I agree with that on the whole, but the NSA seems to be having a pretty free reign inside the country too lately. I could give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut what the NSA does to people who aren't american citizens... as long as it's not a war crime or some kind of violation of universal human rights... pretty much anything we (or most other countries except us) signed a treaty saying is a bad thing we shouldn't even do to our enemies.
But I do have a problem with them slurping up and keeping records of its own citizens data without judicial process... and lately, there's been a lot of questions about the integrity of this organization. Enough to warrant a closer inspection at the least.
the U.S. cloud computing industry stands to lose more like $180 billion,
Oh noes! That's almost as much as much money lost due to coffee machine breakdowns in the break rooms of the country! Well, at least according to the Figures Outta My Ass Department.
What I'm trying to figure out is... how does the use of more computational resources lead to a "loss"? The NSA needs a lot of "cloud" to process all that data they're collecting... Amazon and several other vendors have been jumping at the chance to create 'government cloud' services... several are in production now. Were these taken into consideration? No.
The idea that businesses are going to jump ship because of NSA spying is ridiculous. For one thing, most countries are doing the same thing the NSA is doing. Hell, the French and the Chinese are so well-known for their industrial espionage that CEOs travelling to those countries won't use the local internet, fax machines, phones, etc. This is SOP for large businesses and has been for over a decade.
Bailing out of US data centers isn't going to improve security in any real way... anyone who does the analysis quickly realizes that every major world government is spying on all the other major world governments... and their businesses.
I mean, what do you think other intelligence agencies do...? -_-
Yeah, their "Jamsecure" technology can be defeated by simply using two microphones instead of one, and sampling at double the rate of the signal. After that, just feed the inverse of the first microphone's signal into the second on a delay based on the distance from the seocnd microphone... and then do the same to the reverse. Viola, both signals are reconstructed.
Heterodyning only happens when you have a single receiver. MIMO technology and signal analysis has come a long way since then... you can separate them out quite easily these days with the right equipment.
I was using desktop publishing software in the late 1980s with a dot matrix printer to do a University magazine, they could do a lot more than you appear to be aware of.
Meh... I was using First Choice on an Epson XT computer with a whopping 20MB harddrive around that time. I'm well aware of their limitations... hence the phrasing reliably reproduce forms Dot matrix printers fade. The documents produced are harder to photocopy because the ink isn't as thick. And while yes, you can use a bitmap mode... it's painfully slow. The quality of dot matrix printing is low; they have problems with registration (as in, page offset, margins, overprint, etc.)...
No. Dot matrix is not an option for this use scenario.
And China Labour Watch also has citations to Samsung.
It says something when a private group that watches a country known for literally working its citizens to death in sweat shops, building giant dams using substandard concrete and technology that will one day result in a major ecological disaster... and saying nothing when one of the major employers started installing suicide nets on its properties to catch workers who were throwing themselves out of windows... says you have a problem with working conditions in your factories.
This is rather like Osama Bin Laden getting on the radio and says another religious extremist group has gone too far... well, I mean, if we dug him up out of the ocean, reanimated him, and his zombie self said that... *cough*
Why would/. allow a submission that uses a source that requires registration or a premium account to view?
Possibly because Slashdot is now owned by a company that requires registration and a premium account for many of its websites. Naturally, they aren't going to see much of a problem with that.
The only people who think that's a problem are the "elite" gamers who are angry that their hobby has gone mainstream and attracted a broader audience.
+5, Strawman.
Let's backup the fail train here and start over: Adding external content to a game ruins the experience. I don't want to be fixing somebody else's realworld problems in my entertainment escapism. There's nothing "elite" about this... Nintendo games were simple. They were hardcoded. They didn't have internet connections. And they were still awesome. This has nothing to do with a "broader" audience... it has to do with advancements in technology. Ever since the internet became a thing for games, we've got shit like the XBone requiring it for single-player games. We're integrating advertising into the menus of all kinds of entertainment devices.
This isn't about me going "oh poor me, I'm an elite gamer and all this mainstream attention is ruining the experience"... it's "oh poor me, my entertainment experience is being ruined by profiteering assholes who are shoving shit nobody wants down my throat..." and the only thing a "broader audience" has to do with it, is that they're too damned apathetic and ignorant to know that it was ever any other way.
Are you seriously bitching that games these days are too fun?
Umm yeah. I hate fun. True story.
That they should be punishing and brutal?
Strawman much? No. I was making fun of integrating 'real world' things into games. I want an escape, not to have more advertising or fixing someone else's real-world problems shoved down my throat. Which is what the article is suggesting we do. Because if we start adding 'public service' things into games that provide zero profit, how long do you think until gaming companies start using the same technology to make profit with it? I think we can measure the latency there in nanoseconds.
