I find it hard to WANT to get into SyFy series any more for that very reason, and it's galling because they really do write some good series and it's hard NOT to. But it's only going to end in frustration because you know any project really worth watching with a good engaging story is going to get axed just as it hits a good stride. Engaging an audience in a sci-fi series can take quite some time, and it's tough to commit to a couple of years of it.
Babylon 5 was eventually "salvaged" by (IIRC) TNT, but the last minute renewal meant that all of Season 5 was crammed into two mind-blowing episodes at the end of Season 4, and Season 5 was a lame-duck exercise in tying up loose ends. It's a testament to how talented JMS really is that Season 5 is even vaguely interesting.
Farscape had a small but dedicated fan base that probably would have put up with a lot of recycled effects if it meant continuing the storyline, meaning it probably could have remained profitable, but it was killed off at a cliffhanger and the "finale" movie was cheaply done, lame, and disappointing. Take the last sentence and grep/Farscape/Firefly.
BSG, for all that everyone hated the ending, at least followed a compelling story arc and that story arc was allowed to continue to a conclusion. That conclusion may have been dissatisfying to some, but at least the writers got to write an ending.
Caprica was a prequel series, much like Sarah Connor Chronicles or Enterprise, and it had the same flaws. You have to start at a point where your audience knows what the eventual outcome of the story will be. You can't write a surprise ending like you could with BSG or most other series - the end of your series has to lead logically or semi-logically to the story you are dovetailing into. Instead, you have to write a really good story arc and bring your audience along for an excellent ride.
The biggest problem with Caprica and Sarah Connor is that the audience KNOWS it's going to be a tragedy, and you can't keep up tragedy in every episode as well, and you're trying to tell a story that is full of tragedy. There's very little room for victory, so you end up with a dark story and a lot of your audience knows it's not going to get better. Introduce comedy or major victories for your protagonists, and you violate your own storyline and alienate what audience you might have. Keep the storyline pure, dark, and tragic, and most people don't want to stomach it for very long.
At least Enterprise was set far enough back that it didn't have a completely fixed ending, and it could have a positive ending since it was set in a brighter, happier Star Trek universe where things always work out OK in the end.
It has to be that way because of simple economics. When I went to school, we had 50 or more kids per class, and the teachers had to teach 5-7 classes a day, including the chores of roll call etc. The taxpayers want accountability and the lowest cost possible, the teachers want to be paid as much as possible, and the parents want various things that either means a lot of parent engagement or total apathy. The best way to get the most out of the system is to just circumvent it and get your kid classified as "special needs" so the school has to pay whatever it takes to give your child the attention they probably actually need, but could be done a lot cheaper in a more engaged model.
My daughter is going to a school based on an entirely different model. They get a teacher in first grade who will stay with them until they graduate from 12th grade. Class sizes are deliberately kept small, and each teacher gets 20 or fewer students as their ideal (current class size in my daughter's class is 18). This teacher is known as their "main lesson" teacher and teaches them things like English, history, basic math, etc. This teacher takes attendance in the morning and releases the kids at the end of the day, and is responsible for day-to-day management of the childrens' education.
There are specialty teachers (other languages, advanced mathematics, music, etc) but they are "subject teachers" who visit classrooms rather than the child coming into a specialized classroom. But the main lesson teacher is still in the room, observing and helping with discipline problems if needed (the "subject teacher" focuses on the lesson, and truly disruptive kids can be removed and it prompts a note to the parent so we can work the issue out with the teacher and our kid). Discipline problems don't generally last long, because the kids are getting plenty of attention as it is, so there's little impetus to misbehave - you LOSE teacher attention and engagement with your peers by doing that.
The beauty of the system is that the main lesson teacher gets to really know their students, and understands when someone is either overwhelmed or bored and can help keep that child engaged in the class. There's a small "support team" who the subject teacher can call in and help the student and their parents work through any issues, recommend additional tutoring if necessary (sometimes provided by volunteers from the upper grades). The students also get to know each other, and the parents are encouraged to socialize and form a community as well. And since we're paying for it, there's a really strong impetus to remain involved to make the expense worthwhile.
You can't do that in an education factory. The taxpayers would never pay for it.
And, yet, tuition at the school is lower than public school costs, primarily because the parents who are paying for it also help out in other ways to keep costs down. Of course, I still have to pay the taxes that support the public school I'm not using, but so do people without kids.
If you go with a password/PIN, someone else may be able to figure it out, and having a secure one requires work on the part of your employee. But at least it can be changed.
If you go with a SecureID chip or something, then you can have a relatively secure short PIN that rotates every 60 seconds day-in and day-out. The passwords are very short and very easy to enter but relatively immune to brute force attack since it's a new number every minute and you can't get through a 6-digit PIN in 60 seconds, especially if you design your system so that a failed entry invokes a 10-second delay before a retry is allowed, and a "x strikes and you're out" policy where the user's credentials are revoked until they can talk to an Admin and get them renewed. There's no sense monitoring the numbers someone keys in, because the information will be useless in less than 60 seconds. Units are unique and hard to copy, so if one is lost the employee can report it and it can be removed from the system and the employee gets a new fob. It's also two-factor, since you usually have to enter an employee number or something first.
