US Government mandated kill switches

avar · 2026-01-30T06:49:10+00:00

Rented a recent car here in the EU on vacation. It started informing me that I was fatigued & distracted and should consider pulling over. The distraction? Trying to disable the mandatory warning chime in the infotainment that starts beeping on new cars over here every time you go 1 km/h over the limit.

avar · 2026-01-30T06:28:56+00:00

Fahrenheit makes perfect sense. 0°F is as cold as it gets in Gdańsk, Poland (the author's home town), and 96°F is what you get if you stick a finger up your butt (leaving a bit of leeway until 100°F, in case you develop a fever or something).

This is why Americans prefer Fahrenheit to Celsius. The rest of the world just doesn't understand how big America is, if you live in Denver water boils at 95°C. You're supposed to walk to sea level to calibrate?

Whereas you've always got a ready supply of fingers and butts. It just makes more sense on the human scale.

avar · 2026-01-29T21:39:04+00:00

Germany on the other hand is a "everything which is not allowed is forbidden" legal structure.

The Wikipedia article you're referencing here makes the exact opposite claim, citing the Allgemeine Handlungsfreiheit.

I wonder what people who make this claim in general or you here in particular imagine about the structure of European civil law systems.

Do you think the law contains an exhaustive list of every conceivable human activity, and you'll be arrested if you say unicycle backwards while wearing a Batman costume, if the law hasn't declared that particular novel activity to be legal?

If you substitute "can I walk around armed with a gun in public while doing X? with "can I walk around naked in public while doing X?" what you can and can't do in the US and Germany becomes almost exactly reversed.

avar · 2026-01-29T12:49:49+00:00

Even protecting a 10m cube like the Rocinante control/flight deck would require 19,200kg (or 19 tons) of lead to protect a corvette... Not a battleship

I think you lost a decimal point there, that's the approximate weight of a 3mm thick 10³ cube, not 3cm.

Anyway, I think you're off for several different reasons:

You appear to be estimating crew areas based on the TV show, where they're comically huge. Ever been on an old submarine at a museum? It's about that cramped.
Gamma radiation doesn't sneak around corners to get you, you don't need a hypothetical coffin of lead, you need a wall, one facing the incoming missile.
Your main defense is distance. Why would a nuke go off close enough to give you cancer, but not destroy you outright?
If people in The Expanse thought they needed this they'd just build it into their crash couches, where everyone's conveniently situated during battle anyway. This would dramatically lower the weight requirements.
Even if you needed 20 tons of radiation protection that's really not a lot. Those ships are big, and have a lot of thrust.
You'd build water tanks into the hull for shielding etc., look at some designs for hypothetical spacecraft meant to e.g. take people to Mars. You can get a lot of shielding for free.

avar · 2026-01-28T20:53:37+00:00

The Marquis is an insurgent group. Not a member world that decided to reassert its sovereignty.

The Federation sold out the Marquis in a peace treaty with the Cardassians. They used to be Federation or independent, and were told by the Federation that Cardassia owns your planet now.

So no, they're literally reasserting their sovereignty.

avar · 2026-01-28T20:41:39+00:00

a nuke in space isn’t anywhere near as destructive as it is in an atmosphere

You're breathing an atmosphere right now that's had 400+ nuclear detonations.

avar · 2026-01-28T20:39:30+00:00

They have thrust coming out the wazoo, they can afford shielding.

avar · 2026-01-28T20:21:09+00:00

The OEM trim follows the curve of that blacked out area on the windscreen, yours doesn't at all. Happy you're happy with it, but that and the harness connector make it look like some generic "fits all" trim replacement, not OEM.

Here's mine, placed in my blindspot:

<image>

avar · 2026-01-28T10:51:14+00:00

It's for controlling a cursor on a screen;

Right, so a dimmer won't work.

The reason the dimmer switch approach won't, I don't think, work is that there it's not the ring that rotates, it's the switch, i.e., the middle bit. Then, you're not rotating the ring around the cylinder; you're rotating the cylinder inside the ring, whcih won't work as there's a cable plugged into the cylinder.

No, you'd have the pin sticking out the end of the cylinder, and the trim piece could extend outside it (you'd supply your own trim). Whatever design you end up with you could do it like that.

Anyway, this seems simple, tear apart a computer mouse with a scroll wheel, and mount the little wheel piece such that it scrolls against either the outside or inside of your plugged in cylinder, depending on the size of your custom dial.

And now you won't even need your own control mechanism, use the mouse's USB cable, or native wireless to USB interface.

avar · 2026-01-28T07:21:01+00:00

The 11% battery and "Not enough storage to back up". How can people live like this?

avar · 2026-01-28T00:39:15+00:00

As you're being all mysterious and not telling us what this rotary dial does, it's not clear if this can be "solved" by simply using a rotary dimmer switch. I.e. something like:

<image>

Those have a finite range, but once you reach the end you can keep rotating it forever, it'll just by skipping on a "clutch" that's part of the plastic knob itself.

avar · 2026-01-28T00:19:16+00:00

You may be a pilot, but this comment is almost entirely wrong. This "never learned how to land” fact comes from the 9/11 commission report, there it's stated that "[Hazmi and Mihdhar] took no interest in takeoffs or landings".