Maybe you're some unemployed shut-in who can devote 10+ hours a day to mastering a Nintendo-hard game, but that ain't something to brag about.
Strawman followed by personal attack. Yeah, definately worth the upmod.
As someone who has directly shined a 300mw laser directly into a security camera for about 30 seconds from less than 10 feet away, I am going to call bullshit because it didn't damage the camera at all. It did bind it while the laser was on it, but that was it.
Yeah, and? For one, you need a much more powerful laser. A 300mW laser is shit. The laser in your bluray burner is about 4.5x more powerful. Second, shining a laser pointer isn't going to do anything to the camera because laser pointers don't have a focusing lens on it. At even a foot away, the beam has already diverged to at least double the size from the front of the device. The square root law means that you were only delivering 1/4th that power over a given surface area then... and I'm guessing, it was probably considerably lower.
And you're the one that suggested 300mW, not me. I know better; I simply suggested a powerful laser could disable a camera. I did not specify how powerful; You assumed that.
Um, are you trying to say that digital cameras are retroreflectors? If so, they are not.
Direct quote from the wikipedia article you posted:
In common (non-SLR) digital cameras, where the sensor system is retroreflective. Researchers have used this property to demonstrate a system to prevent unauthorized photographs by detecting digital cameras and beaming a highly-focused beam of light into the lens.
But any laser strong enough to damage a camera CCD (especially through a closed shutter, or a camera not even pointed at the laser) will also damage human eyes.
Well yes, if you point them at someone's eye. I already said this in my earlier post. However, absent a high amount of particulate or humidity in the air, the risk to human beings in the area is quite low, assuming you aim it correctly and don't reflect it off something (a retroflector, as you recall, returns the light on a parallel path, so if you are targetting it correctly, the only real risk is to yourself).
Have you ever worked on IT at a hospital in Zambia? Are you certain you know more about the hospital's needs than bjhonermann does? If not, maybe you should ask your questions more respectfully. ("BRAIN WORMS" my ass.)
The fact that the OP has stated he's forging ahead despite the bleedingly obvious -- that there's a electricity shortage, lends me to believe that, yes, the OP has brain worms. If being disrespectful is what is needed to call attention to this giant sucking chest wound in his plan for modernizing the hospital... well hey then, glad I could help.
Some of the other comments said that dot-matrix printers are still in common use in third-world countries, due to their reliability, so ribbons are still widely available; and consumables costs (paper + ribbons) for dot-matrix printers are lower than inkjet or laser. Dust resistance and shelf life are also excellent. Could you have learned all that by searching Amazon?
No, I could have learned all that by searching Google. But I was around when printers were the size of filing cabinets... so I didn't need to search any website to know that. Dot matrix printers though can't reliably reproduce forms in a variety of formats and orientations... which is why you don't find them in medical records offices. Ever. And while dust resistance is 'excellent'... that's not exactly a huge problem in a hospital setting, since if there was any appreciable dust present it would affect patient health and make surgeries achem... dangerous.
Please reserve snark for cases where it is clearly warranted. This isn't one.
Dude, I grew up in the 90s. Snark is ALWAYS warranted. In fact, when I was taking a ride in an ambulance after over-dosing on my meds from a failed suicide attempt and the EMT asked if I'd found Jesus, I told him I hadn't yet because he was too busy appearing on tortilla chips in mexico and on pieces of burnt bread in Nevada, but should I find him, I would turn him into the lost and found immediately.
To advance to the next level, match the following corporate logo to its motto...
Well, it can't be much worse than it is now with DLC and in-game tutorials. Gone are the days of Doom when the instruction manual was 'New Game' and you dropped into E1M1 and either figured it out in short order, or died repeatedly until you did. Or like some of the old-school Nintendo games. You couldn't beat them, but they were fun anyway. Now everyone's a precious snowflake and games have different options in case you happen to suck at, say, using a mouse. I'm looking at you, Mass Effect 3.
currently rolling out an electronic medical records (EMR) system in public health facilities...
Okay, good...
We're providing solar panels and battery backups for sites, which work increasingly well w
One cloudy day and your doctors can't access critical life-saving patient data... and people die. Might I suggest a generator, with fuel, like other hospitals have?
might be accomplished if we had low cost low power B/W printers available at sites so that critical information could be entered electronically and then printed out as needed, either for client carried purposes (transfers/visits to 'paper facilities') or to serve as local backup when power is an issue. However, we've yet to find printing solutions that seem appropriate to the context and are hopeful the Slashdot crowd may have some ideas."
Yeah, actually, just google for "battery powered printer". Amazon sells them. But I strongly suggest you fix your infrastructure problem (reliable power) before you increase your reliance on it as you are proposing...