If you go with straight biometrics, you really get the worst of all possible worlds. Sure, your employees don't need to remember a password or worry about losing a security fob, but there's absolutely no way to change their biometric information once it's been copied. There's no "three strikes" because they either fool the system or they don't - it's single-factor authentication. You don't know who is trying to access the system until and unless they succeed.
About the best security is a combination of very simple biometrics along with a rotating PIN, or a user-selected password along with a rotating PIN. The password is far cheaper, and for all practical purposes can be made as secure as (or more secure than) biometric data because you can change it as needed. Plus you aren't divulging biometric data to an employer who might turn around and sell it or have it breached, rendering you unemployable anywhere that uses that same biometric data to identify you. If someone outside my company copies my iris image for nefarious purposes inside the company, I might lose my job if the company can't verify who I am. If someone inside or outside the company copies my iris image and sells it to the highest bidder, I'm totally and utterly screwed.
My company uses a three-factor identification system for remote access - our username, an 8-digit number we set ourselves and need to memorize, and a 6-digit SecureID rotating PIN. Get any one factor wrong three times in a row, and you lose remote access until you pass another three-factor identification system (call the Helpdesk from the company-issued cell phone or your desk at work and give them your name and employee number, at which point they can only reset the 8-digit number you've chosen, and a record goes into the system saying you asked for a reset).
Once you log in, the only thing you can do is remote in to your actual work desktop, which requires another (different) userID and another (different) password. So even if you got in to the remote software, you're not going anywhere until you can provide two more factors of authentication.
That worked for me at the lower schools I attended, too. The ones where teachers had 20-30 kids that they had all day. After the first couple of weeks, the teacher knew their students on sight, and an empty desk meant a student was not in attendance.
Then I went to a large high school, and we had subject teachers who had classrooms of 50-75 students each, and only 45 minutes a day with them. Class sizes varied, so you couldn't tell by the number of empty desks. Even at a few seconds per student to do roll call, it ate up almost 10% of our class time, and it was completely impractical for a teacher who was teaching 5-6 classes of 50-75 students a day to know all of their students on sight. The average person could probably memorize about 100 of them, maybe.
My daughter is going to a school where they have one teacher who will follow them through their academic career at the school (first grade to 12th grade). There are "subject teachers", but the teachers travel from classroom to classroom rather than the students traveling around to different rooms.
So attendance is easy - the teacher knew the kids from the second week of school (class size is about 18 for our school), and greets them at the door. There's no opportunity for a student to cut a specific class, since the students are in the same classroom all day. They also don't need to carry their materials from classroom to classroom, since only one person (the teacher) has to move around. No need for lockers, or heavy backpacks that need to be worn all day, or fancy storage for their pens and pencils and notebooks. They have one desk, and they keep all of their stuff there.
It astonishes me that more schools don't use that model. One teacher walks in carrying a folding flipchart and a briefcase with their notes for the class, teaches the class, then heads off to the next classroom. Instead of moving 20 kids, they move one teacher.
Thanks for the heads-up. So far, so good, though using my company-issue Goldtouch for a couple of years was a bit of a setback until I whinged loud enough and I could turn the $200 Goldtouch in for a $30 Microsoft Natural 4000.
Therein lies the problem. This isn't going to be a literal switch sitting on someone's desk that has an "ON" and "OFF" setting. Having a "kill switch" scenario means handing control of the core routers over to a government agency (or giving them administrative access to them, which amounts to the same thing). A "kill switch" implies a "nuclear option" - you either have the Internet in the US or you don't. This is something that would be very visible and make anyone who made that decision deeply accountable for that decision. So a lot of people could actually buy in to this, as long as it's a non-discriminating across-the-board shutdown.
Once that happens, however, it's a much smaller step to justifying more refined control, in the name of limiting the potential impact.
"Well, we could stop short of killing the ENTIRE US-facing Internet if we had the authority to just shut down portions of it, so we need the authority to shut down regions, or domains, or individual computers who are doing naughty things." What looks to the public like a reduction in authority, so everyone applauds it, but it also means that the government now has the authority to do less noticeable changes, like shutting off dissidents and people who disagree.
"Well, we could stop interfering with computers so heavyhandedly if we could just see what they were all doing all the time, so we could identify the ones that are engaging in wrongdoing." Again, something that sounds really logical on the surface, but means that the government can now "warrantless wiretap" anything anyone is doing on the Internet in the name of "only inconveniencing the guilty".
See, now, there's your problem. You're confusing condos with actual real estate. The actual value of a condo is in the building, and those deteriorate. A condo is a very-long-term lease you pay for up front. If you want a relatively cheap place to live, a condo may not be a terribly bad deal. Just compare it to rental and see how things work out for you based on how long you think you'll be living there, what the condo market has done, what you think it might do, etc.
If you want to invest in real estate, invest in real estate. As in something where you own the land underneath it. That way, even if the house itself devalues as it ages, you've still got a pretty much permanent asset.
About an hour after I get back from the fabric store, I'll have about a dozen that are "thought to have been made" for the first movie. I just gotta find someone gullible enough to think that.
