Whether or not the King supports the law against insulting Thai royalty, he is the King.
He has the power to effect change, so he has the associated responsibility. It would take as little as a public statement that he's ok with insults. "Hear me, my people! Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me! So chill out and let those people out of jail mmkay?"
I don't think there's any useful information a robber can garner from Streetview that wouldn't be immediately available from a drive-by.
What time was the photo taken in Streetview? The robber has no clue. So there's no way to use it to tell if the occupants are at home on a Wednesday morning vs a Saturday morning(A robber can reasonably assume that people are more likely to be at work in the morning and at home at night).
If they drive past the house and look at the driveway, they know what day it is, what time of day it is, and whether or not you're home(by the car in the driveway). Considerably more useful than streetview. They don't need to sit around and lurk to gain more information than they could with streetview. They can drive past like any other car in the neighborhood.
Streetview isn't snapshotting your trenches, barbed wire, and turret emplacements. It's windows, doors, and perhaps a fence that they'd see as soon as they pull up. They don't need to devise some master-plan with a crack team of 11 professionals. They run over, hop the fence if there is one, and kick the back-door in(the door NOT visible from streetview). Or kick the side door. Or kick the front door. Or smash a ground-level window. They can't tell which will work best from streetview, they need to actually be there smashing at things till it works. (Smashing through gets them in and out faster than suspiciously hovering over a lock attempting to pick it).
I really don't see how Streetview assists a burglar in any way.
It's neat, but it's not the same vision of a human interstellar empire that most people fantasize about. The group in Alpha Centauri would be completely separate from the rest of humanity. It'd be a self-sustaining and self-reliant group with its own set of problems to contend with.
It wouldn't be a colony of Earth, it'd be two separate entities like the USA and Great Britain, but even further detached.
The only thing tying the two together is the fact that they're the same species. It's pretty tenuous connection to create a bridge with.
Can't really go google-digging for a link at work, but I remember an experiment called "Avatar" where a guy rigged a camera-mount to point down at him like in a third-person game. The video feed would play in a helmet he wore. So essentially, he was looking down at himself when he wore the suit. It shifted his sense of location away from his head to several feet behind and above him.
Some other experiment(or perhaps the same one?) also used a video feed to replace the subject's viewpoint to a camera's position and found that they could get them to flinch by swinging a hammer where their knee would be(if they were actually sitting where the camera was positioned).
I'm not objective enough to actually endorse the following rationale but:
An argument could be made that the animals lack value in the same sense that we value a human. Let's set aside the idea that humans have no objective value either and say that they do given our subjective empathy with the human experience.
Just because it recognizes and reacts to pain doesn't necessarily signify anything other than the fact that we recognize that it recognizes and reacts to pain.
Lots of videogame badguys take damage and react accordingly to preserve their lives. The Emotion engine for example is a physics/animation/AI package licensed by game developers to provide this behavior(as seen in GTAIV and Star Wars: Force unleashed). It allows the AI to assess damage, recognize potential harm, and attempt to preserve itself. People thrown through the air will put their hands up to protect their head and face, they'll take hits and attempt to reassert their balance after the impact. Pedestrians who are shot will panic and flee as best they can. But it's still just a game. The virtual characters only have virtual suffering.
(If games aren't your thing, you can think of Cylon pain instead).
One might be able to regard the animal's suffering on a lower level with a similar rationale.
That screaming sound from the pressure cooker is just steam leaving the crab's shells. The crabs aren't actually screaming....
At least that's what I tell myself to feel better, because that sound is damned unnerving when I think of how much it would suck to be steamed to death. This article just makes it more awkward.
This would still be handy, there's been plenty of occasions where I've fired off an e-mail and after the window closes I still have the after-image of the text fresh in my mind...and that's when I see the typo/missing attachment.
I even send a correction less than a minute later, but when I hit send/receive and the message goes out, I simultaneously get an e-mail back pointing out my mistake.
Take out a loan, go back to school, and get a degree.
You're competing against other applicants who either have years of experience, or relevant degrees, or certs, or mostly, some combination of the above.
