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Had a mobile mechanic unable to change the timing belt on our 10 y/o Volkswagen Golf because the balancer is now secured with a proprietary lock-ring instead of four hex bolts.

He said this sort of thing is getting more common and even if he did want to buy all of the required bits and bobs he wouldn't be able to fit them all in his van.

Even in the 'good old days', you weren't getting very far working on your car without things like gear pullers, timing guns and feeler gauges. All things that technically you could be using for other things, but not exactly in the average toolbox of someone that doesn't work on cars.


But if anything is going to push it over the edge of going off (for whatever reason it has finally decided it's time), it's going to be a plane driving over the top / near it.


The reason it detonated now is probably corrosion eating away for decades. Which also has made it incredibly dangerous to defuse WW2 bombs, because their behavior is so unpredictable.

If you look at the photo in the article, the bomb seems to be at the very edge of the taxiway, where a plane is unlikely to drive directly over it. If it would have been a little bit closer to the center, it might have happened just as you described...


I would like to mention that the wings of most jetliners almost reach or extend over the edge of most taxiways.

I would also like to mention that the wings carry most of the jet fuel.

Yeah. I'm glad RNGesus decided to be on humanity's side this time.


I wasn't referring to the damage the explosion might have done to the plane, I was thinking about the explosion being more likely to be triggered if the landing gears of taxiing planes pass directly overhead rather than at a certain distance. Then again, since the ground under the taxiway is already compacted, any mechanical effect that reaches a buried bomb is probably vibration rather than direct pressure, and that also has an effect at some distance (but it's probably still stronger directly underneath)


Just watched a blurb from NHK's hourly news programme and they mentioned a plane carrying 96 passengers and crew had taxied down that taxiway just minutes prior to the bomb going off.

I reiterate this was sheer dumb miraculous luck that nothing and nobody was harmed or killed.


I'm sure we'd be surprised by just how many times a day we survived only due to dumb miraculous luck.


I didn't realise we had 18 mile depths.


To be clear, that's not referencing ocean depth to the sea floor. It means the epicenter is located 18 miles down inside the Earth's crust.


Lol any serious business. Shoutout to all the people at mega-corps using Teams!


Teams and Symphony are my industry’s weapons of choice. But I guess we’re just playing around.


Yeah, I love the fact that Jetbrains 'everything' is actually affordable by a solo software engineer and you can just 'bring your own tools' to a job.


Sigh, remembers when Visual Age for Java was $10k a seat in 2000 $$$.


Companies are made of people and people have lives.


Yeah not everyone from Netherlands will find Dubai or Israel enticing. No offense to those living in those places.


Genuine page turner.


A fair chunk of modern corporate data ends up in OLAP systems that are now more often or not stored using s3 (or their MS/Google equivalents) in 'Data Lakes'. The concept of 'private data' whilst using cloud providers is an interesting one, but there has been enough work done by all parties involved to ensure that all but the most sensitive data is now created, stored and analysed using the systems provided by "Big Cloud".


Once you reach a certain scale in a particular type of company the repo just becomes another type of org unit. Your giant fish swallows a minnow, it looks good on paper, someone does a half arse integration, then that repo becomes the one. The one that your manager says, under no circumstances no-one commits to, because then it's OUR repo (with whatever baggage that brings)... The org depends on the code, but the org actively resists it like a virus. This kills any attempt at the mono repo at any largish non FAANG org.


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