Today's classroom science explanation brought to you by Jah-Wren Ryei, the idiot moderator who +1'd someone talking out of their ass, and wikipedia. Stay tuned for more exciting science later in this thread, where we'll go in detail to explore the behind the scenes technology that makes camera 'jamming' a reality, and why for some strange reason only people who have read books on optics can understand... it doesn't detect and blind human eyes.
Modern cameras are easy to detect and destroy without leaving any physical evidence. All you need is something capable of sending out a pulse of near-infrared light and then looking for the highest return signal. Visible light will work too, but since we're being sneaky and all. All digital reflect light in the same direction as it is received; an optical quality not found naturally.
Just shoot a high power laser on a very short duration wherever this quality is found, and you'll burn out the CCD of any nearby digital camera. Be warned however; while this won't happen to humans, animals like cats have eyes which produce similar effect. Make sure you aren't using such a device indiscriminately. As well, the headlights of newer cars also exhibit this quality... so you should manually aim such a device towards a likely camera and then let the optics get a precise fix on the CCD.
No need to jam... fire once, move on. You can even do it from miles away, where you're not even a single pixel in the frame. All that'll be recorded is a bright flash of multicolored or white light, followed by camera death.
Ambition: These network admins need some. I'm still waiting for one of these sites to update their DNS to include every IP address on the internet with an 'A' record in their domain, then create a web page for their crawler that sequentially lists them all. The entire UK wakes up tomorrow with no internet.
Great Britain could use a Great kick in the ass. The irony of trying to block porn and winding up booting themselves off the entire internet cannot be understated.
Ah yes, the slashdot mods are hating on the truth again.
"These Moderator Points Paid For By The Department of American Propaganda."
Sadly, the facts are not in favor of the moderators today. $1.2 billion a year has bought the egyptian military a lot of democracy! And finding out what Reagan did is just an google away. But hey mods... don't let your blind patriotism get in the way of a righteous down-modding. Afterall, being critical of your own government supporting re-directing billions to kill peaceful protesters is a very democratic thing to do... unlike, say, providing food stamps, which presently has a smaller budget than the money we're giving to Egypt right now to kill its own citizens.
But don't let reality get in the way of your bizarre conspiracy theory.
From TFA: "Egyptâ(TM)s Health Ministry said 60 people died and 874 injured..."
A cursory glance at the timestamp on these stories provides a big clue as to what happened here, and the clue suggests "bizarre conspiracy theory" shouldn't be the conclusion drawn. The OP should be chastized for not RTFA, which is the most likely explanation, not chastized for wearing a tin foil hat, which is unlikely, though a popular personal attack these days.
Gotta protect the reputation of those "allies" to justify not calling the Egyptian situation what it is: a military coup.
Ah, I don't think it's the reputation of our "allies" we're worried about. I think it's our own ass, since we have a long history of supplying military weapons and no-strings-attached money by the pallet to Egypt. Hell, we used to supply weapons to Iran... though apparently people's memories are shorter than ever since the advent of the internet and people forgot about Reagan. Much of the militarization and violence in the middle east is directly due to us giving them those weapons. America follows the 34th Rule of Acquisition like any good Ferrengi would. Though right now the 98th and 125th could really use some attention...
If you're going 60 miles an hour or more, you're almost invariably trusting your life to a combination of road construction, road conditions, and a $150(ish) tire. And how well do you trust the frame welds?
I can see the road and the road conditions. I've had tires blow out and it doesn't immediately result in the car exploding, killing everyone inside... instead it just makes a wub-wub-wub sound like it's dub-stepping and the car starts to pull hard to one side. Assuming you aren't in the middle of a turn at freeway speeds, it's a non-event. Aaaand if you are... well, let's just say you can skip the morning coffee because the morning commute just took a turn for the interesting.
And as far as trusting the frame welds... most modern cars are a unibody design. They don't have welds. But let's say they did, and hundreds of them decided to give way simultaniously while driving... the fact is that I'm still surrounded by a couple of tons of plastic, metal, and rubber. Physics dictates this is going to end much better for me than firing my naked body into a concrete barrier at 60 MPH. The car is travelling at the same speed as I am, whether its in pieces or not... and it's going to be what absorbs most of the impact, not my delicate fleshy bits.
So even if the car disintegrates around me... as often happens in high-speed collisions with cars anyway... it's going to end a lot better for me than having a hundred plus pounds of shit strapped to my back and being fired at terminal velocity into the pavement.
This is democracy in action. No, really. You think jackbooted thugs roaming the streets freely without resistance is democracy? Democracy is bloody. It's violent. This is how it's supposed to be when the government decides to arm itself and consider its own people the enemy, potential subversives, terrorists, etc. The will of the people is never so clearly shown when they're being crushed underneath tanks and there's bodies in the streets and floating down the rivers.
