transformers step 240V mains down to 110V centre-tapped.

    Just because a supply is capable of providing more than 25mA, it doesn't mean it can deliver a lethal electric shock. A car battery can provide two or three hundred amps, but you can't get a fatal shock off it because 12V isn't enough to pass more than a few mA through the human body - Ohm's Law to the rescue!

  • (cs)

    Why, only yesterday whilst in a client's comms room did I make the following observation:

    "By the way, did you know your aircon unit is dripping water into that bank of electrical sockets?"

  • Dingbat (unregistered) in reply to spacix

    AC is for wusses. Try working in an old (Strowger era) phone exhange. 50v DC on bare copper bus bars a foot wide and an inch thick. You touch that stuff and you hang on, you don't jump or let go.

  • EE time (unregistered) in reply to High school physics time.
    High school physics time.:
    There's no such thing as a supply 'with 1A current': current flow varies, depending on the load. Unless you've constructed some kind of mad current-regulated power supply, or something.

    "Mad current-regulated power supply" indeed... Most lab power supplies can be operated as either (current-limited) voltage or (voltage-limited) current sources. Want to see a simple current source? Grab hold of a solar cell. :P

  • (cs) in reply to xtremezone
    xtremezone:
    akatherder:
    I got in trouble for sticking my mom's car keys into an electrical outlet when I was 3 or 4.
    Heh, I did the same thing, except it was only one loose key and I was pretending it was the ignition of a car. ;) I think I did it for quite some time before getting shocked. As I remember it, when I did get shocked I was thrown backward into a chair behind me. I was also 3 or 4.
    A properly designed socket (such as the type used in the UK and Hong Kong, where the earth pin of the plug pushes a cover out from in front of the contacts. This prevents anyone from accidentally touching the contacts.
  • (cs)
    Instead, he grabbed the relay contact, jumped back from the system yelling a word or two that would make a sailor blush

    So the system yelled profanity at him? Isn't that also grounds for a harassment suite?

    Man, that company has problems!

     -dZ.
  • Poirot (unregistered)

    Ah, you're all a bunch of pussies. The real WTF is that Shawn jumped around screaming "safety officer" like a little girl. Take it like a man. I've had loads of shocks from the 240V mains here in the uk, and it's never done me any CABBAGE! SHNELL! SHNELL! Winklehoffen!

  • ? (unregistered) in reply to Siloria

    The origins of pair programming are now apparant.

  • (cs) in reply to Physics Phil
    Physics Phil:
    A properly designed socket (such as the type used in the UK and Hong Kong, where the earth pin of the plug pushes a cover out from in front of the contacts. This prevents anyone from accidentally touching the contacts.
    All well and good until somebody abuses the system. Somebody my dad knew once made up an extension cord with a plug on both ends. My dad, seeing one end of what looked like a normal power cable, picked it up by the plug. Unfortunately, the other end was plugged in to the mains supply. It stinged a little apparently.
  • ClaudeSuck.de (unregistered) in reply to Nawak
    Nawak:
    spacix:
    Pressing keys on a keyboard or mouse = operating electrical switches that have power applied to them. Though a small about of power it is still power therefor a "power switch" he should have hand filled some forms requesting the union type out the form and submit it :D
    Joking apart, you don't need special authorization/accreditation/formation when you work with very low voltage (<50V AC)

    This means that you REALLY NEED authorisation in order to flip a light switch???

  • (cs)

    You know, whatever crap I may be dealing with when I come to the office in the morning, The Daily WTF feed always puts me in a better mood.

    Especially in this article, shows me what I COULD be dealing with elsewhere.

    Thanks for the site guys.

    Eric Pearson

  • Ryde (unregistered) in reply to chrismcb
    chrismcb:
    Was his problem with the "real trashy" part or the "gay" part?

    I'm guessing the "porn" part was the problem. A lot of people feel that porn is an unacceptable use of school funds. I don't see where he implied that the reaction would be different for real trashy hetero porn, unless you think that posting copies of the cover around campus would have ended up with different results.

  • ClaudeSuck.de (unregistered) in reply to Nawak
    Nawak:
    spacix:
    Pressing keys on a keyboard or mouse = operating electrical switches that have power applied to them. Though a small about of power it is still power therefor a "power switch" he should have hand filled some forms requesting the union type out the form and submit it :D
    Joking apart, you don't need special authorization/accreditation/formation when you work with very low voltage (<50V AC)

    This means that you REALLY NEED authorisation in order to flip a light switch???

  • (cs) in reply to Matts
    Matts:
    I worked in a union plant, a GM factory, 20+ years ago. We had no problem at all with the union regarding the computers. This story is not only false, it is old and false.

    Your logic is faulty. Because your experience 20+ years ago with one particular facility and one particular union (UAW) doesn't match the described scenario, you're assuming that all unions and all facilities don't match either.

    You know what they say about "assuming", don't you?

    I've worked in union places where what was described in the OP would have been very possible. I also work in a union facility right now where it wouldn't be. Don't be so quick to use your very limited experience to pass judgment on the whole world.

  • Brian (unregistered) in reply to Poirot

    The REAL WTF, is that your reading comprehension skills are horrible, One of Shawn's colleagues called for the safety officer.

  • Electrical Engineer (unregistered) in reply to spacix
    spacix:
    It takes less than 25mA arm to arm to kill you. Human skin requires >7 Vrms to break the skin...

    All joking in line and up front, I suggest you go grab a 50Vac with 1A current hand to hand and test this theory :D

    Before you pretend being that smart, learn a little bit about the subject you're intend to talk about. For example, begin with Ohm's law and figure out WHAT would one have to be to meet your 50Vac 1A requirement.

  • Poirot (unregistered) in reply to Brian
    Brian:
    The REAL WTF, is that your reading comprehension skills are horrible, One of Shawn's colleagues called for the safety officer.

    Yeah, I'm sure you're right. I'm sure it was "his colleague".....

    :-)

  • Rich (unregistered) in reply to Ryde
    Ryde:
    chrismcb:
    Was his problem with the "real trashy" part or the "gay" part?

    I'm guessing the "porn" part was the problem. A lot of people feel that porn is an unacceptable use of school funds. I don't see where he implied that the reaction would be different for real trashy hetero porn, unless you think that posting copies of the cover around campus would have ended up with different results.

    Actually, a quick Google reveals he's a "conservative Christian" activist, and has a problem with both sex and sexuality. And fun in general, by the sounds of things.

    Also, I suspect that this "trashy gay porn" wasn't really porn, just mild raunchiness. The equivalent of (UK) mainstream lads-mags like Loaded and FHM. Of course, I don't know this for sure, but I've seen the "porn" label thrown around plenty of times for anything gay that involves, e.g.: kissing. Shocking stuff, indeed.

Leave a comment on “Dead Man's Switch”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article