It's by no means impossible for you to change careers. But you are trying to break into a technical field and so you will need to assert that you meet the technical requirements. Once you can do that, then you can try to paint yourself as the better pick over the competition.
Perhaps by the time you're out of school the economy will have recovered and you'll have better job opportunities to chase after too.
It's a little silly to hear the woman in the commercial say "It's ok in moderation"...then pour themselves a big honking cup of syrupy artificial fruit punch. That cup alone is already as much (or more) sugar than a person should be taking in for one day.
Damn, if someone is going to suck down that much sugar, might as well get it from a worthwhile treat rather than colored sugar water.
My christian mother died of stomach cancer when I was in my teens. She was expected to die the first time they detected cancer, but she survived and lived on for several years without symptoms before it resurfaced and she died.
The support network for a christian cancer patient is considerable. The family was supplied with home-cooked food from various church members the entire time she was hospitalized and for several weeks following her death. The revolving door of supportive visitors coming to encourage the patient and the family is a constant reminder to fight the disease. When people constantly tell you that the treatment will work, and that prayer can turn the odds around, it's not surprising that the religious would undertake the treatment.
If they believe the treatment will work, it's more likely that they'll take it, as opposed to someone who believes the treatment is a waste and is just prolonging the inevitable.
The first time around, we all believed she would survive, and she did. The second time, we knew that she wouldn't and she didn't. She accepted death and was confident of where she would end up. She spent the last days arranging her affairs and leaving each family member a final letter, and she eventually went peacefully in her sleep.
We're just looking at a statistic from a small sample of complicated people on how they face death. This one factor could be important, but it is hardly descriptive of the individual's battle with death.
Halo was the game I had in mind when I commented about "mediocre games selling well". It's the most obvious example. Halo 1 was merely decent compared the other FPS games available at the time. It stood out for being done on a console at a time when console FPSes weren't popular.
However, I don't lump Halo 3 in the same basket as Halo 1. It's not particularly new or different(it's the third in a trilogy after all), but the amount of polish that went into putting all the elements together should be recognized. Great art direction(They use colors!), solid audio, varied map design, well balanced gameplay, and terrific multiplayer options. And they made a bold move in integrating replays directly into the game itself(PC gamers had to use 3rd party programs to record such things, and only from the player's viewpoint).
Innovative games are welcome when they're done well, but it's not a make-or-break requirement. A particularly well-crafted game can be plenty of fun even if it doesn't try to do anything new. Improving on elements already seen in other games is still laudable.
Advertising is key for game sales. Great games have come and gone virtually unnoticed without sufficient marketing (ex. Beyond Good & Evil).
Good quality racks up great word-of-mouth(which takes time to circulate!), but these big bursts of sales only come when there's enough people aware of the game so that they can take time to consider it.
The free-weekend though was a fantastic idea. Getting to see exactly what you're paying for relieves a lot of the doubts that a potential buyer may have.
The principle equalizer in Counterstrike isn't any of those things. It's the headshot.
When it comes down to exchange of one bullet against another between one player and the next, the headshot trumps everything except perhaps sheer numbers.
They can have any gun they want, all the money, be on the winning team, but if you still have bullets and line-of-sight, you have a fighting chance to kill the opponent in a split second...if you're good enough. In many games, weapons take time to deal damage, and players gradually wear each other down. With headshots, if the player is able to focus the skill enough, he is in control of a "critical strike" to end everything then and there. As long as they don't outnumber you simultaneously (i.e more headshots than your gun can produce before you're killed), you've still got a chance to recover and win any encounter.
While I don't like Voyager's overall storyline, about half of the cast, I really like Janeway so far.
She's a strong captain, perhaps the strongest of the captains on the shows. She's unflinchingly hard when needed, and has no weakness for the other gender. I'm only up to early season 6, but I've seen only one kiss, and she'd already placed up safeguards in case he betrays her. She's not perfect, she murdered Tuvix of her own free will, and attempted to kill a prisoner (Ransom's crewman). I think her biggest weakness is Seven of Nine (read into THAT however you like). She gives that Borg amazing slack considering how often Seven goes against orders. Overall, among the strongest female characters portrayed in the media in my opinion.
