. That price also includes having a kiddo come along with you, as long as they are above the age of 7. Teenagers 15 and over are able to drive with the instructor! And maybe, after you’ve driven a tank for awhile, you want to get the taste of driving some heavy construction equipment. Another $50 will get you into the driver’s seat of a bulldozer or an excavator!
Is Tank Town pricey fun compared to other bizarre tourist attractions? Yes… but how many times can the average person honestly say they got to drive a tank or use an excavator?
Crushing a Car Is So Much Fun!
There’s just something ingrained in the very nature of the human soul about being in control while driving a tank and crushing a car that makes for a memorable, fun experience. The crunch of the metal, the power of being in control of 15 tons of tank, and the sound of glass exploding underneath your treading is something that will bring the smile to almost anyone’s face! The cost of crushing a car is $499 and reservations are required to make this happen, but if you can afford it, it is definitely worth the experience!
There is one secret at Tank Town that you may not realize: there actually aren’t any tanks over at Tank Town. That’s because the United States does not allow the sale of operational military armor. What you’ll see at Tank Town instead are armored British personnel carriers that look a lot like a tank and drive a lot like a tank… but really isn’t a tank. It only takes about 30 seconds to learn how to drive one, but the experience definitely qualifies it as one of the most fun AND most bizarre things you can do as a tourist today!
If you are planning on a trip to Tank Town, the first thing you must realize is that you’re going to get dirty. Not kind of dusty… you will want to bring a change of clothes because you are going to be covered in muck! You’ll also see that a wide range of people enjoy Tank Town, from WWII veterans to those 15 year old kids who are still learning how to drive their parent’s car. Because of the popularity, Tank Town, USA recommends making reservations no matter what you intend to do during your visit.
Be Sure To Fill Out Your Trip With Other Bizarre Things!
There’s the Statue of Liberty replica that has been modified to become a street lamp, also in Blue Ridge. It’s sitting right next to the old county courthouse in town.
There’s Patrick’s Pub & Grill, which straddles the state line between Tennessee and Georgia. What makes this bar unique is that the county in Tennessee that contains the front of the house allows liquor, but the Georgia county where the back of the house is happens to be a dry county, so it doesn’t allow any liquor whatsoever. Patrick’s has stationed a table a few feet from the bathroom so that you can set your beer down in Tennessee and not pee illegally with a beer in your hand in Georgia… without ever leaving the bar!
In Cumming, GA, about an hour away, you’ll be able to get out and climb around on two of the largest Pink Panther statues in the world. They’re right along the highway!
Cumming is worth the drive because you can also experience Booger Hill. It’s a gravity hill, which means the world of physics seems to get turned on its head – as you’re driving uphill, your car will actually pick up speed as if you were coasting downhill! Booger Hill is a very popular attraction and is often packed with traffic. It is said that this happens because the ghosts of the local slave burial grounds don’t want visitors, so they pull your vehicle back up the hill. Some people have even said that they have found handprints on their vehicle afterwards!
From Tank Town to Booger Hill, the entire Blue Ridge region is filled with fun and bizarre things to do. The only question I have is this: what if I could take one of those British personnel carriers up Booger Hill? Could the ghosts pull 15 tons of armored goodness up a hill in neutral?
Defined by the White House as a national threat, ransomware attacks are a growing threat to any organization connected to the Internet. Ransomware attacks can bring an organization to its knees and lead to bankruptcy. Knowing what to do when the attacker strikes can make the difference between a bump in the road and a lethal blow. So it is crucial to be prepared and have the necessary knowledge and structure in place to react rapidly when the attack takes place.
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Download this scenario based on a real-life attack and practice with your team to be prepared.
The increasing reliance on smart city operations has motivated the need for trusted Internet of Things (IoT) transactions due to the transformation of IoT devices from smart sensing to being active participants that share their data with fog/edge computing services. Existing security models such as centralized cloud-hosted security infrastructures cannot address IoT's security and privacy concerns because of the lack of resources and flexibility, which makes IoT devices susceptible to elevation of privileges, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS). An attractive and more realistic alternative to address these challenges is the blockchain, which uses a decentralized infrastructure for fighting DDoS attacks and eliminate the risk of a single point of failure. Blockchain serves as the backbone for diverse IoT applications, such as transactive energy auctions, self-driving cars, and trusted health-care systems. Additionally, software-defined networking (SDN) allows the development of customized security policies and services in a dynamic, software-based fashion. Complementing SDN, network function virtualization (NFV) enables scaling IoT capabilities by allowing on-demand service orchestration and management. By combining blockchain and SDN/NFV, we can optimize the flow management in response to attacks by enabling sophisticated analysis of IoT transactions and improving security and privacy based on global network awareness given by centralized SDN controllers. To that end, in this chapter, we introduce an SDN architecture for enforcing security of IoT transaction in the blockchain. We also introduce a novel proof-of-authority (PoA) consensus algorithm to report suspected IoT smart devices and report them under smart contract. We then introduce a distributed intrusion detection system as a manifestation of virtualized network functions (VNFs) in the fog computing environment, i.e., a firewall-as-a-service in SDN network, which takes care of malicious flows and enables DDoS detection and mitigation on-demand.Atlas Break is currently being printed in a factory as I write this. That is just mind-blowing to me and so exciting. A physical card game like the ones on my shelves, like the ones at the boardgame shops and cafes I love. So much work has gone into this game and the product itself is really just the beginning. But, before diving into the future of Atlas Break, I want to take a look at the past and deliver a brief history of the game’s incarnations.
When I first began designing Atlas Break, it was absolutely nothing like its current incarnation. My initial task for this project was to create a two player digital card game.
I delivered a few ideas of different play styles, little family trees of mechanics and we chose one to go with. My ideas manifested everywhere. I was constantly brainstorming and daydreaming. Two activities which I believe are essential for any task, particular creative endeavors.
Notebooks were full of sketches, lists of questions, ideas, names and on my computer copious spreadsheets and organization tools.
As I became more and more engaged in the design of the game, one mechanic seemed to lead to another. Ideas flowed and with a digital platform, mechanics could be employed which assumed automatic calculations and visual alterations accomplished instantly, easily, and reliably. One mechanic which took full advantage of that capability in the original was the leveling up of creatures. Players used decks they created pre-game full of fairly weak critters and beasts which, after surviving on the playing field for X number of turns, would automatically level up into more formidable monsters with different stats.
That was just one of the many mechanics which required a computer. As the game was being programmed, how were we going to test and play the game?
Let me tell you about my dear friends…paper and dry erase boards. Steve made a card database for me to enter every card into. From there, we printed our first prototypes on card stock. They were just spreadsheets, really, with the vital information and stats written out. Playing the game on top of a white erase board, we tracked all the stat changes, card level ups, and anything else we couldn’t remember and played the game again and again.
I played the game with more people. Friends would come to sit on the opposite side of my whiteboard and we would play. There was no way to tell how long an average game would be because so much was involved in tracking all the stat changes and levels. It was still fun.
We hired artists to help us create the beautiful imagery in the game. My wild lists of animals and robots with names like “Veta Clamps” and “Fex Rogo” and…”Harold” were becoming real. Tom created the card frames and the play field and they became more real. And I, with an endless tapestry of mechanics endlessly sought to repair any holes in the weave.
It took a long time to fill our card library with all of the necessary