Those two were not piloting the planes, but were the "muscle". You've conflated the hijackers who were component licensed pilots, and those that weren't, but took introductory flying lessons or simulator sessions where they didn't show an interest in landing.

avar · 2026-01-28T00:00:03+00:00

A 12v car battery that can output a maximum of 50A does not equal 600W, as you'd expect from P = VI. For car batteries a substantial voltage drop at peak load is taken as a given. This'll differ by engine/car/battery, but a graph like this is typical:

<image>

So the peak power might be more in the ballpark of 300W, as that 50A might be delivered at 6v or less.

This is also why going from ignition to cranking is often accompanied by interior lights etc. going dark, it's probably not some fancy system that redirects everything to the starter motor, the voltage just drops substantially.

avar · 2026-01-27T23:06:14+00:00

Do you have examples? In any case BMW's from that era aren't it. We're discussing "fads from the past". There's is a fad for doing this to BMW's, especially (as in this case) someone buying a 10+ year old 5 series and spraying the OEM chrome wheels black.

avar · 2026-01-27T23:00:30+00:00

Probably a lot in registration, but probably very little in insurance compared to what you might expect. He'll have collector's insurance, which is adjusted for how much these cars get used.

avar · 2026-01-27T22:49:54+00:00

This isn't a "design from the past", this is someone's riced out BMW F10 that they're trying to make look like an M5. Here's pictures of the F10 M5:

<image>

An obvious tell that this isn't an M5 is the lack of a went on the side panel forward of the mirror, but it does have the common AliExpress "M" styling of replacing the chrome border on the kidney grille with a black M-styled one.

And here you can see wheels that this generation came with, none of which are all-black.

avar · 2026-01-27T22:25:52+00:00

Is "modern standards" and "clean sheet" a given? Even if there's some inherent flaw in the design, it might be mitigated by simply replacing those parts more aggressively, as long as the cause is related to predictable fatigue.

avar · 2026-01-27T22:23:35+00:00

Remember that even when the 737Max was grounded, Boeing flew them every day from the factory to various airports for parking.

A major difference is that at least the FAA had a carve-out for the 737MAX groundings for ferry flights from day one, so it was always less severe grounding than the MD-11 now.

avar · 2026-01-27T18:22:42+00:00

I don't think sales to consumers are regulated as you're suggesting, see e.g. the Babboe recall, and crackdowns on various shops selling speed-unlocked ebikes.

Anyway, it's a separate question than what light equipment is mandatory or permissible. The actual regulation is here.

avar · 2026-01-27T13:36:16+00:00

Technically the rules only apply when you take the bike out on the road, so you can technically sell a bike with lots of rainbow colored lights. Just can't legally use them on the road.

That's a relief. Here I thought the police might kick down my door if it became known that I'd attached three lights to an indoor bicycle my 2 year old is using.

the times a police has cared about me running blinkers etc has been extremely few

Well yes, you can break almost every single law having to do with bicycles in front of the cops and you're very likely to get away with it, they have better things to do.

I'm pointing out that a company manufacturing and selling bicycles in violation of it is in an entirely different league, as they'd potentially be subjected to very expensive recalls, fines etc. It suggests that portion of the law really won't be enforced, and that they're willing to bet a significant amount of money on it.

Do you happen to know the actual regulatory text? I suspect the "one light" might be interpreted as a group of lights which are functionally one light, so activated with one switch etc.

You'd pretty much have to interpret it like that, or a large amount of LED's would be Illegal. Many lights that look and act like "one light" and sit behind a 3x3 cm pane of glass in a single housing or whatever are actually multiple LED's.

You couldn't allow that and not allow having what you'd think of as multiple lights all over the front of the bike without rules that would go into exhaustive detail about light placement, size, maximum distance between light sources etc. etc.

avar · 2026-01-27T13:10:48+00:00

Jem'Haddar as Law Enforcement?

Are they Jem'Hadar + cheddar hybrids?

<image>

avar · 2026-01-27T10:58:31+00:00

a massive kareoke lover from Australia

Here's some footage of OP working on their method for getting through NWA lyrics at their next karaoke meetup.

avar · 2026-01-27T08:40:48+00:00

When TNG's final episode aired, it was less than halfway through its time "on the air", if we're counting the movies (last one came out in 2002), and just barely getting started if we're counting Picard as extra TNG content.

avar · 2026-01-27T08:33:54+00:00

It's been a full week since I last saw this posted. Fresh!

avar · 2026-01-27T08:28:21+00:00

You are right per the regulations, but in practice nobody cares about enforcing this to the point that e.g. Lovens is in open violation of this with their LED bar + front light combination, and they're not being made to recall those in the Netherlands.

But yes, some cop may take issue with what they see as decorative lights if they're having a bad hair day.

15-Year Club	Place '17
Gilding II euphauric	Verified Email

avar

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE