I would just peel the label off the best I could and format them.
I remember scavenging ten 1.44Mb HD floppies from an IBM booth (loaded with demo software) at a computer show over the course of a weekend back when the HD floppies were new technology and selling for $65 or more per box of ten; the computer I'd just bought had one of the new drives, but I wasn't making enough to actually buy them myself. Some care peeling the labels, and I had myself a stack of floppies whose aggregate capacity was a significant fraction of my hard drive's space. Twenty years is a long time in the computer industry...
So I saw the movie and never got around to reading the book--the movie seemed obviously satirical, fairly amusing, particularly relevant today. Was the book also supposed to be satire?
To use a Hitchhiker's Guide reference, the movie was the 'Nutrimatic tea' version of the book -- almost, but not quite, completely unlike the book. Were Heinlein not buried at sea, you could probably hook him up to a generator and get a couple of kilowatts out of him turning over in his grave from what Verhoeven did to it. It's a solid 'B' movie; unfortunately, billing it as 'Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers' is a gross disservice to the book.
Do it with black construction paper and run the toner dry as well!
Only if you want to get your ass hauled into court; a lot of older fax machines' print heads rely on low black coverage to give the print head time to cool down, so a continuous loop of black can burn out the fax machine's print head. Doing this deliberately could leave you chargeable with something like malicious mischief or worse.
Actually, I think this is part of the reason the Red Cross now encourages people to "donate" blood - my father told me they used to actually pay the donors.
The Red Cross doesn't do it that I know of, but the municipal blood banks still 'pay' the donors; it's not a direct payout, but donors are covered for their blood needs if they have surgery or need blood otherwise. It's more like insurance than getting paid -- but with the cost of a single unit of whole blood, and the way medical insurance seems to be narrowing coverage more and more, it's a bet I'm more than willing to make.
And to the people who asked about lasik and retina scans... RTFP it says IRIS not Retina. Iris is the color part in the front, retina is the light sensitive part in the back.
And just what does this iris scan look for, and how? The part of the eye between the iris and the cornea is a lenticular bag of fluid, and this fluid does not have a refractive index of zero. The whole point of refractive surgery like RK, PRK, and LASIK is that it changes the shape of your cornea -- and therefore the shape of the bag of fluid -- so that the light entering your eye is refracted differently by this fluid, and will now focus correctly on your retina. If the light passing through the fluid is refracted differently, it will change the way that your iris looks from outside the eye. The question is whether the refractive changes from this kind of surgery causes enough of a change to throw off the iris reader.
An even better link
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Thin, Flat LEDs
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· Score: 5, Informative
The press release on Omron's web site gives more information, including a diagram that shows how the device functions. It appears to be a central LED device surrounded by a Fresnel mirror, with the mirror cavity filled by what I would presume to be a material similar to fiber-optic cladding. Light emitted from the LED is reflected off the surface of the cavity-fill material, then bounces off the Fresnel mirror, which focuses the light into a reasonably unidirectional beam; a single unit is 30mm on a side, with a thickness of 6mm.
And the "right" language is not just a technical question. If the company only has Java, VB, and COBOL experience and the permanent staff isn't very flexible, the right language probably isn't perl, no matter what the problem is.
If you read the article, it's not so much a question of directing that the program be written in Perl just because it could be written faster in that language by a Perl programmer than a Java programmer, even if you don't have any Perl programmers, but (using your example) ordering that it be written in COBOL even though it could be thrown together in VB in an hour or two. The article uses the 'interpreted vs. compiled' dichotomy to illustrate the productivity losses resulting from selecting an inappropriate development language from the ones a company has development skills with, not just the script-vs.-executable wars. The 'it's just a script, it's not a real program' can be carried to lots of other languages.
Typically these jobs that take weeks instead of hours are assigned to the wrong people, not the wrong language. The right person should figure out the best solution for the problem and tackle the problem correctly. The wrong person will go after it in his favorite language and ignore the best way if it includes any amount of work before he begins coding.
I don't think that it is typically the job being assigned to the wrong person, but that it is the job being assigned by the wrong person -- someone who does not have enough comprehension of the problem and the available tools to make a good decision about how a task will be addressed, and who is unwilling to accept the advice of the subordinate they assign to the task that another method (or another person) would be better for the task. Or if the subordinate is unwilling or unable to give feedback to the person assigning the task. There have been too many occasions where a design was finalized in the upper levels of management and dropped on the programmers to implement according to the design, with the programmers -- or anybody else with a clue how to solve the problem -- given no opportunity to suggest better ways to complete the project to be able to count the wasted man-hours.
...how many people that set up honeypots use Windows or need a GUI?
You're right; who needs a honeypot when you can just set up a Windows system, which is automatically a hack magnet?
Seriously, though, having a Windows honeypot would be useful simply because of the enormous variety of attacks directed at Windows systems. Having a system designed to attract and log attacks would give more information than trying to examine the post-mortem data after a Windows box has been 'H4C|20R3D'.
But the text doesn't seem to be a real subtitle. It's too large to be a standard DVD caption text. Futhermore, I can understand that funny mistakes occur when you translate e.g. Japanese into English, but when transcribing English? You'd have to be a complete moron...
In the comment log, the author of the website explains what he did to produce the images:
For all you sceptics out there: The reason the images are so crisp, is because they're taken from an Xvid DVD-rip. The text was ripped from the bootleg and inserted into the Xvid for the best possible image quality. This still means what you see on the captions are what you see on the screen. I could've written this on the front page, but I'm not sure if that would be a good idea. If I ever get hold of a camera, I will take pictures of the TV when playing the bootleg. I'd imagine *that* would be pretty hard to fake. Anyone who has seen an asian bootleg will testify to that the BLs *do* have english subtitles.
It it possible that a new generation of ships might have measures that a) reduce the risk of fire, and b) make it easier to fight the fire?
HMS Sheffield had automatic fire-suppression gear. When the Exocet missile fired by the Argentines hit her, even though the warhead didn't detonate, the damage from the impact knocked out the fire-suppression gear in that part of the ship, allowing the remaining fuel in the missile to burn unchecked.
Whoever makes 802.11b repeaters will have their stock shooting up in the next few days then. With their excessive steelwork and armory, a warship is an extremely BAD place to run on 802.11b as the signals will bounce around everywhere (being at the high frequency they are).
Not to mention that each compartment on a warship is a reasonable approximation to a Faraday cage, and many of the C3I spaces are Faraday cages.
One of the things that any electronic warfare specialist or tactical action officer learns is that your radar signals can be detected several times as far out as you can detect a return bounced off a target; EMCON (EMissions CONtrol) is a major concern for warships in a combat environment. If the crew complement of a warship is reduced, and the crew needs to use the wireless network to run the ship, then that's an electronic emission that can't be turned off. How far away from the ship can the wireless signal be detected? To be used to localize a target, you don't need to be able to connect via the network signal; you just have to be able to detect it and tell what direction it's coming from.
Granted the raises aren't as fast or as potentially rewarding as private sector, but one doesn't have to worry about one's employer going out of business either.
Well, yes and no; I've got 20 years as a programmer working for the Navy, and I changed jobs due to a RIF (Reduction In Force) action at the facility where I worked. However, since the government doesn't like coughing up severance pay, they have a placement program to try to find you another position, so both myself an a coworker who was also caught in the RIF wound up working at a Navy hospital in the same office (two other coworkers from my old facility are also working there, but in different locations). It may not be the same job, but it's the same employer, so everything just keeps stacking up.
Damn straight it is. You get twenty-eight years to milk something for all the millions it's worth, AND you get to crush utterly and punitively anyone who dares steal even a penny's worth from you? Sounds like a good deal to me.
That depends on how the legislation is implemented. The legal precedent is that, when copyright terms are extended, all works under copyright benefit from the term extension. Therefore, a simple extension of that precedent would imply that if the term were reduced, any works currently under copyright would have their copyright terms reduced as well. How many companies do you think would agree to the implementation of iron-clad copy protection if it meant that they were going to lose all the revenue they would have been able to squeeze from anything created before 1975 (assuming that the law was enacted this year)? We've seen lots of arguments claiming that the 20-year copyright extension was at least partly due to Disney not wanting to lose the rights to the earliest depiction of Mickey Mouse; how do you think they're going to take having to lose the rights to fifty years of Disney work just to get a tighter stranglehold on the most recent 28 years of their product?
Or turn it around the other way; new copyright terms are for a maximum of 28 years, existing copyrights retain their original term. The consumers take it in the shorts with ten feet of wrought-iron fence wrapped in curare-dipped razor wire -- the media companies get the iron-clad protection they want on all their existing properties, and have twenty-eight years to lobby Congress into cranking the copyright term back up again.
Guess which one the media companies are going to go for?
It's simple to fix... require that those who release works with legally-backed copy protection file an unencrypted digital version with at least the quality of the protected version with the Library of Congress, who will place that version on a public web server the moment the 28 years are up.
That doesn't address the problem sufficiently unless you assume that both the bandwidth to obtain copies of works and the mechanisms to create tangible copies exists.
