There are so many things wrong with the parent statement, I don't even know where to begin. Picking one, How do you explain that in the past, when governments did not guarantee universal education, companies, lords, kings, warlords, whatever, had much more power over the average person than is true today in the developed world?
"Are you saying that our current political system is less predicated on people behaving a certain way?"
Of course not.
Can our current political system exist? Yes, because... well, it does. Therefore people behave in such a way that our current political system can exist. Can Libertarianism exist (as libertarians posit it)? I contend that it cannot, because it is dependant on people acting in a way that, in 10,000 years of human history, they do not.
Even if, given a libertarian system sprung whole cloth from the ground, such a system was self sustaining (something I highly doubt), there simply ain't no way to get there from here.
I flirted with libertarianism when I was in college, but soon realized the fundamental problem with it: all success is predicated on people behaving a certain way, a way which 10,000 years of human experience shows is antithetical to human nature. (This by the way, is true of many ideologies - communism, facsim, etc.) As an example, the libertarian view on pollution (in a nutshell) is that government should not be involved. The marketplace will triumph because people collectively will boycott companies that pollute, and individually sue companies that pollute their specific air or land. But how does word get out that a specific company is polluting? Easy enough to make sure newspapers and television that do this kind of investigative reporting don't get ad dollars - under libertarianism there would be nothing to prevent corporations generating a blacklist of media outlets to kill. And if a multibillion dollar corporation says, "hey, my twenty highly paid scientific experts say that pollution didn't come from my drainpipe", how does a $30K/year individual marshall a lawsuit against them? Especially if it is legal for the corporation to call in favors from other corporations and have that individual fired, their mortgage forclosed, their health insurance dropped, and their kids kicked out of school. Public approbation? How does the individual talk to "The Public"? If a few people do get wind of it, the polluters will run some happiness-and-fluff commercials about how they really care about the environment and are working hard every day to protect it, and any tiny disturbance in their bottom line will be reversed (anyone else remember those bizarre 1970's era commercials that showed a thoughtful, intelligent Mom making sure her kids got only the nutritionally best snacks: Hostess Twinkies"?)
Bottom line of the libertarians: "Well, if people aren't willing to fight for something, then the market has decided, and they have to accept the consequences." The problem with that is the little guy did figure out a way to fight the big corporations without having to spend all day every day monitoring and coordinating. A strong representational government. But the first thing the libertarians want to see killed is that government.
Oh come on. Let's say you want to do something incredibly complicated (sarcasm) like run a backup tape at night. Unix/Linux is great in that you can do anything with any weird hardware that has ever existed. But for crying out loud, by the time you work through the twenty different suggestions on what is the "really really easy way" to do this, then realize that if if fails overnight, there is no warning when you log on, so you find out about logs, then find out there is a standard log location (usuallly), then realize they don't turn on automatically, then figure out they have different levels of reporting (which is called verbosity, which is funny but not intuitive) then realize that the error doesn't really tell you anything (it turned out to mean "too many files to fit on the tape", I mean for chrissake, how about that as a frickin error message instead of the deep level crap that I got!), so let me look that up in the documentation, which is where, oh I'll browse for it, I'll just click on the directory browser icon oh an by the way I upgraded something and it didn't upgrade the old one, but simply created a new one, so I'll just change my KDE icons to point at the new one so it will call up the directory browser, but hey, where do I do that,it should be obivious, but no, not there, or there, or there, oh let me look that up in the manual or on the web or on the wait where is that manual or let me call up the directory browser manually to find the manual manually, oh shit it is in icon view how can I change that permanantly why do I have to keep changing it at least that should be simple to change it permanantly, it should be obvious, where is it must be here, no maybe here, how about here, oh well I'll ask on usenet, and get my answer... RTFM!!!! WARNING WILL ROBINSON SYSTEM OVERLOAD!!!
Couldn't agree more about the lack of examples. I find the example-less man pages extremely frustrating as they seem to require a pretty detailed understanding of the inner workings of every command. They mix detailed, "wires and bolts" stuff with the basics. Perfect example is the "locate" command. I wanted to find a file and "locate" seemed like a dream come true. But doing a little research showed up all this abrupt language about databases. What databases? What are they for? Oh wait, maybe these switches do what I want... no, they are for the database? I still don't know what that is? My god, I just want to see if there is a file with "RS232" in the name, but not in the directory name. Why does this have to be so confusing?!