After several minutes... [Client yelling into speaker]: NO! That's ONE divorce, hold the alimony, with a side of bankruptcy. [Scratchy speaker voice]: Bzzzz one.. bzz..ors.. bzz..mon.. bzzz...utcy, tha... bzzz drive throug... click.
Then you get to the front of line and find out that the time you've spent in line is, of course, billable.
Their money makers are windows, xbox, office etc.. none of which are mentioned in the article.
Microsoft has an incredibly great balance sheet and is making shitloads of money, and that's good news.
The bad news is that Redmond has developed a nasty habit of releasing incremental improvements and lackluster copies of what the competition is doing.
It's not that what they sell is bad, Windows Seven is actually a very good operating system (and this is said by someone who switched to Ubuntu, but I still see enough Windows Seven to like what I see). The xbox obviously gets great reviews (I'm not a game machine owner, so I can't judge for myself). Windows phones have always had a good reputation as decent phones. Hell, you can have my Microsoft Natural Keyboard when you pry it from my cold, dead, grateful-not-to-have-needed-carpal-tunnel-surgery hands. Microsoft makes some really good stuff.
The problem with Microsoft is that they aren't trying to make brand new stuff any more, and their copies of others' work has become really lackluster. Windows Seven is great, but set Windows 2000 next to Windows Seven and tell me there's 10 years of significant innovation there. Tell me how many revolutions that product has gone through since they dumped the 95/98/ME kernel. No, I'll tell you. Zero. Nada. Zip. It doesn't make Seven BAD, it just makes it BORING.
Where are they in social networking? Where are they on mobile stuff? Search? Bing? Really? Where's my Microsoft Flying Car? Why am I carrying a cell phone at all? Where's my glasses with a heads-up display, eye tracking, and an earpiece built into the wing? What is Microsoft Labs working on? Oh, right, a ribbon interface for Office, a poor clone of Google, and an update to Windows CE. Yawn. Snore.
That's how the market works, if you don't come out with something that makes people go "WOW!" every now and then, you're dying. That doesn't mean bankruptcy is imminent or your shareholders should be concerned about not making a dividend 3 years from now. It just means that you aren't a leader any more, and you need to get off those laurels before they leave a permanent mark on your ass. Because once people start looking to others for new stuff, they'll start drifting away from you on your cash cow products.
Yes, the talk has been all about making two films since the project was declared, and I for one welcome it.
I had several complaints about LoTR (the most significant being "The Two Towers" turning into "The Battle of Helms Deep: A Love Story") and a lot of them were simply the impossibility of fitting so much material into "movie time". If Jackson had had the green light for 4 LoTR films, or 5, or 6, we might have seen Bombadil, we might have seen Sharkey, a lot of background might have been filled in, etc.
Also, you can skip decent sized swaths of LoTR after you say "and then they walked for a month", which can take whole chapters in LoTR where each individual leaf on every tree is exhaustively examined and described.:) The Hobbit is a shorter book than any of the three LoTR volumes, but it's a faster-paced book with lots more action. It's more of a children's book than LoTR, so a lot happens in fairly short amounts of time. There's easily two movies' worth of material there, and I'd rather have Jackson take his time and tell a broader and more comprehensive story than try to cram "There and Back Again" into 90 minutes.
Another vote for the Microsoft Natural. In my case, I use the 4000 model, and love it. The keys give reasonable "clickity" noises and it requires very little force to type even on the periphery keys. It's a very well-built thing, though it is a squishy dome style keyboard. I still prefer a buckling-spring Model M, but for the sake of my wrists and my co-workers' sanity the Natural 4000 is a good compromise.:)
The 4000 goes for about 30 bucks last time I checked, so if it doesn't work out it wasn't a great expense.
No, the difference here is that the current system is based on actual citizenship, not legality of their presence here.
If you come to the United States for the purposes of obtaining citizenship, there is a significant period between the time you declare your intention to be a citizen and the time when you are actually sworn in as a citizen. People who are undergoing this process are here perfectly legally, but they have not yet become citizens, though many have declared their intentions to do so and are currently undergoing the immigration/naturalization process.
Currently, in most states, only eligible citizens can vote. That is, those who were either born here, or have been here long enough to be sworn in as fully-vested citizens. Legal immigrants are in a grey area. They cannot vote, because they were not granted citizenship by right of birth and they have not yet taken the oath of citizenship. They are here perfectly legitimately, working, paying taxes, etc, and many are even working toward earning citizenship, but they are not yet full citizens and therefore cannot yet vote.
This law seeks to change that. I haven't read the legislation on the ballot in Portland (because, while I live in Maine, I don't live in Portland and therefore cannot vote on this one), but I presume it allows anyone who has stated the intent to become a citizen to vote in elections.
I meant to say "with roughly matching cars", of course, as in "with something vaguely related to the scenario we're actually talking about".
An engineer faced with a vehicle twice the size of his own would look at the other vehicle and say "Fuck, that's a big vehicle, no way my car can stop that."
If you're using your Prius to attempt to stop an Escalade, well, you're on your own there. And, yes, you're probably not going to be able to stop it.
Plus, if you discover after the fact that you're not able to provide enough stopping force, you simply let up on the brake, hit the gas, separate, and veer off.
Obviously, when you are planning the maneuver, one of the calculations you have to do is "do I have enough time to abort if it's not working?"