Under the protection requirements instituted by the xxAA, the RMW (Removable Media Writer -- whatever permanent-storage technology exists in this future period) drive will have hardware checks to prevent it from copying protected media. If you already have the work in a protected form, you would have a reasonable expectation that the copying lockout would cease after the term of the copyright expires.
So the media would have to have a copyright date embedded, and either your computer would check the copyright date against its own clock, or connect to the Net to check a master copyright database, in order to validate the copyright status of the work. If your system date is checked, all that takes to circumvent is altering your system date; even with a protected configuration like the erstwhile Palladium system, that's going to be relatively easy to circumvent. If your computer has to check a master copyright database, that's more complex; it would take a redirected IP address plus faking the (required) encrypted data exchange with the database server. But having how quickly secure encryption methods get broken, I'm certain that that can be cracked, too.
This doesn't even begin to address the fact that, since there has to be some point at which an unencrypted data stream has to exist in a playback -- if nothing else, tapping out the digital signal to your monitor and extracting the part that makes up the video window -- there will be hardware-based ways around the DRM that can't be blocked.
So the result is that the people who are dedicated to putting out pirated versions of works will have to work harder to get their cracks, but the technological advances that make locking up works easier will also make cracking the protections easier. And unless part of this copy-protection legislation castrates the existing 'fair use' provisions of copyright law (i.e., it being legal to make a copy of a DVD for your own use as a hedge against accidentally trashing the original), the required gaps in the copy-protection mechanisms necessary to retain fair-use copying would be much easier to exploit.
Nice concept, but I wouldn't want to use it in a bus or such. It real life it would crave some sort of gyro to detect movement. Imagine a bus rounding a corner and the text compensating by scrolling. At least it would serve as amusement to the fellow busriders.
With a gyroscope/accelerometer arrangement to detect movement, you could set it up so that you clear the screen by turning it over and shaking it.
RFID tags need to be printed on paper, so unless you have something like a magazine you'll be able to get rid of the RFID tags just by removing the wrapper or sales tag. Duh. It's not like these things are going to be attached to everything permanently just while they're in the store. It's basically a replacement for the barcode.
Even if they _do_ need to be printed on paper, why do you assume that the exterior packaging is the only place that the tag can go? Books -- bury the tag in the binding. Magazines -- in the binding strip of cardstock ad inserts. Electronic gear -- unless the case is a Faraday cage, you just stick the tag to the inside of the case. Larger appliances -- most of them have enough plastic on the exterior to allow a tag to be molded inside. Credit cards -- the way they're going with smart cards, this would be redundant.
There are enough ways to hide the tag in products that worrying about them on products is a waste of time.
but I don't see why they are so short i mean sure its faster but why not make the damn thing longer??
Because this type of coaster is still in its infancy. This is clearly an evolution of the Thrust Air 2000 coaster invented by S&S Sports Power, and it follows the same basic design -- a catapult launch, a 90 pitchup, a 180 pitchover to nose down, and back to the launch point, throwing in a 360 roll during the descent to heighten the thrill.
The selling points of this type of ride are the catapult launch -- instead of the long, slow crank up the lift hill, you're shot off the mark, reaching maximum speed almost immediately -- the vertical climb and dive, and the 'hang time' spent in free fall. You come out of the dive at close to the 120mph at which you entered the climb; at that speed, any of the fancy track elements you see on slower coasters would create unacceptably huge G forces on the riders -- if you look at the other 'gigacoasters', they have one or more secondary hills after the first drop to bleed some of the speed off the coaster train before they start any serious turns, and these coasters use speed and drop height as their selling points, not inversions, while the coasters that are known for their inversion count are all much slower than the gigacoasters. Top Thrill makes its mark from its height; adding more hills detracts from the purity of the single vertical hill (and the attraction of rides like SFMM's 'Superman: The Escape', which is nothing but a shot out, up, down, and back), and slowing the coaster train down enough so that inverting track elements are survivable detracts from the ride's speed. And, as another poster has pointed out, Cedar Point is running out of space to put new coasters.
If that's the case then Pricewatch is being misleading, that heading clearly says RADEON 9700 Pro
It's an artifact of the way the search engine works; all the cheaper entries, for the Radeon 9700 cards, have phrases like "not 9700 Pro" in either the product or description fields. What's happening is that Pricewatch's search engine isn't smart enough to parse English; it's just looking for records taht contain 'Radeon', '9700', and 'pro', and listing them in price order. Blame the government, which has enacted regulations that make the dealers put in disclaimers to protect themselves from idiot users who can't be bothered to read the product name and description, and then get bent out of shape with the dealer because they ordered and received a Radeon 9700 instead of the ultra-cheap 9700 Pro they thought they were ordering.
