Take a cue from the ladies. Lady or gent, a passport should go in a pouch around your neck and then be hidden under your shirt. Keep the neck cord hidden too.
They may cut the cord and try to get at it but you are likely to notice something suddenly trying to leap off you chest.
Just keep the pouch out of sight at security checkpoints lest they decide you need to place it on the belt for X-ray. If they don't see it under your shirt, they probably won't hassle you.
Soft-sided luggage or any luggage, bag, purse, murse, fanny pack, laptop case, carry case, pouch with a plastic zipper is extremely vulnerable to pilfering. All you need is an ink pen or other small, pointed object to pop it wide open. Locks are of no use.
Try it. Zip up any bag you might have. A tote bag or backpack will do as long as the zipper is plastic. Zip it shut. Put on a luggage lock if you like. It won't matter.
Take a common ink pen. Bic, Pilot, whatever. Push the pointy end HARD into the zipper track. Any spot will do. The plastic parts will pop open and wow suddenly it's unzipped. Pull it open as much as you like. Full access. But that's not even the best part!
When you are done stealing your own stuff, run the zipper clasp thing around and the zipper is back like new, with little or no sign it was ever opened. And of course the thief has no need for burglary tools. Just a common ink pen. Surely that can't be used for evil....
Why not just knife the bag open? Well, sure, but this way is covert. Zip it back up and the bag doesn't LOOK robbed. And there is no knife to get caught with. Everybody has ink pens. Nobody suspects it. Even TSA lets an ink pen through.
Pencils, ice picks, nails, even plastic flatware can be used to pop zippers. Probably car keys or maybe even a coin. Plastic zippers are just bad news.
This plane may be perfectly fine and just having teething problems as Boeing says, but it's made me wary and perhaps even angry since before it launched because the 787 was winning awards and accolades for being revolutionary and new and blah blah blah well before it had taken even a taxi test.
My feeling it, let the model prove itself first and then worry about awards. The 747 has proven itself. The 737. Even the 757 and 767 although nobody much cares about those two dullards. But let the 787 EARN its place and prove it is the real deal and then paste on the praise.
They didn't do that. They went 150% hype and probably bragged a lot when they should have been humble and wow what a surprise everybody notices when the hype-machine has problems that might otherwise go without much notice.
In other words, they hyped the hell out of it and golly if they didn't get hype for the errors and issues too. Sometimes it's better to stay out of the spotlight, but that tends to be easier to do when the whole company isn't riding on ONE model. Geez, Boeing.
To be fair, the same hype crap happens at the Detroit car show where they award "Car of the year" to a new model that hasn't actually gone on sale yet, hasn't proved it's something people want to buy or is reliable or even notable in any actual real-world way. I think the Volt got the award one such year. And wow was THAT a hot seller! Just flying off the shelves! Or not. It may make for nice headlines but it means jack shit when the vehicle has never sold copy-one to anybody.
saying it's cheaper from an energy standpoint to just pepper the ocean with lots of sensors than to transport a single sensor over lots of territory
Well, yes. There are many scenarios where it would be very cost effective to monitor a large area with scattered smart sand grains, each equipped with enough sensors to do whatever and some method to report back. Toss out a few million of them and wait, then correlate the results being fed back. If some of the sand grains get trashed, oh well. You sent out lots of them. Some will survive.
In a sense, this kind of tracking is nothing but motion capture on a very different scale than putting dots on a bodysuit, but somewhat the same idea. By tracking the dots, you build a shape of the object under the dots.
Personally I think this is a great way to explore space if you have a lot of time for results to come back. Toss out a cloud of smart sand grains and let them scatter across the galaxy. Then just wait for reports to come back. You won't need big rockets. You will just need patience. The only problem is that it will take a lot of time. I am convinced space-exploring species have found better ways to do this and perhaps in time so will we.
What you say was and still is theoretical. There were rules. But as with any rules, you can always find ways around them.
My family was on food stamps briefly back in the 80s. Back then, you'd go to a Post Office to pick up the stamp booklets. Later they made you go to a welfare office that was outfitted like an armored check cashing place with the bullet proof glass. Sometimes they had mobile stamp trucks which was an armored car with a walk-up window. It would drive around town and you had to A) find it and B) survive being handed your stamps out in the open. But I dirgress.
With paper stamps, you could certainly buy candy for 15 cents and pocket the change from a dollar stamp, and do this repeatedly to build up money for toilet paper or smokes. OR you could just find someone -and there were always volunteers outside the stores- who would give you cash for food stamps, of course at a 50% rate, or perhaps worse. You could even find retailers willing to cash them out for smokes, booze, whatever you wanted, right at the checkout. Usually an item like beer would have a cash price and then a food stamp price that was higher. Go figure.
My family didn't play those games. We only got about $100 in stamps and we actually needed it for food.
Nowadays, you get the EBT card. But the same things still apply. You can find people who will go shopping with you, take your $200 in groceries -usually steaks, expensive stuff- and give you a lesser amount cash for it. $100 for $200 food is a deal. Untraceable because the EBT transactions look legit. Food actually was sold. It just never reached the intended recipient.