Unless the follower vehicle has 4WD engaged, my 4 wheels can impart a shitload more stopping force than a Bughatti Veyron at 1,000 horsepower can impart in thrust on the two wheels it's pushing with. His wheels will start to spin, lowering his effective acceleration force to near zero.
Plus, if he starts to overwhelm me, I take my foot off the brakes, floor the gas, break contact, and turn. Done. No drama required. Truck continues on his merry way, I get out of his way and slow back down.
A pressed accelerator overpowers breaks, even more so of "the car in front".
Physics fail. I've got four tires on the ground and all four are imparting deceleration to the mass of two vehicles, and the other vehicle has two tires attempting to impart momentum to the same mass. At some point pretty early on, assuming he's got the gas down hard, he's going to start spinning wheels and will have no effective acceleration to match my 4 wheels of deceleration.
The pickup could get the minivan shoved out of the way and then roll it.
Too many movies fail. In order to do that, the truck would have to get 90 degrees from your direction and then still be in contact with your vehicle. As the forward driver, if you feel your back end going out, you power-slide (turn into the slide) with your front tires, take your foot off the brake, and give it some gas, then take a little slide off. You'll break contact with the following vehicle very slowly.
definitely not something I would want to do with my family and friends in the car.
Nor should you. There are two qualifications for doing this.
1. You have to be a good enough person to care. 2. You have to be good enough at physics to understand the forces involved and how to apply them.
I'll assume you meet the first qualification. Your own post has demonstrated (no offense intended) that you don't meet the second. You'd probably introduce more risk to the situation than you'd be reducing.
If you think this was a huge major risk, then you don't understand what's going on enough to be trying it. He did this because he was an engineer and understood the physics involved, in addition to being a caring person.
One would assume that he blew his horn a few times to try and wake the pickup driver up first.
Even if the other driver had mashed the gas, though, the risk is relatively low.
First, there's a good chance your brakes will still be enough to overcome that (it's not an impact any more, you're already in contact. It's one vehicle's engine trying to impart momentum on two vehicles' worth of mass), and one set of brakes trying to fight that momentum. Unless his engine is a crapload more powerful than your brakes, you're good. Even then, unless he's got a 4-wheel-drive and it's engaged, you've got more rubber decelerating than he's got accelerating. His wheels will probably spin, wasting his engine power and allowing your brakes to trump his engine.
Moreover, the point of contact is the two rear bumpers. You turn the wheel slightly and the truck accentuates your turn due to the nonlinear push that's now been imparted, and you floor it and drive off at 45 degrees from your old direction. You and the truck separate and you can slam on the brakes and let him go by.
There's really not much risk involved. If you keep the speed difference low (drive next to truck, match speeds, pull ahead of it, then let up on the gas very gently), the truck bumps pretty gently into you and you very carefully apply brakes (and transmission, if you have a standard shift) to slow both vehicles down to a stop. Best case: You bring truck to a halt and apply your parking brake to keep you and the truck from moving, then go and try to shut the truck's engine down (assuming the truck is an automatic and hasn't stalled itself out already).
If it's apparent that the truck pushing you is too powerful for you to stop (large engine with cruise control on, for example) then there's little you can do to help. In that case, you accelerate, build up a gap of a few feet, lane-change off in the safest direction, then drive alongside the pickup flashing your lights and blasting your horn like an idiot to let others know that something is wrong here! Pay attention! You might even wake the driver up, though obviously it's assumed you've tried this before taking on the damage attempting to slow him down in the first place.
When you get somewhere dangerous (intersection, curve, whatever), you stop and allow the pickup to continue, hoping the warning you tried to give was enough, and dreading the repair bills to your rear bumper. That's pretty much the worst case assuming you're careful - you tried and it wasn't enough.
The only real risk is making a mistake (slowing down too abruptly and accruing enough damage to your vehicle that you get into trouble, or locking the vehicles together so you can't separate if needed), or not allowing enough time to get back out from in front of the truck if/when you discover you can't bring it to a halt. Obviously, if you're not that confident with your car or if you have a VERY tiny car, then your risk is higher.
The Mythbusters were testing a couple of StormChaser vehicles for wind survivability. They tested linear wind from the optimal direction the vehicle was designed for (I would have loved to see the fancier one with the struts turned 90 or even 180 degrees, because that vehicle was very specifically designed to only resist wind from a pretty specific direction).
This building looks like they can use the louvers over the fans to adjust wind direction (possibly even setting up some cyclone forces), and they can take an entire house and turn it to simulate wind from different directions.
Plus, this building can introduce wind-driven rain, floods, and even (after an upgrade next year) hail.
The Mythbusters have a win for efficiency because their test was much simpler.
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I find it hard to WANT to get into SyFy series any more for that very reason, and it's galling because they really do write some good series and it's hard NOT to. But it's only going to end in frustration because you know any project really worth watching with a good engaging story is going to get axed just as it hits a good stride. Engaging an audience in a sci-fi series can take quite some time, and it's tough to commit to a couple of years of it.
