Ouch- eletrocution

[geoff]

And how do you think that those who are so poor that they have to travel on train roofs are ever going to see such footage?

Dalits don't all have laptops and internet connections

[tony sayer]

And in India more likely barefoot;(...

[tony sayer]

My daughters have already seen it on facebook links and both seem not bothered. Ones a rail user and commented if you will mess with power lines then thats what you'd expect to happen..

Course she knows that "incident" normally means some poor sod under a train somewhere in the Railtrack book of jargon;(...

[tony sayer]

In article , Colin Wilson scribeth thus

Spot on;!...

[tony sayer]

In article , Mike Tomlinson scribeth thus

You just don't understand the nature of a depressive illness Mike, very few people have any idea at all what its like to feel so bad that doing away with yourself is the only cure to your misery.

You just don't think rationally at all, otherwise you wouldn't be doing it attempting it;!..

[tony sayer]

Some time ago there was a man round here who had terrible leg pain so much so he put it on the line to have it cut off as the doctors couldn't do anything about it such was his misery and desperation of long term pain day in day out...

[Bob Mannix]

I don't think anyone was arguing that they couldn't see any solution than their own demise, or that they weren't deserving of sympathy. To ruin (to some extent) the life of a train driver by jumping out in front of him is selfish, however and there are other solutions that don't involve this level of hurt to others (although there will always be some hurt to others). A recent suicide locally did not involve others in the act itself and was just as certain and straightforward to accomplish.

[David Hansen]

On Mon, 8 Jun 2009 09:26:37 +0100 someone who may be "Bob Mannix" wrote this:-

That assumes a level of clarity which these poor people don't have, a deliberate decision that they don't care what effect they have on others.

[Dave Liquorice]

I was really thinking of use in this country. Mind you we could do with eliminating the daft twonks that play on the railways from our gene pool...

True but there are education programmes that tour around giving information of a given subject. Not that such a programme on the dangers of power lines (rail and distribution) would have much effect. If the only way you can afford to travel is on the roof that is where you will travel. Or the only way to get bit of power is to connect to the lines then that is what you do.

[Dave Liquorice]

Aye the caste system is largely alive and well outside of the new "affluent middle classes" (as in a western consumer definition) but even they don't object to the lowest clearing blocked sewers with their bare hands and nothing but a bit of cloth to protect their modesty.

As you say life is cheap. Some in here need to take the western blinkers off and realise that the western life style is perched precariously on a knife edge. It wouldn't take much to knock it off and the western countries to starve. They'd starve in India as well but a much larger proportion of the population would survive as they are already growing most of their own food.

[pjlusenet]

Ye gods!! To my surprise it did look like the others were trying to get him to come down rather than join him. Obviously they're not thick.

Unlike

they were trying to tap the overhead distribution cables. Picture quality is poor but I found it more shocking (excuse pun!)

[Bob Mannix]

On the contrary, most suicides, other than ones who are under the influence, or raving, are very precise and deliberate in their decision. Many plan the act and lead a normal day up until then. They have not gone mad but reached what they view as an inevitable (and logical) conclusion that death is preferable to anything life has to offer. They may drop their kids at school and be acting "normally". I believe those who have thought about others in life will do so in death and those who have been very self centred and selfish in life will also be in death. Cheery subject but there you go ...

[dennis]

Don't count on it.. in that event it is a case of who has the best army that will survive.

[PeterC]

If I wanted those sort of videos, I'd use portable Opera on a USB stick. It puts a folder on to C:\Documents and Settiings\Temporary ... but wipes it on exit, then use Eraser to overwrite the empty space. Opera'a cached files don't have 'real' names or any extension anyway. Then there's OperaTor Portable for the really paranoid/guilty.

[Dave Liquorice]

And where is the support and logistics for an army at war going to come from? OK the military are not 100% reliant on the civilian supply chain but they are to some extent.

[Jules]

I suspect it's entirely possible that he just didn't realise that those wires were how the train got its power.

[Jules]

Yep - what I normally do is kick the video off downloading and then do 'ls -l /tmp/Fl*' a couple of times so I can see which file is actually being written to. Either wait until the filesize stops increasing, or the progress bar has finished in the video player within the browser, then copy / convert.

Youtube seem to be using a new flv format lately which trips up some of the players (but still works with the embedded Adobe players) - I've found that ffplay will handle them fine, but mplayer won't. I suspect mplayer will catch up eventually.

[Andrew Gabriel]

The circuit is earth return (track), so you can't measure earth leakage, as it's not insulated from earth.

I used to have an 11kV insulator I found on a walk in the countryside. It had a very thin metal flash line over the outside of it, and was presumably disposed of into the nearest hedge by whoever replaced it.

A friend (who isn't Internet-savvy) had a teenage child who was about to start riding a moped, and he wasn't happy about it. Several of us talked about it at work. I went browsing on the Internet and found several photos of motorcycle fatalities, the idea being that his dad would only let him on the moped after he'd gone through some of these with him, basically to show a teenager who (like any teenager) thinks they're indestructable, just how fragile life really is. That was 4 or

5 years ago, and about 2 years afterwards, the teenager lost a friend in a car crash (which he wasn't involved in). He remarked to his dad that the session with the motorcycle fatality photos had quite an impact on him, and he thought about it each time he saw a friend doing something stupid on a bike. (The site was ogrish.com, but it's now gone and the name points somewhere else.)

I can't help thinking that the wrapping people in cotton wool that we do in this country (i.e. protecting them from images of such realities) may well result in more such incidents due to widespread ignorance.

[David Hansen]

On 08 Jun 2009 16:14:23 GMT someone who may be [e-mail] (Andrew Gabriel) wrote this:-

I think the same way too.

However, the showing of a film in school which showed the true effect of motor vehicle crashes on humans did not stop one pupil in my year riding a motorcycle into a horse at high speed. It was fatal for him (and I imagine the horse). That does not mean the film was ineffective by the way, only that it was not 100% effective.

[Andrew Gabriel]

The body just acts to start the arc flash-over outside the body. The arc is much lower impedance than the body so most of the current flows in the arc, not through the body. The arc is very high energy -- usually into the 10's of MW, and being at point blank range, that will probably be fatal even without any electrocution current.

This is same effect as the pop and bright flash you sometimes get when a filament lamp dies. The filament breaks and initially creates a spark between the ends. The arc is much lower impedance than the filament, so the two ends of the arc rapidly run in the opposite direction down the filament until it's completely shorted out, which is what causes the bright flash and blows a fuse (in the lamp base or consumer unit).