Okay, i was checking up on Pricewatch to see the price differences between the R9700 and nVidia's offerings. WTf is up with this GF4 TI 4800? Is it just a version that supports AGP 8x ? Because, it's MORE expensive by 20 bucks than a Radeon 9700Pro (at 232$)
Pricewatch is sandbagging you about the price, due to the way that dealers are listing video cards. If you go to the actual search page for that price quote, you'll see that the entire first page of results is for the Radeon 9700, not the 9700 Pro. Only at the very bottom of the second page of listings do you find an entry for the 9700 Pro, at $276. All of the lower-priced entries have phrases like "not 9700 pro" or "9700 pro also available" in the Product or Description fields. So the GF4 TI 4800, at $250, is $25 cheaper than the cheapest 9700 Pro. The Radeon is still the faster card, but it's not the cheaper card.
You're misreading the article
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Robot Pharmacists
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Human pharmacists have always served as information resources for their customers, and even as a check on poorly-chosen prescriptions from doctors.
I can understand automating away the cashier or the janitor, but automating away a job where human judgment is so crucial is a terrible idea.
The problem is that pharmacies and patients don't use the same terms. When your doctor writes you a prescription, you take it to a pharmacy to get it filled. When the pharmacist takes your prescription script, they fill it and then dispense it to you.
When a pharmacy fills a prescription, what they are doing is to take the ordered quantity of the medication out of their stock and package it; when they dispense a prescription, they present it to the patient along with information about how and when to take it. Filling machines as described in the article don't take the place of a pharmacist -- they're taking the place of the pharmacy techs back inside the pharmacy who type up prescription labels, count out pills, and put them in prescription bottles. This means that the people working in the pharmacy don't have to take as much time preparing the prescription, and can spend more time with the patient.
Fill robots don't replace the pharmacist; what they do is eliminate the place where many medication mistakes occur -- selecting and measuring out the drug that the patient will receive. Drug manufacturers deliberately make pills and capsules with different shapes, colors, sizes and markings in order to help both the patients and the pharmacy staff tell them apart, but a pharmacy tech can still make a mistake and pick the wrong canister off the shelf when pulling a medication, and not notice that they've got the wrong little white pill, particularly when they've got lots of prescriptions to fill. A fill robot doesn't make that mistake; as long as the correct drug is in the correct hopper (and it's easier to make sure you've got the right drug when you're only touching the supply to put another 10,000 pills in the hopper, rather than for each of the 60-pill prescriptions that would be filled from that supply), the fill robot will always pick the correct drug.
And the situation is not as generally clear-cut as the article portrays. Where I work -- a major military hospital -- I am the manager for the pharmacy module of the medical information system at the hospital. The pharmacy has a large fill robot that processes refills; patients can either bring in a prescription for refill or use the phone- or web-based refill system to order their refills. Prescriptions entered for refill are processed by the main medical information system (checking to make sure that there are still refills available on that Rx, that the patient isn't trying to refill the Rx too soon, etc.), and then are sent to the fill robot, which fills and labels the refills, which are then distributed to the satellite pharmacies that the patients have selected to pick up their refills. The prescriptions don't need counselling or instructions, because the patient got those when they got the prescription initially.
Those kids fresh out of college may know current technology, but they don't have a damn clue when it comes to designing systems. When it comes to making a decision most will take whatever path is quicker/easier and not consider the longterm implications -- which means down the road you have to throw out huge chunks of code and rewrite it because it wasn't done right the first time. After all, long-term up till now has meant "next semester".
And in most cases, these fresh-minted graduates are coming out of an ivory-tower development environment, where it doesn't have to work well as long as it shows that the student grasps the concept that the professor is presenting. And the development environments make them used to writing code as if there's no limit on the amount of storage and memory they can use, so their code is elephantine and slow.
Outsource to India? No thanks... I've seen the results of that. My company tried to outsource the GUI front-end of our application to India for a very, very low sum. End result? All of the code was thrown away. The one piece that may have been salvagable turned out to be a BSD-license library that was from an alpha release and had its license violated -- the moron coder removed the copyright and claimed it was his own. It was broken too (hence the reason it was alpha). We hired a Java programmer and he finished in four months what they had failed to do in nine.
