So... the highest level of authority in that office who should know about this, is probably a partner in the law firm, and risks losing his license to practice law because of it
So far as I know, there's no requirement that your doors be locked to remain licensed to practice law. The door is deadbolted after hours, so it's not an issue after hours. Also, both partners are aware of the issue because I wave the damn popsicle stick at them as a reminder every time I'm there.
... and you are still liable for a charge of B&E...
I suggest you go read the definition of B&E/Burglary. Basically, it is this:
"entering a building or remaining unlawfully with intent to commit any crime"
1) every time I'm there I am there at their request and am permitted to be in the area by the back door
2) what crime? I'm there to make keys to file cabinets or reset the combination on their safe, again, at their request
and the head of security is an accessory to your B&E...
Where did you acquire your legal education? Television? An accessory must generally have knowledge that a crime is being, or will be committed. At most this could be considered negligence, but as such would only be grounds for dismissal or civil suit. But given that the partners know all about it and tactly approve, that's not even a sure thing.
At first I thought man-trap would be they lock you in if anything goes wrong, the problem here would be a potentially devestating liability if there is any injury.
Think about the lawsuit if someone got injured or killed (or mildly annoyed) if they were physically detained by an automated system.
Yeah, you usually only find man-traps at places like Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the system is supervised by actual live security personel. A man-trap is really only worth the effort and expense of constant monitoring if you're running something like LANL, where if a guy tries to wander in with a found/stolen card, you don't want him to just be able to say "oh well, no secret stealing for me today" and just walk away.
but it really doesn't read the card, it just verifies that you stuck a magstrip card into the slot....It may also be that, in fact, it was turned this way because of a problem with reliability of magstripe cards (they fail pretty regularly), and instead the system should have been converted to another form of identification -- Wiegand, RF proxy, etc.
One law office where I work had so much trouble with the mag-stripe reader on the back door that the head of security himself opened the thing up and wired the electric strike release directly to the microswitch that detects when a card's been inserted! This means that you can get in the back door with anything that fits in the slot, even a popsicle stick, a trick I throughly enjoy demonstrating every time I go there. I even keep a popsicle stick in the truck just for that purpose.
Surprised guy who sits by back door: How'd you get in?
Me: Popsicle stick (holding up popsicle stick)
Yeah, damn it, if they hadn't put massive restrictions on owning guns in Britain seventy years ago, Britain wouldn't be seeing a slight increase in one type of crime today!
I think that's missing the real issue. Limiting private posession of firearms has, for most of the last 70 years, been the modus operandi of most of europe. That being the case, the black market supply of firearms has likewise been fairly limited. With the fall of the soviet union and the rise of the open border/less repressive government Russia, however, I suspect the black market has expanded somewhat over the last decade or so.
One person just can't accomplish that kind of violence with any kind of weapon short of a gun.
...or a car, or a bomb, or a good gasoline accelerated fire. You lack imagination and resourcefulness if you think a gun is the only way to kill multiple people quickly and effectively.
This has always bugged me a bit too... What's not semi-automatic about a double action revolver?
It fires pretty much as fast as you can pull the trigger with no extra steps between shots.
"semi-automatic" generally implies that some portion of the energy used to fire the previous round was used to 1) bring the current round into firing position, and 2) cock the hammer. With a DA revolver it's still you doing all that work, though through a mechanical contrivance that integrates it fairly seamlessly into the process of firing (i.e. pulling the trigger). The difference between the two has been blurred slightly of late by semi-auto pistols like the Glock, which use a spring loaded striker that's drawn back and released by the trigger pull, instead of a traditional hammer.
Unless I'm mistaken, the top of a coke can is a separate piece made of an alloy that will stick to a magnet
You are mistaken. They always make the tops out of the same thing as the rest because 1) they only want to deal with a single metal supply-- in this case, sheet aluminum; and 2) the potential for electrolytic effects with dissimilar metals in contact with an acidic substance means the cans might suffer internal corrosion, wiping out any imaginable advantage to using a different alloy.
Do you have a cite? I've always suspected doctors collectively manipulate the market this way, but I couldn't find a credible source, nor an explanation of how it works. Is it just as simple as doctors dictating how many new doctors will be trained?
Well, there was a class action lawsuit that alleged exactly that a while back, but it was dismissed. I think looking for overt manipulation like that is barking up the wrong tree. The problem is much more basic. The AMA is a private professional guild that has no public oversight. Despite this, they have become the governing body deciding who does and does not get a license to practice medicine in thius country. As such, they get to decide what is required of a prospective doctor before they are granted a license. Among other things, they decide what schools are acceptable and how long an apprenticeship (called "residency") one must endure to qualify. The problem is that about a hundred years ago the AMA got it into its collective head that doctors should only be some sort of elite, upper class. To further that notion they required more and more arguably unnecessary schooling and experience before awarding a license. They rationalize it as quality control by claiming that every doctor should be the "best possible", but that's ridiculous. Sure, it'd be great if every doctor could look at a list of symptoms and say "AHA! He is suffering sleeping sickness from the bite of a tsetse fly!", but does it really make sense to expect that level of skill from a guy who only intends to remove warts? Is there no room in the US for a class of medical practitioner somewhere below the current minimum? They have 'em in other countries.