Of course... they're losing. Apparently all those weapons and support we've been shipping overseas has found a use: Bringing democracy to other countries. (-_-) Now I'm not suggesting we get involved (US State Department; I'm looking at you and your comical avoidance of the word 'coup')... just that if you zoom in on those protesters you're going to see a lot of signs on both sides angry at America... and there may be good reason for that, and you know, maybe we should take responsibility for the role we've played in this.
Ah, who am I kidding -- keep the funding coming guys! This is great TV!
Speaking of bots... I'd like to propose a new flying hunter-killer robot that tracks down people who submit election-related news when there is no election happening in the next month. By all means, go bat-shit crazy about the election when it's actually timely... but right now, nobody gives a fuck. No really: The number of fucks given counter hit zero almost a year ago. The care-o-meter in Carealot is pointing straight down. Tenderheart is cutting his own wrists right now and sobbing. Grumpybear finally feels validated. Can I be any more clear on this lack of fucks given?
The media wants us to care about an election that's three years from now. This is like trying to start the Christmas season in July. Mind you, the Christmas season currently expanding like an unemployed American living in a McDonald's... but even rabid christians and retailers hoping for some dollars for jesus hasn't been able to fatten it up to the point where it's eaten adjacent seasons.
Now, let's talk about those hunter-killer robots. That is relevant to nerds. Especially snarky and annoyed ones.
And things are, by default, legal in Thailand; same as everywhere else. Very much the opposite of everything being illegal... the reality is you might be surprised how much is not illegal!
The reality is... I could really go for a citation. That would be surprising. An internet pundit suggesting that the world is not as it appears is neither enlightening nor informative.
We're talking about the only country in SE Asia to avoid European colonization. They're not going to go all, "Ooooooh, shiny" over freakin' bitcoin and forget to safeguard their currency.
Ah, according to internet pundits, that's exactly what's going on -- "by default, legal in Thailand" would mean I could pay for everything with "Custom NuDollars", a currency I just invented. But it's cool... you got a +1 from someone who hasn't had their morning coffee, so win for you!
That said, they do not care, legally or otherwise, if you convince a cab driver to accept bitcoin or IOUs or Zimbabwe Dollars.
Said cabbie may come looking for you when his suitcase full of Zimbabwe Dollars turns out to be not as valuable as promised. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's a good idea!
The head of the central bank of Thailand issued a preliminary ruling expressing that Bitcoin may be illegal because there are no laws that allow its use.
Well, many countries have laws dictating what can and cannot be used as currency. If Thailand is such a country (and I honestly couldn't tell you -- their laws aren't written in English), then any currency would have to be declared valid by the government before it could be used. Otherwise I could say that, say, volcanic rocks are a form of currency and could go on exchanging rocks with other people as if it were currency... which needless to say, wouldn't be a good thing. Now, bitcoin is considerably more resiliant to counterfeit than burned up rocks, but the legal theory is similar.
The head of the central bank, naturally, wants some resolution on this -- because their business involves currency conversion. It seems only reasonable that until a new currency can be vetted by an appropriate authority, banks default to not using it.
And all of this underscores that banking institutions around the world are considering joining the currency exchange market. This would be a very good thing for bitcoin users because it would prevent a lot of the instability in the price of bitcoins -- you can't DDoS Visa/Mastercard the same way you can with current bitcoin exchanges.
All that said... other governments can and should be suspicious of bitcoin for an entirely overlooked reason: The main algorithm it depends on is SHA-2. Guess who invented it: The NSA. And the organization has, in the past, found vulnerabilities (or created them!) in cryptographic algorithms, then released them to the public. To this day, the Enigma ciphering system used by the Germans during WWII is still available for commercial purchase and use. Think about that for a minute.
Now... if you're a government that is considering allowing its businesses (or itself!) to use this new currency... how much do you trust it? The SHA-2 algorithm could have a fatal flaw that has gone undetected that could allow the NSA to forge transactions, saturate the market with bitcoins, or do all kinds of nefarious things.
Below this comment, please find a large pile of pendants and self-described mathematicians telling you how unlikely this is, and ignoring the fact that governments don't give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut about technical arguments... they do place a great value on reputation and the history of other persons and organizations however. It's politics 101; And no matter how many statistics the pendants will throw out... they can't erase the fact that politicians, not mathematicians and computer geeks, are the ones making the decision on whether or not to use a given technology. -_-
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with that on the whole, but the NSA seems to be having a pretty free reign inside the country too lately. I could give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut what the NSA does to people who aren't american citizens... as long as it's not a war crime or some kind of violation of universal human rights... pretty much anything we (or most other countries except us) signed a treaty saying is a bad thing we shouldn't even do to our enemies.