I think a dark theme would be the best way to go. It would be easier to connect to since it would be close to the spirit of the times we live in. We don't trust the government, we don't trust companies, we don't trust fellow citizens. America is stuck in two long wars, and the world is going through a deep recession.
TV dramas have turned darker to fit the mood, 24, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes. Star Trek's wide-eyed optimism and lust for exploration of the new and unknown feels alien. Tom Paris's "Captain Proton" hobby pokes fun at how campy those old TV shows were, which just underscores how out-of-place Star Trek seems in today's line-up.
Which isn't to say that the Star Trek setting is useless. I think Deep Space 9 works the best for today's audience, and branching off into a show about Section 31 would be a perfect fit. Take the emphasis back off the new and unknown, and see how the futuristic technology already introduced into the show influences their society and their interactions. The internet is continually presenting us with challenges for adaptation, how is the Federation coping with their information security and privacy issues?
Port security procedures have improved quite a bit.
US customs actually has a truck at the port that is just a giant gate that lowers down and passes over the container, scanning from 3 angles at once. The idea of a nuclear cargo container isn't a new one.
Containers are actually catalogued pretty thoroughly these days. Their contents and routing are recorded at the origin, and transmitted to the US in advance. They photograph from multiple angles as they pass through terminal gates. The containers are given unique seals to make sure it hasn't been tampered with, and their status is documented at every stop along the way(more advanced carriers report the status of a given container electronically so customers can get daily tracking reports).
Of course, just like everything else, the security isn't impenetrable. However, security isn't just about catching attempts, but preventing someone from trying. The risks of using a shipping container for this task are prohibitive compared to other methods of delivery.
I would guess that if they wanted to detonate a nuclear bomb on U.S soil, they would deliver smaller components through more discreet methods, and make the final assembly within our borders instead.
I think it can be done. One of the driving forces behind Guitar hero aside from accessibility is the fact that it scores you.
We can tell when we hit the wrong note of course, but mistakes weigh heavily in the mind of a new player, and frustration can easily kick in before fascination. That's how so many new players just end up quitting.
With scores, you can see progress with a concrete metric. You may have only managed 1 more note correctly, or ran your scale.5 seconds faster, but it's an improvement you can see that you might not have noticed. This can give them the encouragement to give it one more go to see if they can do better.
And the fact that they're fretting actual strings instead of buttons goes a long way in teaching them to successfully work their way around a guitar.
You could even modify the game to teach real guitar concepts. Add scale time-trials, at harder levels, remove the note indicators so they have to memorize it, then transfer between scales midway through...the player could pick up quite a bit.
You can have the game accept different variations of notes as correct inputs. Like instead of a vanilla D, let them play a Dsus4 and recognize that as a successful note as well. Everybody in Guitar Hero plays the same song by default, they can try their own combinations and impress their friends.
It's an idea with a lot of potential, and also an idea that's been around for a long time. The devil's in the details and the successful will all pivot on how well they execute this product. (My bet is that they will fail completely and fade into obscurity).
You won't get it in writing from them, but I doubt you'd need it.
Just go straight to HR and explain that you feel your boss is implying blackmail. Write up these suspicions in a letter and hand it to them so they have a nice neat copy to review...i.e you're holding onto an original.
That should give you some piece of mind, giving you a bad referral would be an incredible risk for them at that point, it's just now worth it to try to pressure you.
But most companies don't even give referrals. Not even good ones(in case you turn out to suck at your new job and the new company blames the previous company for a misleading referral). Nowadays you just get start of employment, end of employment, and pay level from a reference.
I don't know what standard IT practices say about high-level password rotation, but I have to change my computer's passwords every 30 days. I remember the new one most of the time but not all of the time. I'll assume the IT dept's would require as much security if not more considering how much more access is granted through them.
It's entirely plausible to forget a password that's strong, random, and rotated every 30 days. I'd be more suprised if he remembered the password than if he forgot it. I'd figure him for a liar if he claims not to have written it down somewhere, rather than if he claims he forgot it.