Babylon 5 was eventually "salvaged" by (IIRC) TNT, but the last minute renewal meant that all of Season 5 was crammed into two mind-blowing episodes at the end of Season 4, and Season 5 was a lame-duck exercise in tying up loose ends. It's a testament to how talented JMS really is that Season 5 is even vaguely interesting.
Farscape had a small but dedicated fan base that probably would have put up with a lot of recycled effects if it meant continuing the storyline, meaning it probably could have remained profitable, but it was killed off at a cliffhanger and the "finale" movie was cheaply done, lame, and disappointing. Take the last sentence and grep/Farscape/Firefly.
BSG, for all that everyone hated the ending, at least followed a compelling story arc and that story arc was allowed to continue to a conclusion. That conclusion may have been dissatisfying to some, but at least the writers got to write an ending.
Caprica was a prequel series, much like Sarah Connor Chronicles or Enterprise, and it had the same flaws. You have to start at a point where your audience knows what the eventual outcome of the story will be. You can't write a surprise ending like you could with BSG or most other series - the end of your series has to lead logically or semi-logically to the story you are dovetailing into. Instead, you have to write a really good story arc and bring your audience along for an excellent ride.
The biggest problem with Caprica and Sarah Connor is that the audience KNOWS it's going to be a tragedy, and you can't keep up tragedy in every episode as well, and you're trying to tell a story that is full of tragedy. There's very little room for victory, so you end up with a dark story and a lot of your audience knows it's not going to get better. Introduce comedy or major victories for your protagonists, and you violate your own storyline and alienate what audience you might have. Keep the storyline pure, dark, and tragic, and most people don't want to stomach it for very long.
At least Enterprise was set far enough back that it didn't have a completely fixed ending, and it could have a positive ending since it was set in a brighter, happier Star Trek universe where things always work out OK in the end.
You missed "growing class sizes" and "No Child Left Behind" fuckwittery.
It has to be that way because of simple economics. When I went to school, we had 50 or more kids per class, and the teachers had to teach 5-7 classes a day, including the chores of roll call etc. The taxpayers want accountability and the lowest cost possible, the teachers want to be paid as much as possible, and the parents want various things that either means a lot of parent engagement or total apathy. The best way to get the most out of the system is to just circumvent it and get your kid classified as "special needs" so the school has to pay whatever it takes to give your child the attention they probably actually need, but could be done a lot cheaper in a more engaged model.
My daughter is going to a school based on an entirely different model. They get a teacher in first grade who will stay with them until they graduate from 12th grade. Class sizes are deliberately kept small, and each teacher gets 20 or fewer students as their ideal (current class size in my daughter's class is 18). This teacher is known as their "main lesson" teacher and teaches them things like English, history, basic math, etc. This teacher takes attendance in the morning and releases the kids at the end of the day, and is responsible for day-to-day management of the childrens' education.
There are specialty teachers (other languages, advanced mathematics, music, etc) but they are "subject teachers" who visit classrooms rather than the child coming into a specialized classroom. But the main lesson teacher is still in the room, observing and helping with discipline problems if needed (the "subject teacher" focuses on the lesson, and truly disruptive kids can be removed and it prompts a note to the parent so we can work the issue out with the teacher and our kid). Discipline problems don't generally last long, because the kids are getting plenty of attention as it is, so there's little impetus to misbehave - you LOSE teacher attention and engagement with your peers by doing that.
The beauty of the system is that the main lesson teacher gets to really know their students, and understands when someone is either overwhelmed or bored and can help keep that child engaged in the class. There's a small "support team" who the subject teacher can call in and help the student and their parents work through any issues, recommend additional tutoring if necessary (sometimes provided by volunteers from the upper grades). The students also get to know each other, and the parents are encouraged to socialize and form a community as well. And since we're paying for it, there's a really strong impetus to remain involved to make the expense worthwhile.
You can't do that in an education factory. The taxpayers would never pay for it.
And, yet, tuition at the school is lower than public school costs, primarily because the parents who are paying for it also help out in other ways to keep costs down. Of course, I still have to pay the taxes that support the public school I'm not using, but so do people without kids.
Yup, that's the big problem.
If you go with a password/PIN, someone else may be able to figure it out, and having a secure one requires work on the part of your employee. But at least it can be changed.
If you go with a SecureID chip or something, then you can have a relatively secure short PIN that rotates every 60 seconds day-in and day-out. The passwords are very short and very easy to enter but relatively immune to brute force attack since it's a new number every minute and you can't get through a 6-digit PIN in 60 seconds, especially if you design your system so that a failed entry invokes a 10-second delay before a retry is allowed, and a "x strikes and you're out" policy where the user's credentials are revoked until they can talk to an Admin and get them renewed. There's no sense monitoring the numbers someone keys in, because the information will be useless in less than 60 seconds. Units are unique and hard to copy, so if one is lost the employee can report it and it can be removed from the system and the employee gets a new fob. It's also two-factor, since you usually have to enter an employee number or something first.
If you go with straight biometrics, you really get the worst of all possible worlds. Sure, your employees don't need to remember a password or worry about losing a security fob, but there's absolutely no way to change their biometric information once it's been copied. There's no "three strikes" because they either fool the system or they don't - it's single-factor authentication. You don't know who is trying to access the system until and unless they succeed.