But I do have a problem with them slurping up and keeping records of its own citizens data without judicial process... and lately, there's been a lot of questions about the integrity of this organization. Enough to warrant a closer inspection at the least.
the U.S. cloud computing industry stands to lose more like $180 billion,
Oh noes! That's almost as much as much money lost due to coffee machine breakdowns in the break rooms of the country! Well, at least according to the Figures Outta My Ass Department.
What I'm trying to figure out is... how does the use of more computational resources lead to a "loss"? The NSA needs a lot of "cloud" to process all that data they're collecting... Amazon and several other vendors have been jumping at the chance to create 'government cloud' services... several are in production now. Were these taken into consideration? No.
The idea that businesses are going to jump ship because of NSA spying is ridiculous. For one thing, most countries are doing the same thing the NSA is doing. Hell, the French and the Chinese are so well-known for their industrial espionage that CEOs travelling to those countries won't use the local internet, fax machines, phones, etc. This is SOP for large businesses and has been for over a decade.
Bailing out of US data centers isn't going to improve security in any real way... anyone who does the analysis quickly realizes that every major world government is spying on all the other major world governments... and their businesses.
I mean, what do you think other intelligence agencies do...? -_-
Yeah, their "Jamsecure" technology can be defeated by simply using two microphones instead of one, and sampling at double the rate of the signal. After that, just feed the inverse of the first microphone's signal into the second on a delay based on the distance from the seocnd microphone... and then do the same to the reverse. Viola, both signals are reconstructed.
Heterodyning only happens when you have a single receiver. MIMO technology and signal analysis has come a long way since then... you can separate them out quite easily these days with the right equipment.
I was using desktop publishing software in the late 1980s with a dot matrix printer to do a University magazine, they could do a lot more than you appear to be aware of.
Meh... I was using First Choice on an Epson XT computer with a whopping 20MB harddrive around that time. I'm well aware of their limitations... hence the phrasing reliably reproduce forms Dot matrix printers fade. The documents produced are harder to photocopy because the ink isn't as thick. And while yes, you can use a bitmap mode... it's painfully slow. The quality of dot matrix printing is low; they have problems with registration (as in, page offset, margins, overprint, etc.)...
No. Dot matrix is not an option for this use scenario.
And China Labour Watch also has citations to Samsung.
It says something when a private group that watches a country known for literally working its citizens to death in sweat shops, building giant dams using substandard concrete and technology that will one day result in a major ecological disaster... and saying nothing when one of the major employers started installing suicide nets on its properties to catch workers who were throwing themselves out of windows... says you have a problem with working conditions in your factories.
This is rather like Osama Bin Laden getting on the radio and says another religious extremist group has gone too far... well, I mean, if we dug him up out of the ocean, reanimated him, and his zombie self said that... *cough*
Why would /. allow a submission that uses a source that requires registration or a premium account to view?
Possibly because Slashdot is now owned by a company that requires registration and a premium account for many of its websites. Naturally, they aren't going to see much of a problem with that.
The only people who think that's a problem are the "elite" gamers who are angry that their hobby has gone mainstream and attracted a broader audience.
+5, Strawman.
Let's backup the fail train here and start over: Adding external content to a game ruins the experience. I don't want to be fixing somebody else's realworld problems in my entertainment escapism. There's nothing "elite" about this... Nintendo games were simple. They were hardcoded. They didn't have internet connections. And they were still awesome. This has nothing to do with a "broader" audience... it has to do with advancements in technology. Ever since the internet became a thing for games, we've got shit like the XBone requiring it for single-player games. We're integrating advertising into the menus of all kinds of entertainment devices.
This isn't about me going "oh poor me, I'm an elite gamer and all this mainstream attention is ruining the experience"... it's "oh poor me, my entertainment experience is being ruined by profiteering assholes who are shoving shit nobody wants down my throat..." and the only thing a "broader audience" has to do with it, is that they're too damned apathetic and ignorant to know that it was ever any other way.
Are you seriously bitching that games these days are too fun?
Umm yeah. I hate fun. True story.
That they should be punishing and brutal?
Strawman much? No. I was making fun of integrating 'real world' things into games. I want an escape, not to have more advertising or fixing someone else's real-world problems shoved down my throat. Which is what the article is suggesting we do. Because if we start adding 'public service' things into games that provide zero profit, how long do you think until gaming companies start using the same technology to make profit with it? I think we can measure the latency there in nanoseconds.
Maybe you're some unemployed shut-in who can devote 10+ hours a day to mastering a Nintendo-hard game, but that ain't something to brag about.