There are also stores with EBT balance check phones. You find the person to buy your EBT card, you put them on the phone to hear the card balance and then you take them through the line to show them it works, provide your PIN, they pay in cash for the card and off they go to shop. You get the card back later because the EBT folks sort of frown on "I lost my card!" 12 times a year. This scheme works well with friends or relatives who know you get the card refilled every month.
Then there still are retailers who will sell beer, cooked food, smokes, pet food, paper goods, toys, any EBT-forbidden item you want and still allow EBT usage. Normally they cook the register books to make it look legit, but not always. Sometimes they don't even charge extra for this. It just takes a retailer who doesn't give a shit. Sometimes they get caught. Several shops near me got busted recently for this practice.
But most of them are more afraid of selling smokes or booze to kids than they are about selling the same items on EBT.
Hardly the only one. I watched as much as I could when it was on in my city, which was not very often. The local station tended to sell that slot to anyone who wanted to run a 30-min ad for something and only ran Terrahawks when they hadn't otherwise sold the time to someone.
To this day, the name Zelda brings to mind nothing to do with Nintendo but instead the scary homicidal alien puppet. It was at least a unique concept for a villain not to mention Ninestein's clones. Not many shows get away with killing off the hero.
Anyway, I suspect the show is not mentioned more because GA is supposed to have said he'd wished it had never been made and at least wanted to forget it existed. It was not one of his favorites for some reason.
For fun, wander around Youtube and check out the Terrahawks Kate Kestrel live action music videos and also the Terrahawks Japanese theme songs. The Japanese open song is rather nice in my opinion. Hated by Fandersons for not being canon but honestly I don't need my fun stamped and approved.
So it's fun and interesting to search these types of star systems and planets--and I think it's absolutely worthwhile to focus a SETI program on them to try to determine if there are any stray signals we can pick up--but otherwise this really is not much more than dreaming and guessing.
The SETI aspect is a problem.
If you took humans out of the picture on Earth, or simply rolled the clock back barely more than a hundred years, the Earth would be teeming with life yet not emitting any artificial radio. A radio signal is =/= life. Uncountable billions of organisms live here without radio.
SETI is only useful for advanced life, and even then, not entirely. Not very much. Most of human existence has been without radio. If we humans continue to migrate to digital modes and/or DRM, we may reach a point someday where the signals we emit are sufficiently spread-spectrum and digitally randomized so as to be relatively similar to noise, or too weak to travel far. This will work fine for our digital devices (some we have now; some to be invented) but it will be a disaster for an alien version of SETI.
Humans don't cause all accidents and computers driving won't be able to prevent them, either.
If a deer jumps in front of a car and ends up as both a hood ornament and a bloody wrecking ball in what used to be the front seat, the resulting accident where you run into a tree is probably not the fault of the computer or the human driver.
There's a point where computers could be programmed to deal with sudden intrusions into the road, but likewise, deer have a tendency to swarm across a road with no warning, so the computer can only do so much before being overwhelmed. Likewise trees falling on the road, objects suddenly in the road, and so on.
Nothing about automated cars will change these things because the road is not a sealed environment. It IS the environment with everything loose in and on it. Cars tread there at their own peril.
Hell, just this morning on the news they showed a car crashing through a store, barely missing a toddler -- the idiot driver thought the car was in reverse. Had he been driving a computer-controlled car, that would have never happened.
If the store had installed barriers to PREVENT the car from getting inside the store, it never would have happened. And it can be argued that such barriers are a "really good idea" because they are cheap and also prevent smash and grab robberies. Why more stores don't use them, I don't know.
Many Frys Electronics stores go one better and use huge granite balls instead of mere steel poles. You can make a joke here if you want.
The Korean brands have a lot of awareness right now, thanks in part to Apple basically standing Samsung up and saying "we're scared of Samsung!" which really added both brand awareness and boosted their reputation -which was nothing to sneeze at anyway.
Samsung has worked very hard to kill Sony. For a long time, that was their main mission: effing bury Sony. The only problem is that they've overshot the goal by making better products more or less across the board, and also that Sony has flopped in nearly every business unit. Samsung now sets the trends in phones and TVs, does very well with tablets, and has decent exposure in regular consumer electronics like pocket cameras and other items. Sony can only hope to follow. Aside from the PlayStation brand, Sony leads.... nowhere. In the future, Samsung is only going to become an even tougher company. They play to win. If iconic Japanese brands die along the way, that's absolutely fine with Samsung.
LG, after changing their name, embarked on putting appliances in lots of homes. That's a great way to make entire families aware of your brand: it's the fridge, the washing machine, and also the TV. And it's a brand with great peer acceptance. Your neighbors know LG and probably think it's a fine brand.
Both of these brands make good products for the most part. The neat part is that they both fight like hell to beat each other. So not only are they stomping on Panasonic and Sony, they are also trying to beat each other. This puts tremendous pressure on everybody else in the game. If you are Sony, you don't have one opponent or even two, you have closer to three or four because as much as Samsung and LG are bitter rivals, they have the same enemies and they will fight as one very tough force. If you are Sony, you don't just have to beat Samsung, you also have to beat LG AND you have to beat both of them combined which is intense enough to be its own entity.
After them, the Japanese brands are kind of lumped in with the no-name Chinese brands. Panasonic and Sony can't easily compete on price with the likes of Vizio or Sceptre, or the new Chinese-licensed brands like JVC, Magnavox or Philips. China hasn't stopped their own brands but they have realized they can just license some old brand name like JVC, play off the name and market what would otherwise be a noname product as a brand product.