About the best security is a combination of very simple biometrics along with a rotating PIN, or a user-selected password along with a rotating PIN. The password is far cheaper, and for all practical purposes can be made as secure as (or more secure than) biometric data because you can change it as needed. Plus you aren't divulging biometric data to an employer who might turn around and sell it or have it breached, rendering you unemployable anywhere that uses that same biometric data to identify you. If someone outside my company copies my iris image for nefarious purposes inside the company, I might lose my job if the company can't verify who I am. If someone inside or outside the company copies my iris image and sells it to the highest bidder, I'm totally and utterly screwed.
My company uses a three-factor identification system for remote access - our username, an 8-digit number we set ourselves and need to memorize, and a 6-digit SecureID rotating PIN. Get any one factor wrong three times in a row, and you lose remote access until you pass another three-factor identification system (call the Helpdesk from the company-issued cell phone or your desk at work and give them your name and employee number, at which point they can only reset the 8-digit number you've chosen, and a record goes into the system saying you asked for a reset).
Once you log in, the only thing you can do is remote in to your actual work desktop, which requires another (different) userID and another (different) password. So even if you got in to the remote software, you're not going anywhere until you can provide two more factors of authentication.
That worked for me at the lower schools I attended, too. The ones where teachers had 20-30 kids that they had all day. After the first couple of weeks, the teacher knew their students on sight, and an empty desk meant a student was not in attendance.
Then I went to a large high school, and we had subject teachers who had classrooms of 50-75 students each, and only 45 minutes a day with them. Class sizes varied, so you couldn't tell by the number of empty desks. Even at a few seconds per student to do roll call, it ate up almost 10% of our class time, and it was completely impractical for a teacher who was teaching 5-6 classes of 50-75 students a day to know all of their students on sight. The average person could probably memorize about 100 of them, maybe.
My daughter is going to a school where they have one teacher who will follow them through their academic career at the school (first grade to 12th grade). There are "subject teachers", but the teachers travel from classroom to classroom rather than the students traveling around to different rooms.
So attendance is easy - the teacher knew the kids from the second week of school (class size is about 18 for our school), and greets them at the door. There's no opportunity for a student to cut a specific class, since the students are in the same classroom all day. They also don't need to carry their materials from classroom to classroom, since only one person (the teacher) has to move around. No need for lockers, or heavy backpacks that need to be worn all day, or fancy storage for their pens and pencils and notebooks. They have one desk, and they keep all of their stuff there.
It astonishes me that more schools don't use that model. One teacher walks in carrying a folding flipchart and a briefcase with their notes for the class, teaches the class, then heads off to the next classroom. Instead of moving 20 kids, they move one teacher.
Even so, it's a very tiny portion of the purchase price due to the vertical construction found at most condo units.
I live in a semi-rural area on three acres. Even if my house burned to the ground tomorrow, I'd still retain nearly half the value of the property.
Thanks for the heads-up. So far, so good, though using my company-issue Goldtouch for a couple of years was a bit of a setback until I whinged loud enough and I could turn the $200 Goldtouch in for a $30 Microsoft Natural 4000.
Depends on which way the "switch" works
Therein lies the problem. This isn't going to be a literal switch sitting on someone's desk that has an "ON" and "OFF" setting. Having a "kill switch" scenario means handing control of the core routers over to a government agency (or giving them administrative access to them, which amounts to the same thing). A "kill switch" implies a "nuclear option" - you either have the Internet in the US or you don't. This is something that would be very visible and make anyone who made that decision deeply accountable for that decision. So a lot of people could actually buy in to this, as long as it's a non-discriminating across-the-board shutdown.
Once that happens, however, it's a much smaller step to justifying more refined control, in the name of limiting the potential impact.
"Well, we could stop short of killing the ENTIRE US-facing Internet if we had the authority to just shut down portions of it, so we need the authority to shut down regions, or domains, or individual computers who are doing naughty things." What looks to the public like a reduction in authority, so everyone applauds it, but it also means that the government now has the authority to do less noticeable changes, like shutting off dissidents and people who disagree.
"Well, we could stop interfering with computers so heavyhandedly if we could just see what they were all doing all the time, so we could identify the ones that are engaging in wrongdoing." Again, something that sounds really logical on the surface, but means that the government can now "warrantless wiretap" anything anyone is doing on the Internet in the name of "only inconveniencing the guilty".
See, now, there's your problem. You're confusing condos with actual real estate. The actual value of a condo is in the building, and those deteriorate. A condo is a very-long-term lease you pay for up front. If you want a relatively cheap place to live, a condo may not be a terribly bad deal. Just compare it to rental and see how things work out for you based on how long you think you'll be living there, what the condo market has done, what you think it might do, etc.
If you want to invest in real estate, invest in real estate. As in something where you own the land underneath it. That way, even if the house itself devalues as it ages, you've still got a pretty much permanent asset.
About an hour after I get back from the fabric store, I'll have about a dozen that are "thought to have been made" for the first movie. I just gotta find someone gullible enough to think that.
Then the little shit's gonna kick you in the balls anyway, so you might as well give them a reason.
I can imagine the fun.
After several minutes... ..ors.. bzz ..mon.. bzzz ...utcy, tha... bzzz drive throug... click.
