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Pneumatic Tube Communication In Hospitals
blee37 sends along a writeup from the School of Medicine at Stanford University on their pneumatic tube delivery system, used for sending atoms not bits. Such systems are in use in hospitals nationwide; the 19th-century technology is enhancd by recent refinements in pneumatic braking. "Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest Silicon Valley wizardry can't match: A tubular system to transport a lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye."
So the point of this article is that physical tasks, like plumbing or carrying infected blood, can't be done electronically ?!?!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The ultra-modern pharmacy in the local town also uses pneumatic delivery for prescription drugs. You present your prescription at the counter, and the attendant checks it, then keys in the appropriate codes on the terminal. The pills/potion/whatever arrives via pneumatic tube while the instructions & labels are being printed. This is faster then the previous method where the same attendant would have to walk off and fetch the prescription materials.
Some banks also use pneumatic conveyance to send currency between the counters and the vault.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I found the article mildly interesting but the lack of details disappointing. They only mention things like switching points and waiting areas in passing. It would've been a great article if they'd talked about the specific tech - I know it's old tech, but most of us have had little to no exposure to it (I've been to banks that use it at their drive-through windows... that's about it). For example: there are switches; is there any sort of prioritization protocol, or are the switches simply for collision prevention?
#DeleteChrome
(and no couriers available to fall back on)
Luckily, they have plenty of *general purpose* organic units to fall back on, which, while less efficient than the tube network, can quickly transport the physical objects. Just because no one has "courier" in their job description, doesn't mean there are no available couriers.
Who cares about the rest of the speech? I am only talking about the series of tubes comment. It's not the whole speech people make fun of, but just that comment.
Appropriate grasp? Really? Series of tubes seems to me to be an appropriate grasp for a Senator. Unless you are saying that any Senator appointed to that subcommittee has to be an IT person.
In fact, I would bet that an IT guy might even explain it that way to a Senator if they had asked.
Instead of saying, "welll.. he is in a position of authority and you know he should like know all this stuff.." you might want to justify how series of tubes is an inappropriate and/or stupid abstraction of layer 1 communications worthy of ridicule.
If you disagreed with the rest of his speech, just say you don't like the man's politics. Just don't try making fun of him for something that is really not able to made fun of in the first place.
Nah, why people make fun of him is when he said in a speech condemning Net Neutrality: "I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially."
Assuming he meant email, is network congestion so bad that it takes a weekend to send an email? More likely he doesn't know how to use a computer properly
*whoosh*