TVs went through a phase where flat screens were a premium product, and at the high end yes they still are. But the low end is dominated by cheap TVs. Heck, you can get a 32-32" LCD TV at drug stores now, same as in the old days when a 12" B/W TV sold at drug stores. China will own that end of the market moving to the middle. Korea owns the top end -with Pioneer in for honorable mention on the high end. Everybody else needs to put on some knee pads and brace for impact. The middle market is going to get squeezed like an Oreo double-stuff left out in the sun.
Well, that doesn't matter. Most of the birther challengers fundamentally reject the idea that the man is legitimate, reject that he possibly can even BE president, and basically have pushed themselves into a logic corner where something cannot possibly be true, so it is simply not true regardless of facts, paperwork, evidence one way or the other, and so on. So, in their eyes, he is not a citizen because he cannot be. That's all. There is no other answer.
The alternative -that he is a citizen and was a legitimate candidate- is too difficult to even consider, so it is automatically not true. It cannot be true. It is not true. Done.
This is some of the same thinking I see around UFOs and aliens and the like. Regardless of whether it's true or not, there are many people who feel, without doing any investigation, that none of it can possibly be true because the alternative, if it IS true, is impossible to accept. So, it is not true. Done.
Whether it's true or not is not material. The problem comes when you choose a position (It's not true, or it is true; either way) and decide you'll never change, regardless of any investigation or evidence or lack thereof. A more scientific approach is to consider what the evidence tells you and then form a conclusion. Most people can't or won't keep an open mind long enough on anything to ever do that. Snap judgment is more the rule, especially in politics. Or little grey men.
It's a bit like closing your eyes and pretending the car about to run you over is not actually there because you can't see it any more. And it you cannot see it, it's not there and not about to run you over. Done. Whether you can see it, or whether you believe evidence or not, does not change the fact that you might not enjoy what is about to happen.
Or you bullshit the RFP. Company I may or may not work for may or may not have just landed a Really Big Deal (TM) RFP for a project. The RFP bid we submitted says we're good to go on everything the agency wanted to do and for less than anyone else. It's a LOT of work. I am sure we underbid.
That's fine and all except we can't deliver some of what was in the RFP. Some of it is stuff we could do but don't currently. It'll require some custom software -which is damn near against the law where I work. Everything must be generic. And some is stuff the agency wants that we have no interest in doing, such as handing over some key elements of our IP and giving them access that our own internal people do not have, and so on. And they want resumes for all staff involved in any way with anything.
This is not a "three letter" agency whatsoever. More like your local garbage department type of thing.
We got the job, we clobbered some competitors, and per some corporate VPs, our next task is to ignore the stuff we don't want to do and BS our way out of doing it. Shrug. This is apparently normal. I don't usually see this deep into the sausage-making side of what we do.
The problem with the Dyson Sphere concept is that it assumes there is no other sufficient source of energy, largely because humans haven't invented one.
Barely over a hundred years ago, we hadn't invented the airplane or helicopter or nuclear power plants in Tsunami zones, or iPads. Yet these things exist now and humans invented them.
By assuming that we know best and there is no other possible better source of energy, we're basically saying it cannot be done. The problem is we have a really bad track record in that area of not know what the hell we are talking about, much less what aliens might do.
We invent. We should assume aliens will also invent.
Now, it will be interesting someday if humans and aliens finally do meet up and we find out they have invented something we also have. The iPad of that era, just for example. We don't have any room for such a thing in our IP laws so the standard lawsuits would fly. And it would be fun to watch the first human IP lawyer try to serve G'Gurat with a suit over bezel design and rows of icons. Especially if G'Gurat is hungry that cycle.
How about promising to let people have time off and also promise that they won't return from their time off to find that their desk is gone along with their job?
How about that?
I mean, it's JUST a promise so it can be as totally worthless as any other benefits promise made by an HR flunky so really, they should have no trouble making a promise like this. It means jack shit.
This scenario has not happened to me, yet. I went on a quite expensive trip one year and found out the company had been sold about an hour after my plane landed in paradise. Cryptic phone messages that I'd better call the office. All I got was a totally ruined vacation due to wondering if I would be able to pay for any of it. hahaha.
But a lot of people got canned and a pattern developed where you'd see someone take a week off and his/her team would be tasked to produce the same results down a man or woman, and when they did (because they were scared for their jobs) the person on vacation was made redundant. Happened quite often.
The result is that the remaining workers are terrified to take time off. I myself blew away three weeks of time last year because I was already at vacation max due to tenure and could not carry over any more time off. Sucks. And they won't cash out time off, either. Your choice is to use it and risk your job, or lose it.
And they complain about people not taking time off and have now decided to give us one more paid holiday off and a mandatory unpaid volunteer day off. Any resemblance to community service time due to penalty of law is purely in the imagination of the employees.
In fourth grade, we had an Apple II that was shared among about 20 classrooms. Nobody, not even the teachers, were allowed to touch it, ever, for fear it would get broken. The thing was never used. It may have been broken given that we never used it.
In middle school, I got a two weeks of typing class before they decided that was a scheduling mistake and I was really supposed to learn Spanish.