How hard is it for doctors trained elsewhere to transfer? I think it's time for a medical H1B visa program.
The AMA has always (successfully) argued for strict limits on the imigration of foreign doctors, explicitly arguing that they would depress wages. Scum.
There is actually a lot that goes into becoming a competent physician. You may want your doctor to remove a mole now, but if that was all your doctor could do you might feel shortchanged when you needed someone to be able to manage your barely compensated congestive heart failure, set up your mechanical ventilator when you develop ARDS after a devastating car accident, or coax your premature infant through the first months of life.
See, this is exactly the problem. Not even half of "doctoring" is critical care stuff. Most of it is routine care. By setting an unnecessarily high bar to entry on such a wide-ranging profession, the supply is limited. Why the hell would you go to a dermatologist to manage congestive heart failure? Or to install a ventilator after an accident? That's as dumb as taking your car to an upholstery shop to have the transmission rebuilt. On the flip side, what kind of idiocy does it take to require an prospective upholsterer to learn basic transmission repair before he can go stuff new foam into car seats? No sense at all, but by being a private guild that's been permitted to control medical licensing in this country, the AMA has done exactly that.
In some ways a physician is a "biological mechanic" (I suppose). But a physican in the US accepts at minimum 11 years of school and post-graduate medical training after high school (in my own experience, 16 years), and typically accrues between $150-400k in debt during this time.
So you're saying that because the AMA requires such a ridiculous degree of schooling just to become the lowest possible level of doctor that students accrue huge debts that this justifies the supply being low and the wages being high? I wish I could demand higher pay simply because my education was expensive and unnecessarily difficult.
But more important than the enduring agony of never-ending school (much of which is also physically demanding), they also accept the emotional responsibility for others' lives.
So what? There doesn't seem to be any limit on the number of people willing to take on that burden. There only seems to be a limit on the number of people who can fight their way through the expense and difficulty of a decade-plus of training. Why do all doctors have to go through that? Do you need 16 years training to remove a mole?
This responsibilty is drilled into us from the time we enter medical school and continues throughout training. Medicine is a noble profession and it has to be, because there is a lot at stake. We enter into a legally binding contract with every patient we talk to, touch, or are curb-sided about by a colleague, to provide medical care that is "standard of care". This is a lot of responsibility and it is a heavy burden.
Further evidence of the "every doctor a superman" philosophy so prevalent in the US. You think the medical profession is the only one with a strict code of conduct?
With regard to residency being a hazing experience -- in some ways this is true. However, there are just a certain number of situations and disease states that you have to encounter in training and life is only so long. If you cut the hours in half, you really would need to be in residency twice as long to be competent on your own.
Competent to remove a mole? Why does every doctor need to be a so heavily trained? Why are they intent on accepting nothing less than a general master for any and all positions of responsibility in the medical profession?
Then I guess we would really be in a bind as far as physician supply. The AMA has a difficult job enough as it is, balancing physician supply with demand and making sure that training programs meet minimum standards to ensure adequate training.
But does no one question the necessity of such minimum standards? Seriously, they're the equivalent if requi
+5 Funny, but I bet they actually were thinking that exact thing, in a roundabout way.
Industry Exec A: How will we keep people from copying stuff?
Industry Exec B: Oh, we'll only be releasing stuff that's stagnant anyway, so any sale is just money in our pocket.
Even if there is a way to prevent copying, what prevents you from burning multiple copies of the DVD the same way as one burns the first? If the program does not allow it, it should be possible for a hacked driver to capture the commands sent to the DVD burner, which could be replayed later.
Their strategy to prevent this is apparently to only release movies that no one would ever want to copy.
WTF? Why do they need a superduperwonderfulelectrogadget to solve this problem?
The easier & cheaper solution involves a pencil and a piece of paper.
Do you have the scalpel? Check. Do you have the bar of soap? Check.
Cripes, is this really that hard to understand? Currently, the way they do it is have people counting the instruments, through all sorts of redundant methods. Still, because it's humans doing the work, the system is subject to occasional human error. Your solution of "pencil & paper, duh" is more if the same: it's humans doing the work, so the system is subject to human error. RFID takes the error inducing element out. Pencil and paper does not.
Expect it to become more and more common as surgeons become even more painfully overworked. It's not their fault. I blame a bizarre system of high spiralling costs combined with drastic costcutting.