My friend brought back pictures from his trip back to India for a wedding.
4-seater compact cars carrying 7 people...5 inside, 2 outside! At 40mph! Apparently transportation on the outside of vehicles is commonplace. Plus drivers who weave randomly through the crowds due to the lack of lane indications(and lack of space in the lane!)
Assuming normal intelligence is a pretty big assumption.
I'll guess what you mean by "normal intelligence" presumes knowledge of what a computer is, what it does, and what the internet is.
It's not intuitive at all. If I open my dad's file, then open the file attachment he sent to someone, I have to explain to him that even though they look the same and are even named the same, they are not the same file. In fact, if he were to just hit "save", as he has grown accustomed to doing, it would be saved to a temporary folder instead and any changes would essentially disappear when he closes the window.
I have to explain to him that the file he made now exists in 3 separate copies, in his documents, in the temporary internet folder, and stored on the internet in hotmail. He's used to dealing with paper, where 3 separate copies are obviously separate. On a computer it all looks the same.
This relates to the topic at hand because the difference between the internet and what's on his computer is that he needs to click the browser icon to get at the stuff on the internet, rather than the stuff on his computer which is accessed by clicking "My documents" on the desktop. Specifically, clicking twice, clicking quickly, and with the left mouse button, not the right mouse button.
In the end, my father switched to firefox with no problem. I just explained that he had to click the orange/blue picture instead of the picture of the blue E.
Lots of people out there don't care about IE vs. Other browsers, they just get what they need done and move on. For these people, if provided a choice of browsers, they won't be happy, they'll be annoyed at having to learn an extra step to do something they were already able to do before. It's willful ignorance stemming from the fact that there are other things they want to do with their time than screw around on the computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether or not the King supports the law against insulting Thai royalty, he is the King.
He has the power to effect change, so he has the associated responsibility. It would take as little as a public statement that he's ok with insults. "Hear me, my people! Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me! So chill out and let those people out of jail mmkay?"
I don't think there's any useful information a robber can garner from Streetview that wouldn't be immediately available from a drive-by.
What time was the photo taken in Streetview? The robber has no clue. So there's no way to use it to tell if the occupants are at home on a Wednesday morning vs a Saturday morning(A robber can reasonably assume that people are more likely to be at work in the morning and at home at night).
If they drive past the house and look at the driveway, they know what day it is, what time of day it is, and whether or not you're home(by the car in the driveway). Considerably more useful than streetview. They don't need to sit around and lurk to gain more information than they could with streetview. They can drive past like any other car in the neighborhood.
Streetview isn't snapshotting your trenches, barbed wire, and turret emplacements. It's windows, doors, and perhaps a fence that they'd see as soon as they pull up. They don't need to devise some master-plan with a crack team of 11 professionals. They run over, hop the fence if there is one, and kick the back-door in(the door NOT visible from streetview). Or kick the side door. Or kick the front door. Or smash a ground-level window. They can't tell which will work best from streetview, they need to actually be there smashing at things till it works. (Smashing through gets them in and out faster than suspiciously hovering over a lock attempting to pick it).
I really don't see how Streetview assists a burglar in any way.
It's neat, but it's not the same vision of a human interstellar empire that most people fantasize about. The group in Alpha Centauri would be completely separate from the rest of humanity. It'd be a self-sustaining and self-reliant group with its own set of problems to contend with.
It wouldn't be a colony of Earth, it'd be two separate entities like the USA and Great Britain, but even further detached.
The only thing tying the two together is the fact that they're the same species. It's pretty tenuous connection to create a bridge with.
I hate April Fools crowding out all the real slashdot articles...
But you know what? I'm still here anyway...*hangs head*
Who would brag about achievement points?...
Can't really go google-digging for a link at work, but I remember an experiment called "Avatar" where a guy rigged a camera-mount to point down at him like in a third-person game. The video feed would play in a helmet he wore. So essentially, he was looking down at himself when he wore the suit. It shifted his sense of location away from his head to several feet behind and above him.