I did not learn Spanish. But that two weeks of typing taught me enough about keyboarding to make me a furious typist on my own and that, in turn, led to building my own PC at home, teaching myself how to use it (DOS in those days) and eventually various computer and IT jobs where ability to type is essential and ability to type like a madman is a plus. It comes in handy.
So I think a lot of my work success can be traced back to the merest fragment of a skill I got from two weeks of typing. The rest was my own initiative.
But who talks on their phone any more? Really? You do?
I still do but not nearly enough to get in the way of whatever else I want to do with my Sprint phone. It's a bullet point issue ("our product is better, neener neener!") that's virtually a non-issue in actual use.
This ban on wireless has always been a red herring. Mobile devices typically operate at a couple of watts, tops. Meanwhile, while taking off or landing, a plane is going to pass fairly close to many cell towers, each of which is belting out much more powerful, much more continuous signals.
And nothing happens.
Planes are also hit with radar from ATC, MET, TCAS, and more, plus massive signals from broadcast media. All the time.
And nothing happens.
Banning this stuff was partly out of what-if fears, and partly because it was an area where the agency and airlines could impose their control upon the public. They really and truly get off on being able to tell us to stand there, do this, don't do that, don't bring water, don't use your phone, don't use your GPS, don't use your laptop, and so on, with "it's against the law" as justification 1, "it's policy" as justification 2 and "We'll arrest you sucka!" as justification 3, and finally to sum up them all: "OMG the plane might crash!"
Correct. And it is the same for any typical RFID -many of which raise alarms and whatnot. If you are only able to READ the tag, then you gain no more information than if you physically put eyes on the object and eyeballed the barcode.
That is pretty much all you can do unless you have access to the database.
And if you don't, then scanning the barcode or RFID or vehicle RFID is not overly useful or risky to privacy. Maybe you can gather some data about passing traffic or something and key a billboard to flash one kind of add to a Chevy and another ad to a Lexus. But it's nothing that could not also be gained by putting someone on the billboard with a pair of binoculars and a way (laptop, switch, whatever) to change the ads. Except, this way there's nobody peering into the cars and looking down my fictional girlfriend's shirt.
She would like that, if she existed.
Besides that, a lot of people are actually proud of the car they drive, either because they are proud, or because they are stuck with it. So making a way to broadcast "I own a GD LEXUS! LEXUS!" could be sold as a feature. New from Lexus, automatic bragging!
The storyline of the anime Southern Cross -no NOT the dubs, please- always struck me as phenomenally depressing.
There are literally no happy endings in that series. Two different species reaching the ends of their lines and nearly every character ends up dead. Those that don't die are left to a rather unpromising fate with no hope to speak of. Nobody wins. Both sides collapse. It's a grim outcome.
The show got canceled in part because it was just such a hopeless story. Yeah it had other issues too.
Other than that, Niven and Pournelle's Footfall struck me as depressing. Not only does humanity get wiped out, it's freaking elephants who do it. I really hated circuses after that.
Maybe I roll with the wrong crowd but I never hear anyone mention Andre Norton. There were plenty of pulpy scifi stories in her books, along with the magic stuff in the Witchworld series. But honestly, what in Prometheus or the Alien mythos wasn't already done 40 years ago in Norton's Forerunner stories?
Norton's concept of a 'distort' still sticks with me as a gadget I'd like to invent. And I am surprised nobody else has. Or have they? That's probably the point.
Ah well, I may have bad taste in books or something. Loved Douglas Adams, loved Gordon Dickson, Clarke, the "Starwolf" books by Gunnarson was it(?) and even sort of liked Battlefield Earth -but as an 11-year-old who had no idea who L.Ron was or what he was all about. 11yr olds want to read about blowing up planets with nuclear bombs, not about religion or whatever.
Just writing about this is somewhat painful. The teenage me used to read books constantly. 20 books checked out on Saturday and I would be lucky to have them last a week. Now the adult me barely even owns any books. And no, no e-books either. I have managed to make a life with no time to focus and read. Always have to do two or three things at once. Watch TV and work on a computer and have a radio playing. But the big problem is that my attention span is gone and my memory is going. Shrug.
BBY is also competing with regional chains like HHGregg, BrandsmartUSA, Microcenter, Frys and others, and the warehouse clubs like Costco and Sams -which also happen to offer a narrow selection of electronics but still manage to do fine with it.
I am not sure if BBY realizes just how aggressive ALL of these companies are on price, on actually having the items in stock and standing behind the sale.
My family has recently replaced all the appliances in this house. We did not spend a dime at BBY. We used one of the regionals for white goods, Costco for major electronics, Amazon Prime or Newegg or Monoprice for everything else and Microcenter when waiting for Newegg is too long. There was even an emergency need for a cellphone battery and we went to Radio Shack and got exactly what we needed in like 10 minutes. RS wins on being all over the place, usually in that corner of the stripmall where you tend to avert your eyes.
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Take a cue from the ladies. Lady or gent, a passport should go in a pouch around your neck and then be hidden under your shirt. Keep the neck cord hidden too.
They may cut the cord and try to get at it but you are likely to notice something suddenly trying to leap off you chest.
Just keep the pouch out of sight at security checkpoints lest they decide you need to place it on the belt for X-ray. If they don't see it under your shirt, they probably won't hassle you.