I remember a project I worked on involving electronic storage/maintenance of training documents. Because we only had a couple of programmers on the project, part of it was contracted out. When we tested the code on a real set of documents, one of their modules kept blowing up; it turned out that their code defined a fixed-length array for what was an indeterminate number of elements, and the real-world document had half again as many elements as the array had space for. Another module had every single routine allocating the same 3Mb data structure dynamically on entry, even if only 1% of that space was actually being used (3000-element array of a structure with 6 float fields and four 240-character text fields; the text fields were never used). The program I was responsible for, the import-export module, which would pull all of the pieces out of the Oracle dataabase that held them, including all their links, then link them back into the database at another site, was written using linked lists for all of its dynamic storage. When the project was completed and accepted for implementation, the contractor took over maintenance of the code -- and promptly ripped out all of the linked-list code in the import-export module and replaced it with fixed-length arrays -- even though it had already been proven that fixed-length arrays broke on real-world data.
There are morons everywhere; unfortunately, in the programming industry, the morons leave legacies that can survive for years beyond when they depart, with the task of actually fixing those problems hampered by those problems becoming part of accepted corporate practice -- once everybody's gotten used to doing it wrong, you can't change the user interface because all of the non-techies would *gasp* have to learn a new UI...
I will have been employed full-time as a programmer for 20 years come the middle of next month, plus three years as a student contractor before that, and I don't expect to retire until I've got more than 30 years in (actually, I can't retire on 30 years -- I come up a year short of minimum retirement age when I have 30 years); I've seen people burn out on programming, and I've seen people get pushed into management as the only available mobility option. It may keep me from making The Big Bucks(tm), but I don't ever want to get shoved into management; having to deal with the egos and prejudices where I work resembles a kindergarten more than it does an office.
Is extracting stem cells for bone marrow just as good as from fetuses? Can it be taken for a living patient? I have a big ethical problem with taking stem cells from an unborn baby, simply because a baby does not have the ability to consent to such a procedure.
My father went through this procedure recently, as part of an experimental cancer treatment (in his case, mantle-cell lymphoma). After three sessions of chemotherapy, they extracted stem cells from him to be cultured, then his bone marrow was killed, after which the cultured stem cells were returned.
The short-term results look good; he's recovered most of his appetite, and his immune system came back up nicely (unlike the chemotherapy treatments, where he was severely debilitated and immunocompromised for some time after the treatment). Whether the treatment succeeded in destroying the cancer is something that we're going to have to watch for the foreseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
Manhole covers are round in order to minimize the number of decisions that a maintenance worker has to make when putting them back.
I remember scavenging ten 1.44Mb HD floppies from an IBM booth (loaded with demo software) at a computer show over the course of a weekend back when the HD floppies were new technology and selling for $65 or more per box of ten; the computer I'd just bought had one of the new drives, but I wasn't making enough to actually buy them myself. Some care peeling the labels, and I had myself a stack of floppies whose aggregate capacity was a significant fraction of my hard drive's space. Twenty years is a long time in the computer industry...
To use a Hitchhiker's Guide reference, the movie was the 'Nutrimatic tea' version of the book -- almost, but not quite, completely unlike the book. Were Heinlein not buried at sea, you could probably hook him up to a generator and get a couple of kilowatts out of him turning over in his grave from what Verhoeven did to it. It's a solid 'B' movie; unfortunately, billing it as 'Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers' is a gross disservice to the book.
Only if you want to get your ass hauled into court; a lot of older fax machines' print heads rely on low black coverage to give the print head time to cool down, so a continuous loop of black can burn out the fax machine's print head. Doing this deliberately could leave you chargeable with something like malicious mischief or worse.
The Red Cross doesn't do it that I know of, but the municipal blood banks still 'pay' the donors; it's not a direct payout, but donors are covered for their blood needs if they have surgery or need blood otherwise. It's more like insurance than getting paid -- but with the cost of a single unit of whole blood, and the way medical insurance seems to be narrowing coverage more and more, it's a bet I'm more than willing to make.
And just what does this iris scan look for, and how? The part of the eye between the iris and the cornea is a lenticular bag of fluid, and this fluid does not have a refractive index of zero. The whole point of refractive surgery like RK, PRK, and LASIK is that it changes the shape of your cornea -- and therefore the shape of the bag of fluid -- so that the light entering your eye is refracted differently by this fluid, and will now focus correctly on your retina. If the light passing through the fluid is refracted differently, it will change the way that your iris looks from outside the eye. The question is whether the refractive changes from this kind of surgery causes enough of a change to throw off the iris reader.