Don't forget the AMA, which tells medical schools how many doctors they're allowed to graduate every year. They've been artificially limiting the doctor supply from the beginning. If too many doctors are allowed, it might end up like (say) Austria, where you can wander in to a doctor's office and have a mole removed without an appointment for forty bucks. Heaven forbid the "noble" profession of doctoring should be reduced to what it really is, that of a "biologcal mechanic". It's the same moronic mindset that continues to allow the practice of hazing in the form of "residency".
Maybe if you had an RFID scan that differentiated between instruments that stayed in while closing and those that don't...
I envision a fairly narrow reader pattern that only encloses the area being worked on. Combine this with an LCD "scoreboard" on the wall listing each and every tool that's still within the surgical area. The scanner runs continuously, like once a second, updating a "live" list on the LCD of all the tools a such still within the surgical area.
Interesting story, but methinks your sarcasm detector is broken.
Nah, my sarcasm detector works. I just saw an opportunity to tell my "I Invented Monkeys Reenacting Gettysburg" story. Sadly, nobody but like three of my friends who were there believe the story, no matter who else I tell it to. It's the absolute goddamn truth though.
The poor illiterate sod who said that the plural noun is also 'tries' is totally wrong.
You're an idiot. I challenge you to find an actual language reference (like a dictionary, rather than a rugby rulebook) that lists "trys" as the proper pural vs "tries".
'trys' is a perfectly acceptable word in another context. The England rugby team often scores more trys than the opposition
No, the plural of the noun "try" is still "tries". Even if you've seen a sports columnist misspell it "trys", it's still wrong. Avid sport enthusiasts are often less than fully literate, and sports writers are surprisingly no exception. I'm sure this says something about the classic eternal struggle of "dumb jocks vs. clumsy nerds", but I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine what.
everytime I think of something funny, like a week later, I see it on TV, and I'm getting sick of it.
You think that's bad? The stuff you make up could conceivably have been made up independently by someone else. You should hear what happened to me. In '93 a friend of mine was working at Film Roman on the ill-fated Blues Brothers animated series. One weekend we went to a party at the house of one of his friends from work. Being a bit of a weirdo, I was sitting on the couch telling (in a faux-british accent) a fictionalized biographical story about my life, specifically what it was like living in a mansion with some 300 anthropomorphic monkeys. It was basically like a stand-up comic act kind of thing I'd do at parties while high. At any rate, part of the bit was about one group of monkeys who would dress up in period accurate costumes and reenact the Battle of Gettysburg. Fast forward a year or so, and I'm watching The Simpsons. It's the Stonecutter episode. The one where, near the end, Homer spends the Stonecutter's money on getting a bunch of monkeys, in period accurate costumes, to reenact the Battle of Gettysburg. There's no way in hell they came up with that independently-- particularly because some of the writers were at that party.
I represent that my Entry is my original creation and hereby grant to Sponsor the copyright and all other rights now known or hereafter existing to use my Entry throughout the universe
Wow. I don't read a lot of these, but is that 'normal' or is Walmart a little optimistic about furture growth?
Unfortunately, "in perpetuity throughout the universe" has been standard legal boilerplate for a very long time. Given the opportunity, lawyers tend to go for your balls, and they don't fuck around about it.
That's not true. If it were, the RFID reader wouldn't get a response. It'd be as useful as "write-only memory". And calling it a "receiver" is somewhat misleading too. It's more accurately described as a "tuned inductive pickup". When an appropriate RF signal hits the pickup, enough power is generated to power up the device, which then expends that power transmitting its contents.
Active RFID tags have a transceiver and are therefore limited only by their power source
No, both of them send information back to the reader device. The difference between them is that "passive" devices tend to hold only a small amount of data and for the most part just echo it back in response to a "ping" from the reader. But given that they make writable RFID tags, the distinction is even less significant.
I'm a pilot, and I'm confused...
Care to elaborate?
In aviation you only care about accuracy. A cohort model of weather prediction provides a more accurate forcast, but gives absolutely no insight into the why and how of it. For a pilot, that's fine. A pilot only wants to know if the weather is going to be conducive to flying. Scientists don't really care what the weather is, their job is to figure out why it's that way.
Can you live locked in a basement having evrything shipped to you and slid under the door? Sure, but to me that sounds very much like prison.
I'd say "prison" is all about who has the keys. For 3 months after a severe injury I spent almost all my time in one room, people delivering my food, mostly just watching TV or reading. I was even "confined", in the sense that I wasn't able to go anywhere without being wheeled there on a gurney. Still, it wasn't prison.
That's a tortured analogy if I've ever seen one. It makes the assumption that all of Microsoft's income goes towards buying food. Given that Gates, Ballmer, et al will probably stop buying fancy cars and expensive shoes before they go hungry, it would be more accurate to say "Google is taking the Porsche 959's out of our garages and the Guccis off our feet!"