Soft-sided luggage or any luggage, bag, purse, murse, fanny pack, laptop case, carry case, pouch with a plastic zipper is extremely vulnerable to pilfering. All you need is an ink pen or other small, pointed object to pop it wide open. Locks are of no use.
Try it. Zip up any bag you might have. A tote bag or backpack will do as long as the zipper is plastic. Zip it shut. Put on a luggage lock if you like. It won't matter.
Take a common ink pen. Bic, Pilot, whatever. Push the pointy end HARD into the zipper track. Any spot will do. The plastic parts will pop open and wow suddenly it's unzipped. Pull it open as much as you like. Full access. But that's not even the best part!
When you are done stealing your own stuff, run the zipper clasp thing around and the zipper is back like new, with little or no sign it was ever opened. And of course the thief has no need for burglary tools. Just a common ink pen. Surely that can't be used for evil....
Why not just knife the bag open? Well, sure, but this way is covert. Zip it back up and the bag doesn't LOOK robbed. And there is no knife to get caught with. Everybody has ink pens. Nobody suspects it. Even TSA lets an ink pen through.
Pencils, ice picks, nails, even plastic flatware can be used to pop zippers. Probably car keys or maybe even a coin. Plastic zippers are just bad news.
Any landing you can walk awa -oh, never mind.
I always think of that crash as the "Ooooh nooo! Ooooh nooo!" crash thanks to the video. Unhappy ending, that one.
Exceptions for hot women in heels or boots. They can keep their shoes, but they still have to take them off. Slowly. No exceptions.
What? Offensive? No, just saying what we all know to be true. Painful truth or not.
But somebody will mod me down for saying what most of the men are thinking, and probably a fair number of the "women" reading this too.
This plane may be perfectly fine and just having teething problems as Boeing says, but it's made me wary and perhaps even angry since before it launched because the 787 was winning awards and accolades for being revolutionary and new and blah blah blah well before it had taken even a taxi test.
My feeling it, let the model prove itself first and then worry about awards. The 747 has proven itself. The 737. Even the 757 and 767 although nobody much cares about those two dullards. But let the 787 EARN its place and prove it is the real deal and then paste on the praise.
They didn't do that. They went 150% hype and probably bragged a lot when they should have been humble and wow what a surprise everybody notices when the hype-machine has problems that might otherwise go without much notice.
In other words, they hyped the hell out of it and golly if they didn't get hype for the errors and issues too. Sometimes it's better to stay out of the spotlight, but that tends to be easier to do when the whole company isn't riding on ONE model. Geez, Boeing.
To be fair, the same hype crap happens at the Detroit car show where they award "Car of the year" to a new model that hasn't actually gone on sale yet, hasn't proved it's something people want to buy or is reliable or even notable in any actual real-world way. I think the Volt got the award one such year. And wow was THAT a hot seller! Just flying off the shelves! Or not. It may make for nice headlines but it means jack shit when the vehicle has never sold copy-one to anybody.
saying it's cheaper from an energy standpoint to just pepper the ocean with lots of sensors than to transport a single sensor over lots of territory
Well, yes. There are many scenarios where it would be very cost effective to monitor a large area with scattered smart sand grains, each equipped with enough sensors to do whatever and some method to report back. Toss out a few million of them and wait, then correlate the results being fed back. If some of the sand grains get trashed, oh well. You sent out lots of them. Some will survive.
In a sense, this kind of tracking is nothing but motion capture on a very different scale than putting dots on a bodysuit, but somewhat the same idea. By tracking the dots, you build a shape of the object under the dots.
Personally I think this is a great way to explore space if you have a lot of time for results to come back. Toss out a cloud of smart sand grains and let them scatter across the galaxy. Then just wait for reports to come back. You won't need big rockets. You will just need patience. The only problem is that it will take a lot of time. I am convinced space-exploring species have found better ways to do this and perhaps in time so will we.
What you say was and still is theoretical. There were rules. But as with any rules, you can always find ways around them.
My family was on food stamps briefly back in the 80s. Back then, you'd go to a Post Office to pick up the stamp booklets. Later they made you go to a welfare office that was outfitted like an armored check cashing place with the bullet proof glass. Sometimes they had mobile stamp trucks which was an armored car with a walk-up window. It would drive around town and you had to A) find it and B) survive being handed your stamps out in the open. But I dirgress.
With paper stamps, you could certainly buy candy for 15 cents and pocket the change from a dollar stamp, and do this repeatedly to build up money for toilet paper or smokes. OR you could just find someone -and there were always volunteers outside the stores- who would give you cash for food stamps, of course at a 50% rate, or perhaps worse. You could even find retailers willing to cash them out for smokes, booze, whatever you wanted, right at the checkout. Usually an item like beer would have a cash price and then a food stamp price that was higher. Go figure.
My family didn't play those games. We only got about $100 in stamps and we actually needed it for food.
Nowadays, you get the EBT card. But the same things still apply. You can find people who will go shopping with you, take your $200 in groceries -usually steaks, expensive stuff- and give you a lesser amount cash for it. $100 for $200 food is a deal. Untraceable because the EBT transactions look legit. Food actually was sold. It just never reached the intended recipient.