The press release on Omron's web site gives more information, including a diagram that shows how the device functions. It appears to be a central LED device surrounded by a Fresnel mirror, with the mirror cavity filled by what I would presume to be a material similar to fiber-optic cladding. Light emitted from the LED is reflected off the surface of the cavity-fill material, then bounces off the Fresnel mirror, which focuses the light into a reasonably unidirectional beam; a single unit is 30mm on a side, with a thickness of 6mm.
Judging from what I've seen, commenting without reading the article seems to be encouraged if not mandatory...
If you read the article, it's not so much a question of directing that the program be written in Perl just because it could be written faster in that language by a Perl programmer than a Java programmer, even if you don't have any Perl programmers, but (using your example) ordering that it be written in COBOL even though it could be thrown together in VB in an hour or two. The article uses the 'interpreted vs. compiled' dichotomy to illustrate the productivity losses resulting from selecting an inappropriate development language from the ones a company has development skills with, not just the script-vs.-executable wars. The 'it's just a script, it's not a real program' can be carried to lots of other languages.
I don't think that it is typically the job being assigned to the wrong person, but that it is the job being assigned by the wrong person -- someone who does not have enough comprehension of the problem and the available tools to make a good decision about how a task will be addressed, and who is unwilling to accept the advice of the subordinate they assign to the task that another method (or another person) would be better for the task. Or if the subordinate is unwilling or unable to give feedback to the person assigning the task. There have been too many occasions where a design was finalized in the upper levels of management and dropped on the programmers to implement according to the design, with the programmers -- or anybody else with a clue how to solve the problem -- given no opportunity to suggest better ways to complete the project to be able to count the wasted man-hours.
You're right; who needs a honeypot when you can just set up a Windows system, which is automatically a hack magnet?
Seriously, though, having a Windows honeypot would be useful simply because of the enormous variety of attacks directed at Windows systems. Having a system designed to attract and log attacks would give more information than trying to examine the post-mortem data after a Windows box has been 'H4C|20R3D'.
In the comment log, the author of the website explains what he did to produce the images:
HMS Sheffield had automatic fire-suppression gear. When the Exocet missile fired by the Argentines hit her, even though the warhead didn't detonate, the damage from the impact knocked out the fire-suppression gear in that part of the ship, allowing the remaining fuel in the missile to burn unchecked.
Not to mention that each compartment on a warship is a reasonable approximation to a Faraday cage, and many of the C3I spaces are Faraday cages.
One of the things that any electronic warfare specialist or tactical action officer learns is that your radar signals can be detected several times as far out as you can detect a return bounced off a target; EMCON (EMissions CONtrol) is a major concern for warships in a combat environment. If the crew complement of a warship is reduced, and the crew needs to use the wireless network to run the ship, then that's an electronic emission that can't be turned off. How far away from the ship can the wireless signal be detected? To be used to localize a target, you don't need to be able to connect via the network signal; you just have to be able to detect it and tell what direction it's coming from.
Well, yes and no; I've got 20 years as a programmer working for the Navy, and I changed jobs due to a RIF (Reduction In Force) action at the facility where I worked. However, since the government doesn't like coughing up severance pay, they have a placement program to try to find you another position, so both myself an a coworker who was also caught in the RIF wound up working at a Navy hospital in the same office (two other coworkers from my old facility are also working there, but in different locations). It may not be the same job, but it's the same employer, so everything just keeps stacking up.
That depends on how the legislation is implemented. The legal precedent is that, when copyright terms are extended, all works under copyright benefit from the term extension. Therefore, a simple extension of that precedent would imply that if the term were reduced, any works currently under copyright would have their copyright terms reduced as well. How many companies do you think would agree to the implementation of iron-clad copy protection if it meant that they were going to lose all the revenue they would have been able to squeeze from anything created before 1975 (assuming that the law was enacted this year)? We've seen lots of arguments claiming that the 20-year copyright extension was at least partly due to Disney not wanting to lose the rights to the earliest depiction of Mickey Mouse; how do you think they're going to take having to lose the rights to fifty years of Disney work just to get a tighter stranglehold on the most recent 28 years of their product?
Or turn it around the other way; new copyright terms are for a maximum of 28 years, existing copyrights retain their original term. The consumers take it in the shorts with ten feet of wrought-iron fence wrapped in curare-dipped razor wire -- the media companies get the iron-clad protection they want on all their existing properties, and have twenty-eight years to lobby Congress into cranking the copyright term back up again.
Guess which one the media companies are going to go for?
That doesn't address the problem sufficiently unless you assume that both the bandwidth to obtain copies of works and the mechanisms to create tangible copies exists.