Some other experiment(or perhaps the same one?) also used a video feed to replace the subject's viewpoint to a camera's position and found that they could get them to flinch by swinging a hammer where their knee would be(if they were actually sitting where the camera was positioned).
I'm not objective enough to actually endorse the following rationale but:
An argument could be made that the animals lack value in the same sense that we value a human. Let's set aside the idea that humans have no objective value either and say that they do given our subjective empathy with the human experience.
Just because it recognizes and reacts to pain doesn't necessarily signify anything other than the fact that we recognize that it recognizes and reacts to pain.
Lots of videogame badguys take damage and react accordingly to preserve their lives. The Emotion engine for example is a physics/animation/AI package licensed by game developers to provide this behavior(as seen in GTAIV and Star Wars: Force unleashed). It allows the AI to assess damage, recognize potential harm, and attempt to preserve itself. People thrown through the air will put their hands up to protect their head and face, they'll take hits and attempt to reassert their balance after the impact. Pedestrians who are shot will panic and flee as best they can. But it's still just a game. The virtual characters only have virtual suffering.
(If games aren't your thing, you can think of Cylon pain instead).
One might be able to regard the animal's suffering on a lower level with a similar rationale.
That screaming sound from the pressure cooker is just steam leaving the crab's shells. The crabs aren't actually screaming....
At least that's what I tell myself to feel better, because that sound is damned unnerving when I think of how much it would suck to be steamed to death. This article just makes it more awkward.
Ahhh nevermind, I'll feel better when I'm full.
This would still be handy, there's been plenty of occasions where I've fired off an e-mail and after the window closes I still have the after-image of the text fresh in my mind...and that's when I see the typo/missing attachment.
I even send a correction less than a minute later, but when I hit send/receive and the message goes out, I simultaneously get an e-mail back pointing out my mistake.
Take out a loan, go back to school, and get a degree.
You're competing against other applicants who either have years of experience, or relevant degrees, or certs, or mostly, some combination of the above.
It's by no means impossible for you to change careers. But you are trying to break into a technical field and so you will need to assert that you meet the technical requirements. Once you can do that, then you can try to paint yourself as the better pick over the competition.
Perhaps by the time you're out of school the economy will have recovered and you'll have better job opportunities to chase after too.
It's a little silly to hear the woman in the commercial say "It's ok in moderation"...then pour themselves a big honking cup of syrupy artificial fruit punch. That cup alone is already as much (or more) sugar than a person should be taking in for one day.
Damn, if someone is going to suck down that much sugar, might as well get it from a worthwhile treat rather than colored sugar water.
There are a lot of ways of looking at this.
My christian mother died of stomach cancer when I was in my teens. She was expected to die the first time they detected cancer, but she survived and lived on for several years without symptoms before it resurfaced and she died.
The support network for a christian cancer patient is considerable. The family was supplied with home-cooked food from various church members the entire time she was hospitalized and for several weeks following her death. The revolving door of supportive visitors coming to encourage the patient and the family is a constant reminder to fight the disease. When people constantly tell you that the treatment will work, and that prayer can turn the odds around, it's not surprising that the religious would undertake the treatment.
If they believe the treatment will work, it's more likely that they'll take it, as opposed to someone who believes the treatment is a waste and is just prolonging the inevitable.
The first time around, we all believed she would survive, and she did. The second time, we knew that she wouldn't and she didn't. She accepted death and was confident of where she would end up. She spent the last days arranging her affairs and leaving each family member a final letter, and she eventually went peacefully in her sleep.
We're just looking at a statistic from a small sample of complicated people on how they face death. This one factor could be important, but it is hardly descriptive of the individual's battle with death.
Another way to look at it: Maybe they like living?
Accepting terminal illness is different from unnecessarily risking your life.
Halo was the game I had in mind when I commented about "mediocre games selling well". It's the most obvious example. Halo 1 was merely decent compared the other FPS games available at the time. It stood out for being done on a console at a time when console FPSes weren't popular.