Strawman followed by personal attack. Yeah, definately worth the upmod.
As someone who has directly shined a 300mw laser directly into a security camera for about 30 seconds from less than 10 feet away, I am going to call bullshit because it didn't damage the camera at all. It did bind it while the laser was on it, but that was it.
Yeah, and? For one, you need a much more powerful laser. A 300mW laser is shit. The laser in your bluray burner is about 4.5x more powerful. Second, shining a laser pointer isn't going to do anything to the camera because laser pointers don't have a focusing lens on it. At even a foot away, the beam has already diverged to at least double the size from the front of the device. The square root law means that you were only delivering 1/4th that power over a given surface area then... and I'm guessing, it was probably considerably lower.
And you're the one that suggested 300mW, not me. I know better; I simply suggested a powerful laser could disable a camera. I did not specify how powerful; You assumed that.
Um, are you trying to say that digital cameras are retroreflectors? If so, they are not.
Direct quote from the wikipedia article you posted:
In common (non-SLR) digital cameras, where the sensor system is retroreflective. Researchers have used this property to demonstrate a system to prevent unauthorized photographs by detecting digital cameras and beaming a highly-focused beam of light into the lens.
But any laser strong enough to damage a camera CCD (especially through a closed shutter, or a camera not even pointed at the laser) will also damage human eyes.
Well yes, if you point them at someone's eye. I already said this in my earlier post. However, absent a high amount of particulate or humidity in the air, the risk to human beings in the area is quite low, assuming you aim it correctly and don't reflect it off something (a retroflector, as you recall, returns the light on a parallel path, so if you are targetting it correctly, the only real risk is to yourself).
Have you ever worked on IT at a hospital in Zambia? Are you certain you know more about the hospital's needs than bjhonermann does? If not, maybe you should ask your questions more respectfully. ("BRAIN WORMS" my ass.)
The fact that the OP has stated he's forging ahead despite the bleedingly obvious -- that there's a electricity shortage, lends me to believe that, yes, the OP has brain worms. If being disrespectful is what is needed to call attention to this giant sucking chest wound in his plan for modernizing the hospital... well hey then, glad I could help.
Some of the other comments said that dot-matrix printers are still in common use in third-world countries, due to their reliability, so ribbons are still widely available; and consumables costs (paper + ribbons) for dot-matrix printers are lower than inkjet or laser. Dust resistance and shelf life are also excellent. Could you have learned all that by searching Amazon?
No, I could have learned all that by searching Google. But I was around when printers were the size of filing cabinets... so I didn't need to search any website to know that. Dot matrix printers though can't reliably reproduce forms in a variety of formats and orientations... which is why you don't find them in medical records offices. Ever. And while dust resistance is 'excellent'... that's not exactly a huge problem in a hospital setting, since if there was any appreciable dust present it would affect patient health and make surgeries achem... dangerous.
Please reserve snark for cases where it is clearly warranted. This isn't one.
Dude, I grew up in the 90s. Snark is ALWAYS warranted. In fact, when I was taking a ride in an ambulance after over-dosing on my meds from a failed suicide attempt and the EMT asked if I'd found Jesus, I told him I hadn't yet because he was too busy appearing on tortilla chips in mexico and on pieces of burnt bread in Nevada, but should I find him, I would turn him into the lost and found immediately.
To advance to the next level, match the following corporate logo to its motto...
Well, it can't be much worse than it is now with DLC and in-game tutorials. Gone are the days of Doom when the instruction manual was 'New Game' and you dropped into E1M1 and either figured it out in short order, or died repeatedly until you did. Or like some of the old-school Nintendo games. You couldn't beat them, but they were fun anyway. Now everyone's a precious snowflake and games have different options in case you happen to suck at, say, using a mouse. I'm looking at you, Mass Effect 3.
So we're angry at rich large businesses for doing what poor public schools do? I'm confused -- why is this news?
currently rolling out an electronic medical records (EMR) system in public health facilities...
Okay, good...
We're providing solar panels and battery backups for sites, which work increasingly well w
One cloudy day and your doctors can't access critical life-saving patient data... and people die. Might I suggest a generator, with fuel, like other hospitals have?
might be accomplished if we had low cost low power B/W printers available at sites so that critical information could be entered electronically and then printed out as needed, either for client carried purposes (transfers/visits to 'paper facilities') or to serve as local backup when power is an issue. However, we've yet to find printing solutions that seem appropriate to the context and are hopeful the Slashdot crowd may have some ideas."
Yeah, actually, just google for "battery powered printer". Amazon sells them. But I strongly suggest you fix your infrastructure problem (reliable power) before you increase your reliance on it as you are proposing...
Yeah, people never get red-eye in photos.
