I live in one of the Colorado counties mentioned in the article as already having this law on the books. The law works fine up here in the mountains, and we have a lot of cyclists and a lot of seasonal traffic. Of course, we don't have the traffic of a big city like San Francisco. Still, we don't have a lot of bike-car accidents or bike-pedestrian accidents at our intersections.
The thing is, the stop signs are treated as yield signs. If a biker just blows through the stop sign without yielding right-of-way, they can still be ticketed. So as far as safety concerns, I don't see it making any difference. The people who would ignore a "yield" are the people who are already ignoring a "stop" and are subject to being ticketed if they get caught. If you dart out in front of a car and get hit by that car, you'll still be found to be at fault (and you're the one who is going to wind up in the hospital)
Cool idea, terrible acting. I feel like the "wow" factor in his audience was really killed by the awkward way he made it look like he was pushing a button and waiting for something to happen, instead of struggling to "lift" the hammer while he waited for the thumbprint to register.
There's a delightful website that showcases the work of so-called "scam baiters" who aim to waste the time of scammers and lead them into compromising situations -- http://www.419eater.com/html/letters.htm
I remember DARE. A message delivered to us by people we didn't respect. A police officer that no one trusted and videos of teens we perceived to be losers telling us that drugs were bad. The program seemed to focus on social pressure not to do drugs, but social pressure is meaningless and ineffective when it's coming from somewhere beneath you. It had the effect of making my peers want to get high to distinguish themselves from the lower social class who were shown to us coming out against drugs.
From personal experience, I feel that they would have been better off focusing on the consequences to your health rather than a fumbling attempt at peer pressure. The one class when they showed pictures of a smoker's lungs was the only one that had any lasting positive impact on me.
In the underground cities of The Caves of Steel, people got around on complex moving walkways. They were arranged in a series of strips that moved at different speeds, with the fastest moving walkways in the center. People skilled at navigating the system could fluidly move through the crowds going from fast "express strips" to slower "off ramp" strips without breaking stride or zooming past their destinations. It looks like this is exactly what they want to build in London.
It makes me think of how Neal Stephenson lamented the rise of "pessimistic sci-fi" because he believes that big ideas in fiction can inspire people to strive to implement those ideas in the real world. It's not a stretch to think that someone who grew up reading Isaac Asimov might be driven to build a robot or a moving walkway transportation system. Elon Musk even credits The Foundation Series when he talks about his inspiration to start SpaceX and get to Mars.
I certainly couldn't answer why, but I wouldn't exactly be surprised if they added it to their lineup. $12 isn't that great by the way -- depending on your needs, have you looked at NameCheap.com? I used them for a bunch of my own domains, including their DNS service -- my needs are modest and the traffic hitting my sites is beyond low, but at less than $9 to register a .COM and free DNS it's really hard to argue with.
I used to use DynDNS (of course I've been using them since way-back-when in the modem days for dynamically updated sub-domain services), I got away from them just recently.. way too pricey for my needs, especially considering I needed to do multiple domains.
Google Apps for Work/GMail are both easy to integrate regardless of whos holding on to your records or hosting your name server, I don't think that should ever be an issue.
How's the "Google App engine"? I use Cloud9, and its unbearably slow -- but who knows what they pay for and how much they overload their machines with containers.
A common API structure amongst teams? It's hard enough coming up with a good API abstraction WITHOUT a team! I do my best to keep things as abstract as possible and leaving myself in a place where I can pass along versioning data with different object information so I don't massively break things.
Some of the biggest issues I face still include lack of foresight, thankfully I haven't had to have any truly major redesigns in any of my projects but there are always things you don't expect.
Working in the private sector FOR someone the challenges are more along the lines of "Can the other team really define what they want?" I can't define a good well abstracted API when they're unexperienced or just don't know what to ask for or even what they want.. but that problem tends to extend beyond programming :)
Other big problem: Documentation. I tend to be a 1 man team that interfaces with other teams of multiple people. I don't usually document well. That sometimes bites me in the ass months later, but that's a typical story -- document and comment! Know WHY you chose to implement an API the way you did. Was it your choice? Was it the other guy? Did you miscalculate something or not realize how a project might expand? Documentation goes beyond defining the API/ABI and again something I'm pretty bad at.
I don't know if going the OSS route would help -- in fact I significantly doubt it. What kind of a sales team do you have? That's more important than your tech, a good salesman can sell junk.. a technology guy might not be able to sell the best piece of tech out there for a penny because you just don't know how.
Do you have someone who can do cold calls? If you're after the home consumer do you have someone that can go door to door? It's even viable in today's age. What have you done for local advertising? Once you start getting some customers it's a lot easier to get more.
Remember, you can always change your business model. Do what's right for now right now and adapt for the future to do what you really want to do.
The peanut butter test is interesting. For sufferers of early onset Alzheimer's, the range at which you can detect a smell is different between your left and right nostrils. They used Peanut Butter in this test done by the University of Florida.
I never understood why George Lucas went with some nonsense alien plot for his new Indiana Jones. Fate of Atlantis was brilliant. It was pure Indy. It would have made a perfect 4th movie.
The thing is, the stop signs are treated as yield signs. If a biker just blows through the stop sign without yielding right-of-way, they can still be ticketed. So as far as safety concerns, I don't see it making any difference. The people who would ignore a "yield" are the people who are already ignoring a "stop" and are subject to being ticketed if they get caught. If you dart out in front of a car and get hit by that car, you'll still be found to be at fault (and you're the one who is going to wind up in the hospital)