I don't really care what you think - it did happen. If you read the post correctly, no one asked us to do anything to damage our equipment: they wanted to see it work, which couldn't be done in that setting. When they couldn't see it operate and couldn't determine it wasn't anything dangerous, they asked if we could ship it instead of going carry on - which we did. The airport was Greenville-Spartenburg, SC and the date was about a year ago (don't have business receipts at home). Airline (irrelevant) was NW to Detroit, transferring to Ottowa.
I was traveling recently for a factory acceptance test for a peice of industrial equipment. We brought our own PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) with the power supply, CPU, and a couple of I/O cards. Because this is relatively expensive and fragile equipment, we took it carry on - BIG MISTAKE!!! They made us unpack everything (hassle, but understandable), then they wanted us to try and turn it on and see what it did. When we tried to explain that it required a special power supply to hook into (it is 110, but not a normal plug) and even if we turned it on, without any I/O devices hooked up to the I/O cards, they would see nothing but a couple of LED lights flashing. That made them even more mad. We tried to show them the manuals for the stuff, hoping that would ease some fears - hah, the techno babble irritated them more. Fortunately, we were at the airport with lots of time to spare, so we jumped on the cell phone, called a co-worker who then rushed over and picked up the stuff. We had him run it over to a Fed-Ex station and ship it to us at the vendors. Luckily we only lost about 6 hrs of testing time and a bunch of $$$ for shiping costs, but the agrivation and irritation suffered was significant. Maybe if the TSA hired people with a IQ over 50, things would run a little smoother.
Looks like all those busted long haul transoceanic fiber companies will now have some users. I can only imagine how they are going to scan those documents in.
Anyone know if there is a good OCR program for ancient greek or latin?
I suppose they could use some sort of bitmap format at high rez. but that is gonna suck up some bandwidth.
I can also hear it now:
Mom - What are you doing up there on the computer at 2AM?
Kid - Honest mom, I was just reading Constantine's notes on the empire relocation!
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I don't really care what you think - it did happen.
If you read the post correctly, no one asked us to do anything to damage our equipment: they wanted to see it work, which couldn't be done in that setting. When they couldn't see it operate and couldn't determine it wasn't anything dangerous, they asked if we could ship it instead of going carry on - which we did.
The airport was Greenville-Spartenburg, SC and the date was about a year ago (don't have business receipts at home). Airline (irrelevant) was NW to Detroit, transferring to Ottowa.
I was traveling recently for a factory acceptance test for a peice of industrial equipment. We brought our own PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) with the power supply, CPU, and a couple of I/O cards. Because this is relatively expensive and fragile equipment, we took it carry on - BIG MISTAKE!!!
They made us unpack everything (hassle, but understandable), then they wanted us to try and turn it on and see what it did. When we tried to explain that it required a special power supply to hook into (it is 110, but not a normal plug) and even if we turned it on, without any I/O devices hooked up to the I/O cards, they would see nothing but a couple of LED lights flashing. That made them even more mad.
We tried to show them the manuals for the stuff, hoping that would ease some fears - hah, the techno babble irritated them more.
Fortunately, we were at the airport with lots of time to spare, so we jumped on the cell phone, called a co-worker who then rushed over and picked up the stuff. We had him run it over to a Fed-Ex station and ship it to us at the vendors. Luckily we only lost about 6 hrs of testing time and a bunch of $$$ for shiping costs, but the agrivation and irritation suffered was significant.
Maybe if the TSA hired people with a IQ over 50, things would run a little smoother.
Looks like all those busted long haul transoceanic fiber companies will now have some users. I can only imagine how they are going to scan those documents in.
Anyone know if there is a good OCR program for ancient greek or latin?
I suppose they could use some sort of bitmap format at high rez. but that is gonna suck up some bandwidth.
I can also hear it now:
Mom - What are you doing up there on the computer at 2AM?
Kid - Honest mom, I was just reading Constantine's notes on the empire relocation!