Sigh. Red eye is caused by the ABSORPTION of light, not the REFLECTION of light. A retroflector is what is in a CCD, and in a cat's eye. example of red eye example of cat eye. Note the difference.
Today's classroom science explanation brought to you by Jah-Wren Ryei, the idiot moderator who +1'd someone talking out of their ass, and wikipedia. Stay tuned for more exciting science later in this thread, where we'll go in detail to explore the behind the scenes technology that makes camera 'jamming' a reality, and why for some strange reason only people who have read books on optics can understand... it doesn't detect and blind human eyes.
Modern cameras are easy to detect and destroy without leaving any physical evidence. All you need is something capable of sending out a pulse of near-infrared light and then looking for the highest return signal. Visible light will work too, but since we're being sneaky and all. All digital reflect light in the same direction as it is received; an optical quality not found naturally.
Just shoot a high power laser on a very short duration wherever this quality is found, and you'll burn out the CCD of any nearby digital camera. Be warned however; while this won't happen to humans, animals like cats have eyes which produce similar effect. Make sure you aren't using such a device indiscriminately. As well, the headlights of newer cars also exhibit this quality... so you should manually aim such a device towards a likely camera and then let the optics get a precise fix on the CCD.
No need to jam... fire once, move on. You can even do it from miles away, where you're not even a single pixel in the frame. All that'll be recorded is a bright flash of multicolored or white light, followed by camera death.
Ambition: These network admins need some. I'm still waiting for one of these sites to update their DNS to include every IP address on the internet with an 'A' record in their domain, then create a web page for their crawler that sequentially lists them all. The entire UK wakes up tomorrow with no internet.
Great Britain could use a Great kick in the ass. The irony of trying to block porn and winding up booting themselves off the entire internet cannot be understated.
Ah yes, the slashdot mods are hating on the truth again.
"These Moderator Points Paid For By The Department of American Propaganda."
Sadly, the facts are not in favor of the moderators today. $1.2 billion a year has bought the egyptian military a lot of democracy! And finding out what Reagan did is just an google away. But hey mods... don't let your blind patriotism get in the way of a righteous down-modding. Afterall, being critical of your own government supporting re-directing billions to kill peaceful protesters is a very democratic thing to do... unlike, say, providing food stamps, which presently has a smaller budget than the money we're giving to Egypt right now to kill its own citizens.
-1, Truthful.
But don't let reality get in the way of your bizarre conspiracy theory.
From TFA: "Egyptâ(TM)s Health Ministry said 60 people died and 874 injured..."
A cursory glance at the timestamp on these stories provides a big clue as to what happened here, and the clue suggests "bizarre conspiracy theory" shouldn't be the conclusion drawn. The OP should be chastized for not RTFA, which is the most likely explanation, not chastized for wearing a tin foil hat, which is unlikely, though a popular personal attack these days.
Gotta protect the reputation of those "allies" to justify not calling the Egyptian situation what it is: a military coup.
Ah, I don't think it's the reputation of our "allies" we're worried about. I think it's our own ass, since we have a long history of supplying military weapons and no-strings-attached money by the pallet to Egypt. Hell, we used to supply weapons to Iran... though apparently people's memories are shorter than ever since the advent of the internet and people forgot about Reagan. Much of the militarization and violence in the middle east is directly due to us giving them those weapons. America follows the 34th Rule of Acquisition like any good Ferrengi would. Though right now the 98th and 125th could really use some attention...
If you're going 60 miles an hour or more, you're almost invariably trusting your life to a combination of road construction, road conditions, and a $150(ish) tire. And how well do you trust the frame welds?
I can see the road and the road conditions. I've had tires blow out and it doesn't immediately result in the car exploding, killing everyone inside... instead it just makes a wub-wub-wub sound like it's dub-stepping and the car starts to pull hard to one side. Assuming you aren't in the middle of a turn at freeway speeds, it's a non-event. Aaaand if you are... well, let's just say you can skip the morning coffee because the morning commute just took a turn for the interesting.
And as far as trusting the frame welds... most modern cars are a unibody design. They don't have welds. But let's say they did, and hundreds of them decided to give way simultaniously while driving... the fact is that I'm still surrounded by a couple of tons of plastic, metal, and rubber. Physics dictates this is going to end much better for me than firing my naked body into a concrete barrier at 60 MPH. The car is travelling at the same speed as I am, whether its in pieces or not... and it's going to be what absorbs most of the impact, not my delicate fleshy bits.
So even if the car disintegrates around me... as often happens in high-speed collisions with cars anyway... it's going to end a lot better for me than having a hundred plus pounds of shit strapped to my back and being fired at terminal velocity into the pavement.