[Client yelling into speaker]: NO! That's ONE divorce, hold the alimony, with a side of bankruptcy.
[Scratchy speaker voice]: Bzzzz one.. bzz
Then you get to the front of line and find out that the time you've spent in line is, of course, billable.
Nope. I'm not a gamer, and I live on the wrong coast for them to bother showing it to me, according to their map.
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/kinect
Sounds interesting if they can turn it into something I might use, and ever bother to do so (mouseless mouse? gesture-based keyboard?).
Apples and Googles and Facebooks, oh my!
Their money makers are windows, xbox, office etc.. none of which are mentioned in the article.
Microsoft has an incredibly great balance sheet and is making shitloads of money, and that's good news.
The bad news is that Redmond has developed a nasty habit of releasing incremental improvements and lackluster copies of what the competition is doing.
It's not that what they sell is bad, Windows Seven is actually a very good operating system (and this is said by someone who switched to Ubuntu, but I still see enough Windows Seven to like what I see). The xbox obviously gets great reviews (I'm not a game machine owner, so I can't judge for myself). Windows phones have always had a good reputation as decent phones. Hell, you can have my Microsoft Natural Keyboard when you pry it from my cold, dead, grateful-not-to-have-needed-carpal-tunnel-surgery hands. Microsoft makes some really good stuff.
The problem with Microsoft is that they aren't trying to make brand new stuff any more, and their copies of others' work has become really lackluster. Windows Seven is great, but set Windows 2000 next to Windows Seven and tell me there's 10 years of significant innovation there. Tell me how many revolutions that product has gone through since they dumped the 95/98/ME kernel. No, I'll tell you. Zero. Nada. Zip. It doesn't make Seven BAD, it just makes it BORING.
Where are they in social networking? Where are they on mobile stuff? Search? Bing? Really? Where's my Microsoft Flying Car? Why am I carrying a cell phone at all? Where's my glasses with a heads-up display, eye tracking, and an earpiece built into the wing? What is Microsoft Labs working on? Oh, right, a ribbon interface for Office, a poor clone of Google, and an update to Windows CE. Yawn. Snore.
That's how the market works, if you don't come out with something that makes people go "WOW!" every now and then, you're dying. That doesn't mean bankruptcy is imminent or your shareholders should be concerned about not making a dividend 3 years from now. It just means that you aren't a leader any more, and you need to get off those laurels before they leave a permanent mark on your ass. Because once people start looking to others for new stuff, they'll start drifting away from you on your cash cow products.
Yes, the talk has been all about making two films since the project was declared, and I for one welcome it.
I had several complaints about LoTR (the most significant being "The Two Towers" turning into "The Battle of Helms Deep: A Love Story") and a lot of them were simply the impossibility of fitting so much material into "movie time". If Jackson had had the green light for 4 LoTR films, or 5, or 6, we might have seen Bombadil, we might have seen Sharkey, a lot of background might have been filled in, etc.
Also, you can skip decent sized swaths of LoTR after you say "and then they walked for a month", which can take whole chapters in LoTR where each individual leaf on every tree is exhaustively examined and described. :) The Hobbit is a shorter book than any of the three LoTR volumes, but it's a faster-paced book with lots more action. It's more of a children's book than LoTR, so a lot happens in fairly short amounts of time. There's easily two movies' worth of material there, and I'd rather have Jackson take his time and tell a broader and more comprehensive story than try to cram "There and Back Again" into 90 minutes.
Plus, of course, there's more money in two films.
Another vote for the Microsoft Natural. In my case, I use the 4000 model, and love it. The keys give reasonable "clickity" noises and it requires very little force to type even on the periphery keys. It's a very well-built thing, though it is a squishy dome style keyboard. I still prefer a buckling-spring Model M, but for the sake of my wrists and my co-workers' sanity the Natural 4000 is a good compromise. :)
The 4000 goes for about 30 bucks last time I checked, so if it doesn't work out it wasn't a great expense.
No, the difference here is that the current system is based on actual citizenship, not legality of their presence here.
If you come to the United States for the purposes of obtaining citizenship, there is a significant period between the time you declare your intention to be a citizen and the time when you are actually sworn in as a citizen. People who are undergoing this process are here perfectly legally, but they have not yet become citizens, though many have declared their intentions to do so and are currently undergoing the immigration/naturalization process.
Currently, in most states, only eligible citizens can vote. That is, those who were either born here, or have been here long enough to be sworn in as fully-vested citizens. Legal immigrants are in a grey area. They cannot vote, because they were not granted citizenship by right of birth and they have not yet taken the oath of citizenship. They are here perfectly legitimately, working, paying taxes, etc, and many are even working toward earning citizenship, but they are not yet full citizens and therefore cannot yet vote.
This law seeks to change that. I haven't read the legislation on the ballot in Portland (because, while I live in Maine, I don't live in Portland and therefore cannot vote on this one), but I presume it allows anyone who has stated the intent to become a citizen to vote in elections.
If Congress is forcibly engaging their customer base, how do you propose that sales will "dwindle"?
I meant to say "with roughly matching cars", of course, as in "with something vaguely related to the scenario we're actually talking about".
An engineer faced with a vehicle twice the size of his own would look at the other vehicle and say "Fuck, that's a big vehicle, no way my car can stop that."