There are also stores with EBT balance check phones. You find the person to buy your EBT card, you put them on the phone to hear the card balance and then you take them through the line to show them it works, provide your PIN, they pay in cash for the card and off they go to shop. You get the card back later because the EBT folks sort of frown on "I lost my card!" 12 times a year. This scheme works well with friends or relatives who know you get the card refilled every month.
Then there still are retailers who will sell beer, cooked food, smokes, pet food, paper goods, toys, any EBT-forbidden item you want and still allow EBT usage. Normally they cook the register books to make it look legit, but not always. Sometimes they don't even charge extra for this. It just takes a retailer who doesn't give a shit. Sometimes they get caught. Several shops near me got busted recently for this practice.
But most of them are more afraid of selling smokes or booze to kids than they are about selling the same items on EBT.
The genius of Derek Meddings, among other people.
The man was incredible with models. It is enough to watch those scenes alone to see what he came up with.
Hardly the only one. I watched as much as I could when it was on in my city, which was not very often. The local station tended to sell that slot to anyone who wanted to run a 30-min ad for something and only ran Terrahawks when they hadn't otherwise sold the time to someone.
To this day, the name Zelda brings to mind nothing to do with Nintendo but instead the scary homicidal alien puppet. It was at least a unique concept for a villain not to mention Ninestein's clones. Not many shows get away with killing off the hero.
Anyway, I suspect the show is not mentioned more because GA is supposed to have said he'd wished it had never been made and at least wanted to forget it existed. It was not one of his favorites for some reason.
For fun, wander around Youtube and check out the Terrahawks Kate Kestrel live action music videos and also the Terrahawks Japanese theme songs. The Japanese open song is rather nice in my opinion. Hated by Fandersons for not being canon but honestly I don't need my fun stamped and approved.
So it's fun and interesting to search these types of star systems and planets--and I think it's absolutely worthwhile to focus a SETI program on them to try to determine if there are any stray signals we can pick up--but otherwise this really is not much more than dreaming and guessing.
The SETI aspect is a problem.
If you took humans out of the picture on Earth, or simply rolled the clock back barely more than a hundred years, the Earth would be teeming with life yet not emitting any artificial radio. A radio signal is =/= life. Uncountable billions of organisms live here without radio.
SETI is only useful for advanced life, and even then, not entirely. Not very much. Most of human existence has been without radio. If we humans continue to migrate to digital modes and/or DRM, we may reach a point someday where the signals we emit are sufficiently spread-spectrum and digitally randomized so as to be relatively similar to noise, or too weak to travel far. This will work fine for our digital devices (some we have now; some to be invented) but it will be a disaster for an alien version of SETI.
Humans don't cause all accidents and computers driving won't be able to prevent them, either.
If a deer jumps in front of a car and ends up as both a hood ornament and a bloody wrecking ball in what used to be the front seat, the resulting accident where you run into a tree is probably not the fault of the computer or the human driver.
There's a point where computers could be programmed to deal with sudden intrusions into the road, but likewise, deer have a tendency to swarm across a road with no warning, so the computer can only do so much before being overwhelmed. Likewise trees falling on the road, objects suddenly in the road, and so on.
Nothing about automated cars will change these things because the road is not a sealed environment. It IS the environment with everything loose in and on it. Cars tread there at their own peril.
Hell, just this morning on the news they showed a car crashing through a store, barely missing a toddler -- the idiot driver thought the car was in reverse. Had he been driving a computer-controlled car, that would have never happened.
If the store had installed barriers to PREVENT the car from getting inside the store, it never would have happened. And it can be argued that such barriers are a "really good idea" because they are cheap and also prevent smash and grab robberies. Why more stores don't use them, I don't know.
Many Frys Electronics stores go one better and use huge granite balls instead of mere steel poles. You can make a joke here if you want.
The Korean brands have a lot of awareness right now, thanks in part to Apple basically standing Samsung up and saying "we're scared of Samsung!" which really added both brand awareness and boosted their reputation -which was nothing to sneeze at anyway.
Samsung has worked very hard to kill Sony. For a long time, that was their main mission: effing bury Sony. The only problem is that they've overshot the goal by making better products more or less across the board, and also that Sony has flopped in nearly every business unit. Samsung now sets the trends in phones and TVs, does very well with tablets, and has decent exposure in regular consumer electronics like pocket cameras and other items. Sony can only hope to follow. Aside from the PlayStation brand, Sony leads.... nowhere. In the future, Samsung is only going to become an even tougher company. They play to win. If iconic Japanese brands die along the way, that's absolutely fine with Samsung.
LG, after changing their name, embarked on putting appliances in lots of homes. That's a great way to make entire families aware of your brand: it's the fridge, the washing machine, and also the TV. And it's a brand with great peer acceptance. Your neighbors know LG and probably think it's a fine brand.
Both of these brands make good products for the most part. The neat part is that they both fight like hell to beat each other. So not only are they stomping on Panasonic and Sony, they are also trying to beat each other. This puts tremendous pressure on everybody else in the game. If you are Sony, you don't have one opponent or even two, you have closer to three or four because as much as Samsung and LG are bitter rivals, they have the same enemies and they will fight as one very tough force. If you are Sony, you don't just have to beat Samsung, you also have to beat LG AND you have to beat both of them combined which is intense enough to be its own entity.