Under the protection requirements instituted by the xxAA, the RMW (Removable Media Writer -- whatever permanent-storage technology exists in this future period) drive will have hardware checks to prevent it from copying protected media. If you already have the work in a protected form, you would have a reasonable expectation that the copying lockout would cease after the term of the copyright expires.
So the media would have to have a copyright date embedded, and either your computer would check the copyright date against its own clock, or connect to the Net to check a master copyright database, in order to validate the copyright status of the work. If your system date is checked, all that takes to circumvent is altering your system date; even with a protected configuration like the erstwhile Palladium system, that's going to be relatively easy to circumvent. If your computer has to check a master copyright database, that's more complex; it would take a redirected IP address plus faking the (required) encrypted data exchange with the database server. But having how quickly secure encryption methods get broken, I'm certain that that can be cracked, too.
This doesn't even begin to address the fact that, since there has to be some point at which an unencrypted data stream has to exist in a playback -- if nothing else, tapping out the digital signal to your monitor and extracting the part that makes up the video window -- there will be hardware-based ways around the DRM that can't be blocked.
So the result is that the people who are dedicated to putting out pirated versions of works will have to work harder to get their cracks, but the technological advances that make locking up works easier will also make cracking the protections easier. And unless part of this copy-protection legislation castrates the existing 'fair use' provisions of copyright law (i.e., it being legal to make a copy of a DVD for your own use as a hedge against accidentally trashing the original), the required gaps in the copy-protection mechanisms necessary to retain fair-use copying would be much easier to exploit.
With a gyroscope/accelerometer arrangement to detect movement, you could set it up so that you clear the screen by turning it over and shaking it.
Even if they _do_ need to be printed on paper, why do you assume that the exterior packaging is the only place that the tag can go? Books -- bury the tag in the binding. Magazines -- in the binding strip of cardstock ad inserts. Electronic gear -- unless the case is a Faraday cage, you just stick the tag to the inside of the case. Larger appliances -- most of them have enough plastic on the exterior to allow a tag to be molded inside. Credit cards -- the way they're going with smart cards, this would be redundant.
There are enough ways to hide the tag in products that worrying about them on products is a waste of time.
Because this type of coaster is still in its infancy. This is clearly an evolution of the Thrust Air 2000 coaster invented by S&S Sports Power, and it follows the same basic design -- a catapult launch, a 90 pitchup, a 180 pitchover to nose down, and back to the launch point, throwing in a 360 roll during the descent to heighten the thrill.
The selling points of this type of ride are the catapult launch -- instead of the long, slow crank up the lift hill, you're shot off the mark, reaching maximum speed almost immediately -- the vertical climb and dive, and the 'hang time' spent in free fall. You come out of the dive at close to the 120mph at which you entered the climb; at that speed, any of the fancy track elements you see on slower coasters would create unacceptably huge G forces on the riders -- if you look at the other 'gigacoasters', they have one or more secondary hills after the first drop to bleed some of the speed off the coaster train before they start any serious turns, and these coasters use speed and drop height as their selling points, not inversions, while the coasters that are known for their inversion count are all much slower than the gigacoasters. Top Thrill makes its mark from its height; adding more hills detracts from the purity of the single vertical hill (and the attraction of rides like SFMM's 'Superman: The Escape', which is nothing but a shot out, up, down, and back), and slowing the coaster train down enough so that inverting track elements are survivable detracts from the ride's speed. And, as another poster has pointed out, Cedar Point is running out of space to put new coasters.
It's an artifact of the way the search engine works; all the cheaper entries, for the Radeon 9700 cards, have phrases like "not 9700 Pro" in either the product or description fields. What's happening is that Pricewatch's search engine isn't smart enough to parse English; it's just looking for records taht contain 'Radeon', '9700', and 'pro', and listing them in price order. Blame the government, which has enacted regulations that make the dealers put in disclaimers to protect themselves from idiot users who can't be bothered to read the product name and description, and then get bent out of shape with the dealer because they ordered and received a Radeon 9700 instead of the ultra-cheap 9700 Pro they thought they were ordering.
Pricewatch is sandbagging you about the price, due to the way that dealers are listing video cards. If you go to the actual search page for that price quote, you'll see that the entire first page of results is for the Radeon 9700, not the 9700 Pro. Only at the very bottom of the second page of listings do you find an entry for the 9700 Pro, at $276. All of the lower-priced entries have phrases like "not 9700 pro" or "9700 pro also available" in the Product or Description fields. So the GF4 TI 4800, at $250, is $25 cheaper than the cheapest 9700 Pro. The Radeon is still the faster card, but it's not the cheaper card.