This is democracy in action. No, really. You think jackbooted thugs roaming the streets freely without resistance is democracy? Democracy is bloody. It's violent. This is how it's supposed to be when the government decides to arm itself and consider its own people the enemy, potential subversives, terrorists, etc. The will of the people is never so clearly shown when they're being crushed underneath tanks and there's bodies in the streets and floating down the rivers.
Of course... they're losing. Apparently all those weapons and support we've been shipping overseas has found a use: Bringing democracy to other countries. (-_-) Now I'm not suggesting we get involved (US State Department; I'm looking at you and your comical avoidance of the word 'coup')... just that if you zoom in on those protesters you're going to see a lot of signs on both sides angry at America... and there may be good reason for that, and you know, maybe we should take responsibility for the role we've played in this.
Ah, who am I kidding -- keep the funding coming guys! This is great TV!
Speaking of bots... I'd like to propose a new flying hunter-killer robot that tracks down people who submit election-related news when there is no election happening in the next month . By all means, go bat-shit crazy about the election when it's actually timely... but right now, nobody gives a fuck. No really: The number of fucks given counter hit zero almost a year ago. The care-o-meter in Carealot is pointing straight down. Tenderheart is cutting his own wrists right now and sobbing. Grumpybear finally feels validated. Can I be any more clear on this lack of fucks given?
The media wants us to care about an election that's three years from now. This is like trying to start the Christmas season in July. Mind you, the Christmas season currently expanding like an unemployed American living in a McDonald's... but even rabid christians and retailers hoping for some dollars for jesus hasn't been able to fatten it up to the point where it's eaten adjacent seasons.
Now, let's talk about those hunter-killer robots. That is relevant to nerds. Especially snarky and annoyed ones.
And things are, by default, legal in Thailand; same as everywhere else. Very much the opposite of everything being illegal... the reality is you might be surprised how much is not illegal!
The reality is... I could really go for a citation. That would be surprising. An internet pundit suggesting that the world is not as it appears is neither enlightening nor informative.
We're talking about the only country in SE Asia to avoid European colonization. They're not going to go all, "Ooooooh, shiny" over freakin' bitcoin and forget to safeguard their currency.
Ah, according to internet pundits, that's exactly what's going on -- "by default, legal in Thailand" would mean I could pay for everything with "Custom NuDollars", a currency I just invented. But it's cool... you got a +1 from someone who hasn't had their morning coffee, so win for you!
That said, they do not care, legally or otherwise, if you convince a cab driver to accept bitcoin or IOUs or Zimbabwe Dollars.
Said cabbie may come looking for you when his suitcase full of Zimbabwe Dollars turns out to be not as valuable as promised. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's a good idea!
The head of the central bank of Thailand issued a preliminary ruling expressing that Bitcoin may be illegal because there are no laws that allow its use.
Well, many countries have laws dictating what can and cannot be used as currency. If Thailand is such a country (and I honestly couldn't tell you -- their laws aren't written in English), then any currency would have to be declared valid by the government before it could be used. Otherwise I could say that, say, volcanic rocks are a form of currency and could go on exchanging rocks with other people as if it were currency... which needless to say, wouldn't be a good thing. Now, bitcoin is considerably more resiliant to counterfeit than burned up rocks, but the legal theory is similar.
The head of the central bank, naturally, wants some resolution on this -- because their business involves currency conversion. It seems only reasonable that until a new currency can be vetted by an appropriate authority, banks default to not using it.
And all of this underscores that banking institutions around the world are considering joining the currency exchange market. This would be a very good thing for bitcoin users because it would prevent a lot of the instability in the price of bitcoins -- you can't DDoS Visa/Mastercard the same way you can with current bitcoin exchanges.
All that said... other governments can and should be suspicious of bitcoin for an entirely overlooked reason: The main algorithm it depends on is SHA-2. Guess who invented it: The NSA. And the organization has, in the past, found vulnerabilities (or created them!) in cryptographic algorithms, then released them to the public. To this day, the Enigma ciphering system used by the Germans during WWII is still available for commercial purchase and use. Think about that for a minute.
Now... if you're a government that is considering allowing its businesses (or itself!) to use this new currency... how much do you trust it? The SHA-2 algorithm could have a fatal flaw that has gone undetected that could allow the NSA to forge transactions, saturate the market with bitcoins, or do all kinds of nefarious things.
Below this comment, please find a large pile of pendants and self-described mathematicians telling you how unlikely this is, and ignoring the fact that governments don't give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut about technical arguments... they do place a great value on reputation and the history of other persons and organizations however. It's politics 101; And no matter how many statistics the pendants will throw out... they can't erase the fact that politicians, not mathematicians and computer geeks, are the ones making the decision on whether or not to use a given technology. -_-
Let the flames begin.