After them, the Japanese brands are kind of lumped in with the no-name Chinese brands. Panasonic and Sony can't easily compete on price with the likes of Vizio or Sceptre, or the new Chinese-licensed brands like JVC, Magnavox or Philips. China hasn't stopped their own brands but they have realized they can just license some old brand name like JVC, play off the name and market what would otherwise be a noname product as a brand product.
TVs went through a phase where flat screens were a premium product, and at the high end yes they still are. But the low end is dominated by cheap TVs. Heck, you can get a 32-32" LCD TV at drug stores now, same as in the old days when a 12" B/W TV sold at drug stores. China will own that end of the market moving to the middle. Korea owns the top end -with Pioneer in for honorable mention on the high end. Everybody else needs to put on some knee pads and brace for impact. The middle market is going to get squeezed like an Oreo double-stuff left out in the sun.
Well, that doesn't matter. Most of the birther challengers fundamentally reject the idea that the man is legitimate, reject that he possibly can even BE president, and basically have pushed themselves into a logic corner where something cannot possibly be true, so it is simply not true regardless of facts, paperwork, evidence one way or the other, and so on. So, in their eyes, he is not a citizen because he cannot be. That's all. There is no other answer.
The alternative -that he is a citizen and was a legitimate candidate- is too difficult to even consider, so it is automatically not true. It cannot be true. It is not true. Done.
This is some of the same thinking I see around UFOs and aliens and the like. Regardless of whether it's true or not, there are many people who feel, without doing any investigation, that none of it can possibly be true because the alternative, if it IS true, is impossible to accept. So, it is not true. Done.
Whether it's true or not is not material. The problem comes when you choose a position (It's not true, or it is true; either way) and decide you'll never change, regardless of any investigation or evidence or lack thereof. A more scientific approach is to consider what the evidence tells you and then form a conclusion. Most people can't or won't keep an open mind long enough on anything to ever do that. Snap judgment is more the rule, especially in politics. Or little grey men.
It's a bit like closing your eyes and pretending the car about to run you over is not actually there because you can't see it any more. And it you cannot see it, it's not there and not about to run you over. Done. Whether you can see it, or whether you believe evidence or not, does not change the fact that you might not enjoy what is about to happen.
Or you bullshit the RFP. Company I may or may not work for may or may not have just landed a Really Big Deal (TM) RFP for a project. The RFP bid we submitted says we're good to go on everything the agency wanted to do and for less than anyone else. It's a LOT of work. I am sure we underbid.
That's fine and all except we can't deliver some of what was in the RFP. Some of it is stuff we could do but don't currently. It'll require some custom software -which is damn near against the law where I work. Everything must be generic. And some is stuff the agency wants that we have no interest in doing, such as handing over some key elements of our IP and giving them access that our own internal people do not have, and so on. And they want resumes for all staff involved in any way with anything.
This is not a "three letter" agency whatsoever. More like your local garbage department type of thing.
We got the job, we clobbered some competitors, and per some corporate VPs, our next task is to ignore the stuff we don't want to do and BS our way out of doing it. Shrug. This is apparently normal. I don't usually see this deep into the sausage-making side of what we do.
The problem with the Dyson Sphere concept is that it assumes there is no other sufficient source of energy, largely because humans haven't invented one.
Barely over a hundred years ago, we hadn't invented the airplane or helicopter or nuclear power plants in Tsunami zones, or iPads. Yet these things exist now and humans invented them.
By assuming that we know best and there is no other possible better source of energy, we're basically saying it cannot be done. The problem is we have a really bad track record in that area of not know what the hell we are talking about, much less what aliens might do.
We invent. We should assume aliens will also invent.
Now, it will be interesting someday if humans and aliens finally do meet up and we find out they have invented something we also have. The iPad of that era, just for example. We don't have any room for such a thing in our IP laws so the standard lawsuits would fly. And it would be fun to watch the first human IP lawyer try to serve G'Gurat with a suit over bezel design and rows of icons. Especially if G'Gurat is hungry that cycle.
So basically, the way to hyperspace is controlled by a very well programmed Pro Action Replay. (Gameshark for the US folks)
Got it.
Now, just need the God Mode code.
How about promising to let people have time off and also promise that they won't return from their time off to find that their desk is gone along with their job?
How about that?
I mean, it's JUST a promise so it can be as totally worthless as any other benefits promise made by an HR flunky so really, they should have no trouble making a promise like this. It means jack shit.
This scenario has not happened to me, yet. I went on a quite expensive trip one year and found out the company had been sold about an hour after my plane landed in paradise. Cryptic phone messages that I'd better call the office. All I got was a totally ruined vacation due to wondering if I would be able to pay for any of it. hahaha.
But a lot of people got canned and a pattern developed where you'd see someone take a week off and his/her team would be tasked to produce the same results down a man or woman, and when they did (because they were scared for their jobs) the person on vacation was made redundant. Happened quite often.
The result is that the remaining workers are terrified to take time off. I myself blew away three weeks of time last year because I was already at vacation max due to tenure and could not carry over any more time off. Sucks. And they won't cash out time off, either. Your choice is to use it and risk your job, or lose it.
And they complain about people not taking time off and have now decided to give us one more paid holiday off and a mandatory unpaid volunteer day off. Any resemblance to community service time due to penalty of law is purely in the imagination of the employees.
