JR does this with many of their trains. There are green cars that you can get a special pass for at the station platform. I would only buy it for long trips by train, for general commuting I think it's a little unnecessary. That said JR is cheaper than the BART and MUNI but doesn't seem to have many undesirable carriage companions.
That product is actually an April Fool's prank, as shown by the little winky face box at the very bottom of the page. I was fooled for quite a while as well.
In Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother, the protagonist defeats gait sensors with some pebbles in his shoe. It's really not such a bad idea, as every step is going to be different as your foot tries not to hit the pebble too hard.
Most law libraries do not let you check out their copies of the legal code. Also most law libraries tend to be in court buildings, and not at public library branches. My public library has lots of hours outside the normal 0900 to 1700, my city's law library is open from 0800 to 1700.
Your point about purchasing a paper copy of the legal code is spot on. In my state, I asked my local government workers (clerks, law librarians, etc) where to buy a copy of my state's code. There seems to be only one source and it costs more than 700 USD.
For someone who lives on the opposite side of town from the courthouse, or spends more on rent than a potential law book, reading law on paper can be impossible.
There are online versions, but somehow I think that most people wouldn't be willing to suffer through the mountains of legal text on their phones. The interfaces I've seen sometimes even break tab navigation by using javascript references to each item, making them a pain to use on a big screen.
It's rapid prototyping. It might just happen that the prototype is good enough to sell, but once you have a basis, comparisons can begin. If the prototype doesn't have to act as the real product, just a skeleton, it's not so hard to change the "bones" if something isn't working properly.
If the prototype is quickly made, it could even count as part of that upfront design process.
I like my people to do more than prototype for this kind of work. It's probably a semantics argument, but we prototype as part of design and intend for it to be trashed/rewritten, whereas what I was speaking to above is real development work that will be used, definitely not polished but 'works' enough to keep moving forward.
That often means "getting the bones" right, but occasionally cutting corners to get stuff done. If your focus is having a good product, which frankly it most of the time should be, then done is better than perfect.
I don't keep "slow tv" up, but I tend to have Netflix running on my left monitor, my requirements on my right monitor and my IDE or text editor in the center. If I get too busy, then Netflix goes away. The motion to the side helps keep me from getting bored.
"Both men received two counts of first-degree burglary and three counts of aggravated robbery, for each of the three employees they made cooperate at the two stores... Then came the kidnapping charges: three counts of second-degree kidnapping, because they’d forced three employees in those two robberies to move from one part of a store to another."
I really dislike "stacked" charges. Maybe that's the best way to differentiate between "a burglary", "a burglary where an innocent person was involved", "a burglary where 3 innocent people were involved," and "a burglary where 3 innocent people were involved and made to do stuff beyond 'getting robbed'".
But assuming "equal" charges, is involving three people 3x as bad as involving one? Is "forcing people to move" 2x as bad as just robbing them?
"... Two clerks were in the store, not just one. Lima-Marin and Clifton brought them both into a back room, forcing one onto the floor and the other to open the safe. “They put a gun to the back of my head and said, ‘This is where you’re going to die,’” one of the employees, Shane Ashurst, later recalled."
The "mov[ing] from one part of a store to another" was how the article characterized the kidnapping charge. I would imagine that forcing someone to the floor and threatening them with a gun would be part of the aggravated assault charge. Otherwise, what's the difference?
Even within the state of Virginia, look at the difference between Fairfax County and Portsmouth. It's comforting to think that your peers are "beating" the national average, and I think that something we miss when we read these graphs. A reminder about both ends of an average is something we need more in life.
I wonder if they plan on recovering the satellite and the geckos. Cameras are ok, but it would be much more useful to have a live sample of space-born geckos to research. Looking at the pictures of this thing, it looks like it might have non-destructive down-mass capabilities, but then I question whether the eggs will survive landing.
The end of the article says: "[Roscosmos] will have to wait until the satellite falls to Earth to know [what caused the communications interruption]." That sounds like they intend to de-orbit and recover the satellite to me. The real question is whether the geckos could survive re-entry. My guess is no.
"On an LCD display behind Baber, I could see an image of my leg, transmitted by a camera under the robot’s gun barrel. The gun then pointed at my stomach. He assured me that it was not loaded."
Pointing a firearm an anyone, even unloaded, even (especially?) robot controlled, is a terrible idea. This bothers me to no end, and it's so strange that someone who works with very powerful weapons can act like this. Perhaps he feels that he's smart enough that no mistakes will happen? Perhaps he has confidence in the robot not to fire any rounds? He's a brilliant man, very good at what he does; certainly he's spent lots of time with these things, and understands them more than I ever will.
That said: mistakes happen, don't point guns at people you don't want holes in.
Or maybe he just likes screwing with their heads, and as a fellow Southron well familiar with the oft-condescending ways of Yankees, I don't suppose I can blame him too strongly for that.
Sadly, that's basically the perspective of the guy in the article:
“I don’t want that on my conscience—something I
created going out and killing people all over the damn
place,” he said. “I’m not worried about what it does
over in Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s fine.”
It was starting to sound like a lot of fun, but that quote sort of brought me back to reality. (Who knows if it's an accurate quote, of course.)
It seems to me that the only right way to work with robotic firearms is to keep a chamber flag in them at all times except when they're on a hot range.
Yeah, that is a big red flag for me too. Confidence in your engineering is one thing but I think this guy's hubris might explain why he has no friends. Someone points a gun at me and I'm giving them a wide berth from then on.