However, I don't lump Halo 3 in the same basket as Halo 1. It's not particularly new or different(it's the third in a trilogy after all), but the amount of polish that went into putting all the elements together should be recognized. Great art direction(They use colors!), solid audio, varied map design, well balanced gameplay, and terrific multiplayer options. And they made a bold move in integrating replays directly into the game itself(PC gamers had to use 3rd party programs to record such things, and only from the player's viewpoint).
Innovative games are welcome when they're done well, but it's not a make-or-break requirement. A particularly well-crafted game can be plenty of fun even if it doesn't try to do anything new. Improving on elements already seen in other games is still laudable.
Further to the above, a lot of really mediocre games get great sales through advertising...
Advertising is key for game sales. Great games have come and gone virtually unnoticed without sufficient marketing (ex. Beyond Good & Evil).
Good quality racks up great word-of-mouth(which takes time to circulate!), but these big bursts of sales only come when there's enough people aware of the game so that they can take time to consider it.
The free-weekend though was a fantastic idea. Getting to see exactly what you're paying for relieves a lot of the doubts that a potential buyer may have.
The principle equalizer in Counterstrike isn't any of those things. It's the headshot.
When it comes down to exchange of one bullet against another between one player and the next, the headshot trumps everything except perhaps sheer numbers.
They can have any gun they want, all the money, be on the winning team, but if you still have bullets and line-of-sight, you have a fighting chance to kill the opponent in a split second...if you're good enough. In many games, weapons take time to deal damage, and players gradually wear each other down. With headshots, if the player is able to focus the skill enough, he is in control of a "critical strike" to end everything then and there. As long as they don't outnumber you simultaneously (i.e more headshots than your gun can produce before you're killed), you've still got a chance to recover and win any encounter.
While I don't like Voyager's overall storyline, about half of the cast, I really like Janeway so far.
She's a strong captain, perhaps the strongest of the captains on the shows. She's unflinchingly hard when needed, and has no weakness for the other gender. I'm only up to early season 6, but I've seen only one kiss, and she'd already placed up safeguards in case he betrays her. She's not perfect, she murdered Tuvix of her own free will, and attempted to kill a prisoner (Ransom's crewman). I think her biggest weakness is Seven of Nine (read into THAT however you like). She gives that Borg amazing slack considering how often Seven goes against orders. Overall, among the strongest female characters portrayed in the media in my opinion.
I think a dark theme would be the best way to go. It would be easier to connect to since it would be close to the spirit of the times we live in. We don't trust the government, we don't trust companies, we don't trust fellow citizens. America is stuck in two long wars, and the world is going through a deep recession.
TV dramas have turned darker to fit the mood, 24, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes. Star Trek's wide-eyed optimism and lust for exploration of the new and unknown feels alien. Tom Paris's "Captain Proton" hobby pokes fun at how campy those old TV shows were, which just underscores how out-of-place Star Trek seems in today's line-up.
Which isn't to say that the Star Trek setting is useless. I think Deep Space 9 works the best for today's audience, and branching off into a show about Section 31 would be a perfect fit. Take the emphasis back off the new and unknown, and see how the futuristic technology already introduced into the show influences their society and their interactions. The internet is continually presenting us with challenges for adaptation, how is the Federation coping with their information security and privacy issues?
Port security procedures have improved quite a bit.
US customs actually has a truck at the port that is just a giant gate that lowers down and passes over the container, scanning from 3 angles at once. The idea of a nuclear cargo container isn't a new one.
Containers are actually catalogued pretty thoroughly these days. Their contents and routing are recorded at the origin, and transmitted to the US in advance. They photograph from multiple angles as they pass through terminal gates. The containers are given unique seals to make sure it hasn't been tampered with, and their status is documented at every stop along the way(more advanced carriers report the status of a given container electronically so customers can get daily tracking reports).
Of course, just like everything else, the security isn't impenetrable. However, security isn't just about catching attempts, but preventing someone from trying. The risks of using a shipping container for this task are prohibitive compared to other methods of delivery.