In fourth grade, we had an Apple II that was shared among about 20 classrooms. Nobody, not even the teachers, were allowed to touch it, ever, for fear it would get broken. The thing was never used. It may have been broken given that we never used it.
In middle school, I got a two weeks of typing class before they decided that was a scheduling mistake and I was really supposed to learn Spanish.
I did not learn Spanish. But that two weeks of typing taught me enough about keyboarding to make me a furious typist on my own and that, in turn, led to building my own PC at home, teaching myself how to use it (DOS in those days) and eventually various computer and IT jobs where ability to type is essential and ability to type like a madman is a plus. It comes in handy.
So I think a lot of my work success can be traced back to the merest fragment of a skill I got from two weeks of typing. The rest was my own initiative.
But who talks on their phone any more? Really? You do?
I still do but not nearly enough to get in the way of whatever else I want to do with my Sprint phone. It's a bullet point issue ("our product is better, neener neener!") that's virtually a non-issue in actual use.
This ban on wireless has always been a red herring. Mobile devices typically operate at a couple of watts, tops. Meanwhile, while taking off or landing, a plane is going to pass fairly close to many cell towers, each of which is belting out much more powerful, much more continuous signals.
And nothing happens.
Planes are also hit with radar from ATC, MET, TCAS, and more, plus massive signals from broadcast media. All the time.
And nothing happens.
Banning this stuff was partly out of what-if fears, and partly because it was an area where the agency and airlines could impose their control upon the public. They really and truly get off on being able to tell us to stand there, do this, don't do that, don't bring water, don't use your phone, don't use your GPS, don't use your laptop, and so on, with "it's against the law" as justification 1, "it's policy" as justification 2 and "We'll arrest you sucka!" as justification 3, and finally to sum up them all: "OMG the plane might crash!"
Correct. And it is the same for any typical RFID -many of which raise alarms and whatnot. If you are only able to READ the tag, then you gain no more information than if you physically put eyes on the object and eyeballed the barcode.
That is pretty much all you can do unless you have access to the database.
And if you don't, then scanning the barcode or RFID or vehicle RFID is not overly useful or risky to privacy. Maybe you can gather some data about passing traffic or something and key a billboard to flash one kind of add to a Chevy and another ad to a Lexus. But it's nothing that could not also be gained by putting someone on the billboard with a pair of binoculars and a way (laptop, switch, whatever) to change the ads. Except, this way there's nobody peering into the cars and looking down my fictional girlfriend's shirt.
She would like that, if she existed.
Besides that, a lot of people are actually proud of the car they drive, either because they are proud, or because they are stuck with it. So making a way to broadcast "I own a GD LEXUS! LEXUS!" could be sold as a feature. New from Lexus, automatic bragging!
The storyline of the anime Southern Cross -no NOT the dubs, please- always struck me as phenomenally depressing.
There are literally no happy endings in that series. Two different species reaching the ends of their lines and nearly every character ends up dead. Those that don't die are left to a rather unpromising fate with no hope to speak of. Nobody wins. Both sides collapse. It's a grim outcome.
The show got canceled in part because it was just such a hopeless story. Yeah it had other issues too.
Other than that, Niven and Pournelle's Footfall struck me as depressing. Not only does humanity get wiped out, it's freaking elephants who do it. I really hated circuses after that.
Maybe I roll with the wrong crowd but I never hear anyone mention Andre Norton. There were plenty of pulpy scifi stories in her books, along with the magic stuff in the Witchworld series. But honestly, what in Prometheus or the Alien mythos wasn't already done 40 years ago in Norton's Forerunner stories?
Norton's concept of a 'distort' still sticks with me as a gadget I'd like to invent. And I am surprised nobody else has. Or have they? That's probably the point.
Ah well, I may have bad taste in books or something. Loved Douglas Adams, loved Gordon Dickson, Clarke, the "Starwolf" books by Gunnarson was it(?) and even sort of liked Battlefield Earth -but as an 11-year-old who had no idea who L.Ron was or what he was all about. 11yr olds want to read about blowing up planets with nuclear bombs, not about religion or whatever.
Just writing about this is somewhat painful. The teenage me used to read books constantly. 20 books checked out on Saturday and I would be lucky to have them last a week. Now the adult me barely even owns any books. And no, no e-books either. I have managed to make a life with no time to focus and read. Always have to do two or three things at once. Watch TV and work on a computer and have a radio playing. But the big problem is that my attention span is gone and my memory is going. Shrug.
BBY is also competing with regional chains like HHGregg, BrandsmartUSA, Microcenter, Frys and others, and the warehouse clubs like Costco and Sams -which also happen to offer a narrow selection of electronics but still manage to do fine with it.
I am not sure if BBY realizes just how aggressive ALL of these companies are on price, on actually having the items in stock and standing behind the sale.
My family has recently replaced all the appliances in this house. We did not spend a dime at BBY. We used one of the regionals for white goods, Costco for major electronics, Amazon Prime or Newegg or Monoprice for everything else and Microcenter when waiting for Newegg is too long. There was even an emergency need for a cellphone battery and we went to Radio Shack and got exactly what we needed in like 10 minutes. RS wins on being all over the place, usually in that corner of the stripmall where you tend to avert your eyes.