What do you think competitors are? Friends?
Not necessarily friends, but not evil either. Saying Google is taking food off their plate is an appeal to emotionalism, likening Google to marauding Mongol Khan ravaging and looting villages and leaving the peasants to starve. It's pretty dumb too, because it's not like MS has any serious foothold in the corporate search arena. If anything, this is MS threatening to eat Google's lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest you go read the definition of B&E/Burglary. Basically, it is this:
"entering a building or remaining unlawfully with intent to commit any crime"
1) every time I'm there I am there at their request and am permitted to be in the area by the back door
2) what crime? I'm there to make keys to file cabinets or reset the combination on their safe, again, at their request
Where did you acquire your legal education? Television? An accessory must generally have knowledge that a crime is being, or will be committed. At most this could be considered negligence, but as such would only be grounds for dismissal or civil suit. But given that the partners know all about it and tactly approve, that's not even a sure thing.
Surprised guy who sits by back door: How'd you get in?
Me: Popsicle stick (holding up popsicle stick)
The AMA has always (successfully) argued for strict limits on the imigration of foreign doctors, explicitly arguing that they would depress wages. Scum.
See, this is exactly the problem. Not even half of "doctoring" is critical care stuff. Most of it is routine care. By setting an unnecessarily high bar to entry on such a wide-ranging profession, the supply is limited. Why the hell would you go to a dermatologist to manage congestive heart failure? Or to install a ventilator after an accident? That's as dumb as taking your car to an upholstery shop to have the transmission rebuilt. On the flip side, what kind of idiocy does it take to require an prospective upholsterer to learn basic transmission repair before he can go stuff new foam into car seats? No sense at all, but by being a private guild that's been permitted to control medical licensing in this country, the AMA has done exactly that.
So you're saying that because the AMA requires such a ridiculous degree of schooling just to become the lowest possible level of doctor that students accrue huge debts that this justifies the supply being low and the wages being high? I wish I could demand higher pay simply because my education was expensive and unnecessarily difficult.
So what? There doesn't seem to be any limit on the number of people willing to take on that burden. There only seems to be a limit on the number of people who can fight their way through the expense and difficulty of a decade-plus of training. Why do all doctors have to go through that? Do you need 16 years training to remove a mole?
Further evidence of the "every doctor a superman" philosophy so prevalent in the US. You think the medical profession is the only one with a strict code of conduct?
Competent to remove a mole? Why does every doctor need to be a so heavily trained? Why are they intent on accepting nothing less than a general master for any and all positions of responsibility in the medical profession?
But does no one question the necessity of such minimum standards? Seriously, they're the equivalent if requi
+5 Funny, but I bet they actually were thinking that exact thing, in a roundabout way.
Industry Exec A: How will we keep people from copying stuff?
Industry Exec B: Oh, we'll only be releasing stuff that's stagnant anyway, so any sale is just money in our pocket.
Maybe if you had an RFID scan that differentiated between instruments that stayed in while closing and those that don't...
I envision a fairly narrow reader pattern that only encloses the area being worked on. Combine this with an LCD "scoreboard" on the wall listing each and every tool that's still within the surgical area. The scanner runs continuously, like once a second, updating a "live" list on the LCD of all the tools a such still within the surgical area.
everytime I think of something funny, like a week later, I see it on TV, and I'm getting sick of it.
You think that's bad? The stuff you make up could conceivably have been made up independently by someone else. You should hear what happened to me. In '93 a friend of mine was working at Film Roman on the ill-fated Blues Brothers animated series. One weekend we went to a party at the house of one of his friends from work. Being a bit of a weirdo, I was sitting on the couch telling (in a faux-british accent) a fictionalized biographical story about my life, specifically what it was like living in a mansion with some 300 anthropomorphic monkeys. It was basically like a stand-up comic act kind of thing I'd do at parties while high. At any rate, part of the bit was about one group of monkeys who would dress up in period accurate costumes and reenact the Battle of Gettysburg. Fast forward a year or so, and I'm watching The Simpsons. It's the Stonecutter episode. The one where, near the end, Homer spends the Stonecutter's money on getting a bunch of monkeys, in period accurate costumes, to reenact the Battle of Gettysburg. There's no way in hell they came up with that independently-- particularly because some of the writers were at that party.
No, both of them send information back to the reader device. The difference between them is that "passive" devices tend to hold only a small amount of data and for the most part just echo it back in response to a "ping" from the reader. But given that they make writable RFID tags, the distinction is even less significant.
Not necessarily friends, but not evil either. Saying Google is taking food off their plate is an appeal to emotionalism, likening Google to marauding Mongol Khan ravaging and looting villages and leaving the peasants to starve. It's pretty dumb too, because it's not like MS has any serious foothold in the corporate search arena. If anything, this is MS threatening to eat Google's lunch.