The problem is that pharmacies and patients don't use the same terms. When your doctor writes you a prescription, you take it to a pharmacy to get it filled. When the pharmacist takes your prescription script, they fill it and then dispense it to you.
When a pharmacy fills a prescription, what they are doing is to take the ordered quantity of the medication out of their stock and package it; when they dispense a prescription, they present it to the patient along with information about how and when to take it. Filling machines as described in the article don't take the place of a pharmacist -- they're taking the place of the pharmacy techs back inside the pharmacy who type up prescription labels, count out pills, and put them in prescription bottles. This means that the people working in the pharmacy don't have to take as much time preparing the prescription, and can spend more time with the patient.
Fill robots don't replace the pharmacist; what they do is eliminate the place where many medication mistakes occur -- selecting and measuring out the drug that the patient will receive. Drug manufacturers deliberately make pills and capsules with different shapes, colors, sizes and markings in order to help both the patients and the pharmacy staff tell them apart, but a pharmacy tech can still make a mistake and pick the wrong canister off the shelf when pulling a medication, and not notice that they've got the wrong little white pill, particularly when they've got lots of prescriptions to fill. A fill robot doesn't make that mistake; as long as the correct drug is in the correct hopper (and it's easier to make sure you've got the right drug when you're only touching the supply to put another 10,000 pills in the hopper, rather than for each of the 60-pill prescriptions that would be filled from that supply), the fill robot will always pick the correct drug.
And the situation is not as generally clear-cut as the article portrays. Where I work -- a major military hospital -- I am the manager for the pharmacy module of the medical information system at the hospital. The pharmacy has a large fill robot that processes refills; patients can either bring in a prescription for refill or use the phone- or web-based refill system to order their refills. Prescriptions entered for refill are processed by the main medical information system (checking to make sure that there are still refills available on that Rx, that the patient isn't trying to refill the Rx too soon, etc.), and then are sent to the fill robot, which fills and labels the refills, which are then distributed to the satellite pharmacies that the patients have selected to pick up their refills. The prescriptions don't need counselling or instructions, because the patient got those when they got the prescription initially.
And in most cases, these fresh-minted graduates are coming out of an ivory-tower development environment, where it doesn't have to work well as long as it shows that the student grasps the concept that the professor is presenting. And the development environments make them used to writing code as if there's no limit on the amount of storage and memory they can use, so their code is elephantine and slow.
I remember a project I worked on involving electronic storage/maintenance of training documents. Because we only had a couple of programmers on the project, part of it was contracted out. When we tested the code on a real set of documents, one of their modules kept blowing up; it turned out that their code defined a fixed-length array for what was an indeterminate number of elements, and the real-world document had half again as many elements as the array had space for. Another module had every single routine allocating the same 3Mb data structure dynamically on entry, even if only 1% of that space was actually being used (3000-element array of a structure with 6 float fields and four 240-character text fields; the text fields were never used). The program I was responsible for, the import-export module, which would pull all of the pieces out of the Oracle dataabase that held them, including all their links, then link them back into the database at another site, was written using linked lists for all of its dynamic storage. When the project was completed and accepted for implementation, the contractor took over maintenance of the code -- and promptly ripped out all of the linked-list code in the import-export module and replaced it with fixed-length arrays -- even though it had already been proven that fixed-length arrays broke on real-world data.
There are morons everywhere; unfortunately, in the programming industry, the morons leave legacies that can survive for years beyond when they depart, with the task of actually fixing those problems hampered by those problems becoming part of accepted corporate practice -- once everybody's gotten used to doing it wrong, you can't change the user interface because all of the non-techies would *gasp* have to learn a new UI...
I will have been employed full-time as a programmer for 20 years come the middle of next month, plus three years as a student contractor before that, and I don't expect to retire until I've got more than 30 years in (actually, I can't retire on 30 years -- I come up a year short of minimum retirement age when I have 30 years); I've seen people burn out on programming, and I've seen people get pushed into management as the only available mobility option. It may keep me from making The Big Bucks(tm), but I don't ever want to get shoved into management; having to deal with the egos and prejudices where I work resembles a kindergarten more than it does an office.
My father went through this procedure recently, as part of an experimental cancer treatment (in his case, mantle-cell lymphoma). After three sessions of chemotherapy, they extracted stem cells from him to be cultured, then his bone marrow was killed, after which the cultured stem cells were returned.
The short-term results look good; he's recovered most of his appetite, and his immune system came back up nicely (unlike the chemotherapy treatments, where he was severely debilitated and immunocompromised for some time after the treatment). Whether the treatment succeeded in destroying the cancer is something that we're going to have to watch for the foreseeable future.