I would guess that if they wanted to detonate a nuclear bomb on U.S soil, they would deliver smaller components through more discreet methods, and make the final assembly within our borders instead.
I think it can be done. One of the driving forces behind Guitar hero aside from accessibility is the fact that it scores you.
We can tell when we hit the wrong note of course, but mistakes weigh heavily in the mind of a new player, and frustration can easily kick in before fascination. That's how so many new players just end up quitting.
With scores, you can see progress with a concrete metric. You may have only managed 1 more note correctly, or ran your scale .5 seconds faster, but it's an improvement you can see that you might not have noticed. This can give them the encouragement to give it one more go to see if they can do better.
And the fact that they're fretting actual strings instead of buttons goes a long way in teaching them to successfully work their way around a guitar.
You could even modify the game to teach real guitar concepts. Add scale time-trials, at harder levels, remove the note indicators so they have to memorize it, then transfer between scales midway through...the player could pick up quite a bit.
You can have the game accept different variations of notes as correct inputs. Like instead of a vanilla D, let them play a Dsus4 and recognize that as a successful note as well. Everybody in Guitar Hero plays the same song by default, they can try their own combinations and impress their friends.
It's an idea with a lot of potential, and also an idea that's been around for a long time. The devil's in the details and the successful will all pivot on how well they execute this product. (My bet is that they will fail completely and fade into obscurity).
You won't get it in writing from them, but I doubt you'd need it.
Just go straight to HR and explain that you feel your boss is implying blackmail. Write up these suspicions in a letter and hand it to them so they have a nice neat copy to review...i.e you're holding onto an original.
That should give you some piece of mind, giving you a bad referral would be an incredible risk for them at that point, it's just now worth it to try to pressure you.
But most companies don't even give referrals. Not even good ones(in case you turn out to suck at your new job and the new company blames the previous company for a misleading referral). Nowadays you just get start of employment, end of employment, and pay level from a reference.
I don't know what standard IT practices say about high-level password rotation, but I have to change my computer's passwords every 30 days. I remember the new one most of the time but not all of the time. I'll assume the IT dept's would require as much security if not more considering how much more access is granted through them.
It's entirely plausible to forget a password that's strong, random, and rotated every 30 days. I'd be more suprised if he remembered the password than if he forgot it. I'd figure him for a liar if he claims not to have written it down somewhere, rather than if he claims he forgot it.
My friend brought back pictures from his trip back to India for a wedding.
4-seater compact cars carrying 7 people...5 inside, 2 outside! At 40mph! Apparently transportation on the outside of vehicles is commonplace. Plus drivers who weave randomly through the crowds due to the lack of lane indications(and lack of space in the lane!)
Assuming normal intelligence is a pretty big assumption.
I'll guess what you mean by "normal intelligence" presumes knowledge of what a computer is, what it does, and what the internet is.
It's not intuitive at all. If I open my dad's file, then open the file attachment he sent to someone, I have to explain to him that even though they look the same and are even named the same, they are not the same file. In fact, if he were to just hit "save", as he has grown accustomed to doing, it would be saved to a temporary folder instead and any changes would essentially disappear when he closes the window.
I have to explain to him that the file he made now exists in 3 separate copies, in his documents, in the temporary internet folder, and stored on the internet in hotmail. He's used to dealing with paper, where 3 separate copies are obviously separate. On a computer it all looks the same.
This relates to the topic at hand because the difference between the internet and what's on his computer is that he needs to click the browser icon to get at the stuff on the internet, rather than the stuff on his computer which is accessed by clicking "My documents" on the desktop. Specifically, clicking twice, clicking quickly, and with the left mouse button, not the right mouse button.
In the end, my father switched to firefox with no problem. I just explained that he had to click the orange/blue picture instead of the picture of the blue E.
Lots of people out there don't care about IE vs. Other browsers, they just get what they need done and move on. For these people, if provided a choice of browsers, they won't be happy, they'll be annoyed at having to learn an extra step to do something they were already able to do before. It's willful ignorance stemming from the fact that there are other things they want to do with their time than screw around on the computer.