Most phones seem to give you the option to skip the next alarm. That may be better than disabling it?

Brick does really badly in earthquakes, at least without major reinforcing. ‘Unreinforced masonry’ can be fatal pretty easily.

Brick veneer over timber framing can be a thing.

In a lot of the world, a school bus is a normal city bus that gets “school” signs put on the front and back, and runs a specific route. There’s not much point in maintaining a dedicated fleet.

Even “App App” would be better.

Here in NZ I believe they mostly can set their own routes, being ‘independent’ contractors.

I have heard Amazon in particular is super tight in the US.

And probably drives on the most efficient route for their run.

You’re about halfway along the run? They’ll always pass you about halfway through the day.

Redundancy doesn’t necessarily come with a golden handshake, though many employment contracts do mandate it.

But they do have to try to find you another job elsewhere in the organisation if that’s possible, and they have to disestablish the position not necessarily you. That means that if they want to make one person from a team redundant, they generally have to actually ask if anyone wants to leave, and if not, run a transparent process to decide who from the team to make redundant, not just pick someone.

You also have to not be planning to re-hire for the role any time soon as that would imply the redundancy wasn’t genuine.

If you’re in a country with good worker protection, there’s a big difference between ‘made redundant’ and ‘fired for cause’. There is no ‘fired for no reason’.

Running through a tent site is not the world’s smartest plan. You’ll trip on a guy wire.

Where on earth do they get the ‘AYD’ from?

Seems like spifk, sporf, or knorkoon might be more sensible.

Never ask questions you don’t want answers to. Rule 34.

“I want this to finish at 6PM” can be easier maths than 11h 15m from now.

1. Most of these are in a metal box, which blocks signal. Adding careful routing to get an antenna in an unshrouded position where it’s still physically protected is a pain. Also, in the middle of an apartment building can give you pretty terrible reception in the first place.

2. GPS doesn’t provide time zones or daylight savings info. The appliance would know where you are and what UTC time it is, but not which time zone you’re in. The manufacturer could pre-program shape files in (yay, more memory) but they become obsolete the next time a politician decides to move time zones or change daylight savings. If this happens to you, your device will keep repeatedly changing to be an hour fast/slow no matter how often you reset it.

   You could have the GPS satellites continually broadcast shape files for the time zone but this would be a big change, use up a lot of the limited bandwidth, and it would take your clock half an hour to set itself.

3. it’s like an extra $5-10 in parts and unlike a WiFi module, the manufacturer can’t make any big data or ad revenue from it.

Exactly. The military isn’t obligated to look at every single picture and tell you that it’s not a drone. But if they don’t do that, they can’t say “we have looked at every single picture and confirmed there are no suspicious drones”.

The military is rightly refusing to prove a negative.

I mean, its trivial to prove something isn’t Bigfoot on the grounds that Bigfoot Isn’t Real. That’s just Hitchens’s Razor. The burden of proof is on the person presenting the claim, not the one refuting it.

Shifting the burden of proof doesn’t disprove the claim. You can look at a picture and call someone an idiot for believing it’s bigfoot/a drone, but still not be able to swear that there is no way it could possibly be a drone.

They may be making a PR decision to issue warnings rather than actually arrest people.

I don’t see anything in the article that suggests they know drones have gone above their bases but not been identified or dealt with.

I think the reference to not being able to identify everything is in reference to civilian reports.

It’s like trying to disprove Bigfoot. Someone comes to you with a shaky, out of focus video with no audio, time, date, or precise location.

I can’t prove it’s not bigfoot. That doesn’t mean I think it is Bigfoot, or that you should think so.

If you have good video and know where it was shot from and can cross-reference that with aircraft trackers? Then maybe they can do a good investigation. There’s been a few of those where it turns out to pretty obviously be a helicopter, a V-22, or just a 737.

Especially since it’s rather hard to judge scale on airborne things some distance away.

Sorry, could have been clearer. I was talking about random dumb civilians.

Quadcopters have been buzzing military bases for years, basically since they became available to the public.

With all this PR about drones and people sometimes blaming the military, the number of dumb civilians thinking about ‘spying’ on military bases will be on the rise.

“We have had confirmed sightings at Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle,” the spokesperson said. “This is not a new issue for us. We’ve had to deal with drone incursions over our bases for quite a time now. It’s something that we routinely respond to in each and every case when reporting is cited.”

It’s not explicitly stated, but my read is they get normal consumer-style quadcopters regularly, and this is simply a continuation of that. Perhaps an increase because people are now trying to explicitly spy on the military.

The public drone sightings, on the other hand, definitely don’t seem to be consumer quadcopters. They mostly look suspiciously like 737s, V-22s, or out of focus stars.

That sounds entirely like a store configuration thing.