If you're using your Prius to attempt to stop an Escalade, well, you're on your own there. And, yes, you're probably not going to be able to stop it.
Plus, if you discover after the fact that you're not able to provide enough stopping force, you simply let up on the brake, hit the gas, separate, and veer off.
Obviously, when you are planning the maneuver, one of the calculations you have to do is "do I have enough time to abort if it's not working?"
At that point, it comes down to rubber surface.
Unless the follower vehicle has 4WD engaged, my 4 wheels can impart a shitload more stopping force than a Bughatti Veyron at 1,000 horsepower can impart in thrust on the two wheels it's pushing with. His wheels will start to spin, lowering his effective acceleration force to near zero.
Plus, if he starts to overwhelm me, I take my foot off the brakes, floor the gas, break contact, and turn. Done. No drama required. Truck continues on his merry way, I get out of his way and slow back down.
A pressed accelerator overpowers breaks, even more so of "the car in front".
Physics fail. I've got four tires on the ground and all four are imparting deceleration to the mass of two vehicles, and the other vehicle has two tires attempting to impart momentum to the same mass. At some point pretty early on, assuming he's got the gas down hard, he's going to start spinning wheels and will have no effective acceleration to match my 4 wheels of deceleration.
The pickup could get the minivan shoved out of the way and then roll it.
Too many movies fail. In order to do that, the truck would have to get 90 degrees from your direction and then still be in contact with your vehicle. As the forward driver, if you feel your back end going out, you power-slide (turn into the slide) with your front tires, take your foot off the brake, and give it some gas, then take a little slide off. You'll break contact with the following vehicle very slowly.
definitely not something I would want to do with my family and friends in the car.
Nor should you. There are two qualifications for doing this.
1. You have to be a good enough person to care.
2. You have to be good enough at physics to understand the forces involved and how to apply them.
I'll assume you meet the first qualification. Your own post has demonstrated (no offense intended) that you don't meet the second. You'd probably introduce more risk to the situation than you'd be reducing.
If you think this was a huge major risk, then you don't understand what's going on enough to be trying it. He did this because he was an engineer and understood the physics involved, in addition to being a caring person.
One would assume that he blew his horn a few times to try and wake the pickup driver up first.
Even if the other driver had mashed the gas, though, the risk is relatively low.
First, there's a good chance your brakes will still be enough to overcome that (it's not an impact any more, you're already in contact. It's one vehicle's engine trying to impart momentum on two vehicles' worth of mass), and one set of brakes trying to fight that momentum. Unless his engine is a crapload more powerful than your brakes, you're good. Even then, unless he's got a 4-wheel-drive and it's engaged, you've got more rubber decelerating than he's got accelerating. His wheels will probably spin, wasting his engine power and allowing your brakes to trump his engine.
Moreover, the point of contact is the two rear bumpers. You turn the wheel slightly and the truck accentuates your turn due to the nonlinear push that's now been imparted, and you floor it and drive off at 45 degrees from your old direction. You and the truck separate and you can slam on the brakes and let him go by.
That's why an engineer might do this.
There's really not much risk involved. If you keep the speed difference low (drive next to truck, match speeds, pull ahead of it, then let up on the gas very gently), the truck bumps pretty gently into you and you very carefully apply brakes (and transmission, if you have a standard shift) to slow both vehicles down to a stop. Best case: You bring truck to a halt and apply your parking brake to keep you and the truck from moving, then go and try to shut the truck's engine down (assuming the truck is an automatic and hasn't stalled itself out already).
If it's apparent that the truck pushing you is too powerful for you to stop (large engine with cruise control on, for example) then there's little you can do to help. In that case, you accelerate, build up a gap of a few feet, lane-change off in the safest direction, then drive alongside the pickup flashing your lights and blasting your horn like an idiot to let others know that something is wrong here! Pay attention! You might even wake the driver up, though obviously it's assumed you've tried this before taking on the damage attempting to slow him down in the first place.
When you get somewhere dangerous (intersection, curve, whatever), you stop and allow the pickup to continue, hoping the warning you tried to give was enough, and dreading the repair bills to your rear bumper. That's pretty much the worst case assuming you're careful - you tried and it wasn't enough.
The only real risk is making a mistake (slowing down too abruptly and accruing enough damage to your vehicle that you get into trouble, or locking the vehicles together so you can't separate if needed), or not allowing enough time to get back out from in front of the truck if/when you discover you can't bring it to a halt. Obviously, if you're not that confident with your car or if you have a VERY tiny car, then your risk is higher.
Yes, and no.
The Mythbusters were testing a couple of StormChaser vehicles for wind survivability. They tested linear wind from the optimal direction the vehicle was designed for (I would have loved to see the fancier one with the struts turned 90 or even 180 degrees, because that vehicle was very specifically designed to only resist wind from a pretty specific direction).
This building looks like they can use the louvers over the fans to adjust wind direction (possibly even setting up some cyclone forces), and they can take an entire house and turn it to simulate wind from different directions.
Plus, this building can introduce wind-driven rain, floods, and even (after an upgrade next year) hail.
The Mythbusters have a win for efficiency because their test was much simpler.