Common core has nothing to do with what you've written. Common Core is simply a standard of what a student in a certain grade should be able to do or understand (eg, a graduating third grader should be able to identify basic shapes by categories and divide shapes into equal fractions). It doesn't say how teachers should teach the subject, and it doesn't say 'no play'. How students are taught varies between states, districts, schools, and individual teachers. If a district adopts a specific math curriculum from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and their third grade materials present the basic geometry one way and the district demands no deviation, then it gets taught HMH's way. If the state and district are more lax, and the school administration is fine as long as the kids get the material, and the teachers want to present the geometry their own way, Common Core doesn't stand in their way. And if a district wants their elementary schools to have three recesses or two or none, that's up to the district and whatever state or federal guidelines apply. Not Common Core.

Not many posters seem to realize what this device is actually for, and what its competition is. It's not meant to replace your living room TV or your monitor. Surface Hub is meant to replace 4 major devices: a computer, a projector, a conference phone, and an interactive whiteboard. Its big competitors are SMART, Promethean, Mimio, Infocus, and Sharp Aquos. Depending on size and features, their interactive displays tend to start around $3000, and are usually only replace the projector and whiteboard. Sharp's 80 inch board is $11k on Newegg, and Promethean's 84" lists at $15k.
Sure, you can hack together a cheap solution--big $1000 TV, a cheap digitizer from China for $300, a used conference phone, and a computer, but I can definitely see the allure of an all-in-one system at a moderate price premium. It's too expensive for my classrooms, but we're already planning on replacing our SMART Boards and projectors with an interactive TV in the next year or two. If MS offered one designed (and priced) for classrooms, I'd definitely be considering it.

I hate driving around Seattle because those street signs aren't always above every intersection, and sometimes when they are, you can't see them until you're already at the intersection (or they're blocked by trees, other signs, or trucks), so you can't get into the appropriate lane.

I think they want to do a hop-to-shore once the technology is matured enough, but the balanced-pencil analogy isn't really applicable. The vast majority of the rocket's mass is in the engine cluster; the rest of it is mostly a thin, hollow tube with some empty tanks. IIRC, the original plan with the drone ships was that once the rocket landed, crew would arrive and weld brackets over the landing legs to hold the rocket down, then return to shore and offload with a normal crane. Then tip the rocket onto an appropriate truck, and take it to the refurb facility.

Lightspeed Tek, which makes classroom amplification systems and related products, has a new(er) model of microphone that uses just one rechargable NiMH AA instead of the two of the previous model. They say you have to use their $9 AA NiMH in them, and if you try another brand, it won't charge. Turns out they designed the new microphone to have a separate circuit for charging, and the contact is on the barrel of the battery, not the - cap, so their batteries are missing the bottom quarter-inch of the label. Cut that area of the label off a $2 eneloop, and it works just fine (assuming you remove all the glue).

The 'ideal' temperature of Earth is one where nearly-sea-level communities, where a vast portion of humanity live, aren't flooded, forcing enormous migrations. The breadbaskets of the world should still stay productive, and the deserts should stay roughly where they are. A warming planet might open up a lot of Siberia and Canada to farming, but how long would it take to get large farms going, and how much of the wilderness would be ruined? The ideal temperature isn't about Earth--it can survive anything we can throw at it. The ideal temperature is about supporting 7+ billion humans without huge die-offs, and if we can avoid it, triggering mass extinctions.

Because the procedure is entirely untested, even in animals! He hasn't even shown he can partially heal a severed spinal cord in a rat using his technique, let alone performing a successful head transplant. I'm all for experimental procedures in extreme cases, but there's a difference between "Ok, we're ready to try this in humans now after a decade of animal and human tissue tests, though you've got a 99% chance of dying anyway" and "What if we replace his burned skin with fruit leather? This propylene glycol will give it sensation and blood vessels, I'm sure of it!"

It might not have anything to do with MGS, but it sure as hell better be a publicity stunt, because anyone involved in an actual human head transplant surgery will need to lose their medical licenses and go to prison for a very long time.

I have stuff damaged by USPS all the time, thanks almost entirely to having a small delivery box. My neighborhood uses 25-year-old cluster boxes, and there are 9 houses to a cluster. Each house gets something about a foot deep and 6x4" across. The carrier will always try to cram something into the box rather than walking it to the door. Worse, the boxes each have a quarter-inch of rim around them, so something the carrier can insert easily from their side may be extremely difficult to remove from the other. I've had to tear apart boxes and padded envelopes to extract them. I'd love to know if there's some sort of way to get the cluster boxes upgraded to the ones that have dedicated package boxes.

I have a Corsair Graphite 600T case. It has two big 200mm fans in the front and top. The stock fans both failed within a year. I replaced them off Corsair's site. They failed within a year. I decided not to buy from Corsair yet again. The fans are only 20mm thick, and the front fan is held in with a bracket that only fits 20mm thick fans. The top fan will block off wire channels if you install a thicker fan. There are essentially no third-party 200mm 20mm thick fans; they're all 30mm. I found one at Fry's and it was a no-name Chinese thing that certainly wasn't any better than Corsair's sleeve-bearing crap. I resorted to getting 4 120mm fans (which you still can't attach to the front because there aren't any mounting points), but they made my case a whole lot louder. I foresee a case upgrade this year, particularly since there isn't any place to mount 2.5" SSDs. I haven't had any other hardware failure in ages. I've even only replaced HDDs as I've collected new, larger ones during sales.

The 'USFS GIFFORD PINCHOT NAT'L FOREST' received over $1.4 million in items. It's a sizable place in southern Washington, but that still seems high. Turns out that $1.1 million of that was for FOUR rugged PDAs. Most everything they got were tools. US DOJ ATF RENTON recieved 5 multimeters valued at over $60k apiece, and other things like weather stations and oscilloscopes. PULLMAN POLICE DEPT got $22 of items: 6 pairs of sun/wind/dust goggles. KING COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE took in over 2 million, including a million-dollar utility helicopter, some sort of spectroscopy detectors, and big trailer generators. SPOKANE COUNTY SHERIFF OFFICE got a FLIR system and 3 'observation' helicopters which were valued at $276k. Quite a few departments got an MRAP and guns, but the majority of items seem to be pretty useful, non-scary things.

I've cleaned this particular virus type off several machines in the past couple months. They haven't caught on to .com files yet. They always hijack the exefile registry key, and sometimes specific executables like iexplore.exe. The worst ones hijack keys in Winlogon. They usually use this bit or even a driver to prevent removal tools from running--malwarebytes, combofix, hijackthis, spybot, adaware... The dumb ones just use filename checks, so you can rename mbam.exe to explorer.exe and run it or regedit.exe to regedit.com. The smart ones use some other method and will recognize the file you're trying to slip by them. By that point, a LiveCD is basically required.

Another big source of Vista eating up space is its WinSxS directory. It keeps EVERY version of EVERY driver or DLL you've ever installed. It's doubly worse if you're running 64-bit, since it usually has every version of every file...in both 64-bit and 32-bit. Before my harddrive tanked this weekend, the WinSxS folder was something like 25 gigs all by itself. I've read that many of these files are simply hardlinks or something, and don't actually exist in the filesystem, but as far as Windows is concerned, the space they claim to take is actually taken. As near as I can tell, there's really no way to thin out the WinSxS folder without breaking something.