Who can afford snow AND heat in this economy?

If a person doesn't keep their path shoveled enough to walk to their own mailbox, why should the mail carrier trek up to their door? Where I grew up if you didn't shovel the mail carrier wouldn't even bother. Maybe he or she would come up once and ring the bell to at least give you warning they won't come up again if you don't shovel. Most often they would just skip you. At least this way a kind neighbor could help the elderly couple with shoveling or bringing up their mail rather than getting nothing.

There are a lot of resources easily found on Google that discuss the problem of light spill and how improperly directed lighting is more dangerous than no lighting (since it creates dark spots and an illusion of safety).

The most recommended solution is to use lower power lighting and more units if necessary, ensure they are equipped with shades that direct the light down and make all effort possible to keep the light from being direct at the observer's eyes as that is the biggest problem with safety (and comfort). Lights that are elevated above people are the hardest to prevent from shining in eyes as they have to be restricted quite heavily to a small spotlight beneath them to prevent blinding people on approach and created dark spots. Keep the lights low, directed down and out of eyes!

I tried to find a collection of fixture designs I saw circulated a few months back but my search-fu is weak today. It basically compared designs of common lighting figures and pointed out the problems. For instance light bollards are generally quite useful since they sit below most people's eyes but poorly designed ones allow light to shine upward and into the observer's eyes directly causing night blindness. A proper bollard uses a shade or proper design to ensure the light is directed out and down and none up toward the eyes. Keeping the lighting level low and using more bollards makes it easier for people to transition into dark areas where the bollards can't go without causing them undo strain.

An anecdotal story: where I lived outside DC there was a bike / walking trail that followed the road until a certain point where it diverged into a more scenic area. The whole path was lined with tall traffic lights that shone quite brightly but where the path diverged, the lights didn't follow. The path was equipped with either timed or motion lights (that didn't detect motion well) at a completely different intensity but still quite high and shining outward. Walking that path in late dusk was super hazardous because you couldn't see where you were going. The lights would go on and off and the shadows it cast made it impossible to see if you were going to step in a hole or if the dark areas under the groups of trees you had to walk past had anyone concealed. It was a horrible design and it rendered the path unusable.

Interesting.

To direct link, click the time when the Tweet was made (from the Web client) and it will take you to the direct link for that Tweet.

Is this the message to which you're referring?

MacHeist has claimed in a tweet that this was a stunt gone horribly wrong.

That reference was specific to the New Jersey turnpike trucker using a jamming. I was too lazy to look up the reference and used a generic memory. Here's an article which contains that anecdote as well as other information about GPS jamming.

There's no secret or trick to it - you just broadcast the same way as a GPS sat (the protocol is well documented) and since the broadcast is local, it's more powerful than Satellites. People use GPS jamming devices to get out of paying tolls in the US - that's just broadcasting noise on the right channel. Spoofing is more refined - broadcasting actual offsets in the right channel. Really, military grade equipment should use some inertial tracking as well to prevent sudden-location shifts common with spoofing. But hindsight, weight limitations, etc.

The benefits of learning even small parts of another language exceed the practicality of using it as a part of your job.

I work with a great deal of people from various parts of India. Though Hindi is not learned universally in India, everyone I have spoken with has a fairly good grasp of it.

I learned from a book and from speaking to my coworkers. It's help build some friendships where none would have existed before and gave me the chance to augment my team with tremendous resources others had passed off because of a "language barrier." (There was no barrier; just because the grammatical structure is different doesn't mean you can't understand them if you want to. Some just didn't want to. C'est la vie - it worked out to my benefit.)

My grandfather was Norwegian so I started learning Norwegian Bokmal quite passively. As the years go by, I grow more interested in the country and culture. They are some amazing people! As a consequence, when some programmers came during Thanksgiving to get trained on a piece of MOSS software we wrote for Microsoft (did that just earn me a -1 Troll?) I was invited to attend. In this case, learning a language was an opportunity to network! As a benefit, I can now read and understand Danish and I can even understand great swaths of Dutch (which seems easier to compare to Norwegian than Swedish.)

Even if it is unlikely you will need a language for your job, there are other benefits. The important part is finding something to get you interested. It is much easier to learn a language if you have a connection to it in some way. Coworkers provide a great connection. A family history is another. A coworker of mine is learning Czech because his wife's family speaks it.

You'd be surprised how easy it is to start a conversation with someone you'd normally have no connection with (run into many engineers in the wild, do you?) by trying to speak to them in their language. Hell, I've had long conversations with people who I've mistaken their accent for one from a language I've spoken! It's a great common ground!

*These are my experiences. Your mileage may vary. Offer void in Texas.