If you're going to put things in a fire rated container, there are a few things to consider. Those containers are not "fire proof" by any means. Get one whose rating is reasonably high as they will buy you some time.

Most house fires are either a basic 'room and contents' or a much more involved fire where whole floors are exposed (and largely consumed) by flame.

When you put your fire rated container somewhere, consider that fire burns upwards, and the thermal difference from floor to ceiling is around 400 degrees F on average. Before you put the container in the basement corner, remember that firefighters use water to put out fires. Lots of water. 150-200GPM per handline and 1000-2000GPM for the big pipes on the ladder trucks. Most of the damage in a house fire is from water. You'll get us much as 6-12 inches of flooding per floor (until the firefighters cut holes in the floor to drain it so the floors don't collapse.

Also should the roof or ceiling collapse, the best places to have things are near the corners of the load bearing walls.

This is my long way of saying store your fire rated container on a solid hardwood (not particle board) or metal shelf, about knee height on a low floor near the corner by load bearing walls. This way in the event the whole house is a write off, you still have a reasonable chance of saving some of your data and personal effects.

A couple points,

a) to date no dinosaur DNA has been found to have survived.

b) if you were to take some DNA from a mosquito trapped in Amber (a la JP) and clone it - you would just get a mosquito.

c) Jack Horner has an excellent TED talk that discusses this point nicely:

http://blog.ted.com/2011/06/07/building-a-dinosaur-from-a-chicken-jack-horner-on-ted/

“The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process,” said Attorney-General Eric Holder... ( http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/holder-defends-obamas-view-of-due-process/article534036/ ) - granted this was in response to Obama's "Hit List" (i.e. the ability for the Executive Branch to execute American citizens who they deem to be a national threat without legal process).

However it pretty much shows the mindset you'll get on Pennsylvania Ave and the Robert Kennedy Building.

As long as there is a process - they feel they are within the constitution.

No wonder they named a Jr High School after this guy.

My ex-gf is a high school language teacher (spanish and french). She has approximately 110 different student in various grades.

Technically, teachers are paid from around 7am(ish) to 330pm (ish). She spends a 2-3 extra hours _per day_ reviewing lesson plans, grading work and doing other admin stuff. She also spends several hundred dollars per year of her own money to purchase extra materials to enhance the quality of the lessons.

While the concept is certainly sound - I don't believe that with the current workload that teachers face, it is feasible. They are already over worked.

And as for IT, typically there is 1 poor IT guy per school (in the wealthier districts).

Great idea, but who can implement it?

I strongly recommend 'Midnight at the Well of the Souls' (and the subsequent series) by Jack L Chalker. The original set of books was pretty hard to find. It is by far my favourite sci-fi series.

It is often funny, sometimes sad but always thought provoking. It's a series of books that ultimately makes you think about Life, the Universe and Everything (except for the lack of restaurants, dolphins and floating couches).

From wikipedia:

Nathan Brazil is the captain of the interstellar freighter Stehekin. While transporting three passengers, Captain Brazil receives a distress call from an uninhabited planet and makes a detour to investigate. There, they find the remains of a research team murdered by the rogue scientist Elkinos Skander in order to conceal his discovery of how to control Markovian technology. While exploring the planet, they are inadvertently transported to the Well World, where they must track down Skander and his equally brilliant and insane pupil. In addition, they must deal with being changed into bizarre alien creatures.

I'm the security director for a mid sized global company. I'm the guy behind locking down the desktops. I won't reiterate the eloquent arguments my colleagues made about the tradeoffs between security / useability and costs.

I will say that we are in process of virtualizing our business applications such that all the users will need is web browser to do the work (a la mainframes). Our tests are showing that they are a) very receptive to using whatever they want for their systems and b) our costs will be lower. The idea is the keys to our kingdom (our IP, data, code etc) are locked up pretty tightly, and the user side of the network is more open. It's an approach that seems to be doing well.

Our users are using win, mac, linux (me) and various flavours of tablets. For the apps we have virtualized, it's going well.

It is a good way to balance control and freedom.

Back in graduate school I made a proof of concept vending machine whose goal was to be able to vend beer within the local council's licensing laws.

It was a combination of the early smartcards (8k), biometrics and micropayments.

The idea is a person would register showing proof of age, have their thumb print scanned, and purchase electronic 'tokens' which were then loaded into the smartcard with the user's print. To buy a beer, the user would insert the card, validate the print - the server would then authorise beer dispension based on time/day (local licensing laws) and if the user had a token (a digital hash value).

We did a proof of concept, but my lasting regret is a) i never published and b) i didn't get sponsorship from Guinness.

A mixed blessing I suspect.

Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is professors aren't hired for their teaching ability, or even their English as a First Language skills.

Profs are hired because of the potential for additional funding through research. Many pawn off the actual teaching to their life bonded serfs (PhD students).

When I was a grad student my prof (and a lot of others) saw the lectures as a distraction to their "real work" (research).

Furthermore, given that profs are 'evaluated' by their schools by the number of papers published (and in what journals) and the amount of funding they can bring in, there is little to no motivation to teach.

Thankfully, there are a few out there who love teaching, but the rest, it's a necessary evil.

I would prefer that software vendors be held accountable for their products. Every other industry is.

Though this is what former Cyber Security Czar Richard Clarke said at Blackhat in Vegas around 2003, and well... look what happened to his career after that.