In the 1979-80 timeframe there was a typewriter in use at Xerox (where I worked) that had "th", "st" and a few other things superscripted. It also had some fractions - "1/2" for sure and I remember some others. I'm pretty sure the typewriter was at least several years old, perhaps more, because the secretary (remember those?) who used it was keeping it because she didn't like the word processing system her boss was trying to get her to use. (And before anyone says they didn't have word processors than, I was using a mouse, a GUI, ethernet, a hard drive, a laser printer, and a high resolution monitor in 1980, the Xerox Alto, and it wasn't brand new.
"Note, before anyone starts whining about nuclear power not being clean, that Hanford isn't about nuclear power, but about nuclear weapons."
But its the same players. The consultants, contractors, etc, who gave the US the radioactive disaster that is Hanford are the same ones who are running reactors all over the US and the world.
I used to be pro nuclear power but after witnessing the amaturish and dishonest reaction during a crisis at the nuke plant near Rochester NY (with 1 million in the greater metropolitan area), and having a very disturbing cocktail party conversation with the head of safety for a nuke plant in Louisiana, I started to investigate more. Whatever the benefits of the technology, the culture of nuclear power is one of lies, coverup and other forms of deceit.
It's a shame, because judged only on technology nukes come out ahead.
Ah, the hazards of the digital processing age. What was the yell? It was a direct feed from a noise cancelling microphone. Inside the room was a thunder of noise, nothing could be heard with people screaming and cheering at the top of their lungs. Dean shouted out to them, they probably couldn't even hear him, amplification or no. But the feed was taken from that darned noise cancelling mike, so you heard Dean seemingly shouting out into a virtually quiet room. The press ran with it because it was a "good" story, and Dean will forever be branded an out of control lunatic.
I'm not even a big fan of Dean's, but to have a career end like this... what a bummer.
I think you are confusing profit margin with profits. Their gross margin was good (28% or thereabouts). Roughly, that's what they make on each piece of hardware or software they sell (on average). Profits are what's left over after you spend your revenue. That includes all expenses including purchases, opening up new R&D labs, etc. If a company does not pay dividends (which is far and away the norm nowadays) it is generally in their interest to keep profits low. If you spend money on infrastructure, you are left with capital and a future tax DEDUCTION (x dollars worth of infrastructure + time adjusted value of the depreciation deduction). If you keep it as a profit, you have a smaller amount of capital since you are taxed on it (X dollars - corporate taxes).
As I mentioned above, the input is from several different historical sources as well as operator input. We have to live with the mish mash that is already in existence.
"Are the standards being followed re human readable? Or is it me who is mistaken? In the ISS specs for Code 128 (available from AIM International). On page 18 Section A.1...
It is correct (and required) for a UPC to print the check digit. If you look at one, the interpretation looks like this "1 00000 00000 2" The "2" is the check digit.
You are right about a standard 128. It should not print the check code built into the symbology. However, just to make life interesting, there are barcode standards which use the Code 128 symbology that have their own check digits (in addition to the one built into the 128 symbology). It is up to the standard to define whether this check digit is printable or not.
In a perfect world, you are absolutely correct. But the reality, which is what I have to deal with, is far from that perfect world. UPC codes can come from a database, in which case they were obtained or generated without the check digit, or they can come from an operator. Any practical system must accomodate both inputs (plus even more, but these two make my point).
Believe me, it would never be acceptable in a production environment to say "our product will shut down your production until a) you have the database fixed or b) you have the operator better trained.
BTW, input is only one reason for the check digit. Probably more important is that it allows the scanner to know whether or not it misread the barcode.
Just a nit, but one that happens to affect me greatly. The reality is that the people printing and/or applying the barcodes are the packaging operations. They typically understand very little. For some odd reason, the UPC standard prints the check digit in the interpretation (the human readable part of the barcode). Why is this an issue? Because one of the common mistakes operators make is to enter the entire code, including the check digit. So there are twelve digits when we were expecting eleven. Did they fat finger an extra character or enter the check digit?
We've tried a few different ways over the years to insure the right number of characters, including forcing eleven by cropping, forcing eleven by not allowing entry (no good if the table is a linked one and the entry is outside of our software) or allowing 11 or 12 and checking the checksum if there are twelve. All this matters because the equipment used to print the barcode typcially generates the check digit on its own, and the different manufacturers handle excess digits in several different ways.
The new standard now says we have three choices: 11,12 or 13. What do we do now? I'm not expecting an answer, because in the end we have to balance all the considerations and make Hobson's choice.
I'm not even going to go into the major US corporation whose database consists of 10,11 or 12 digit UPC codes, because in the beginning, that first digit was always the same, so why waste space on it?
Just goes to show you that when volume and/or speed increases, everything gets complicated (except rock).
Arbitrary length barcode standards do exist (EAN-128 for example), but they are complex beasts and great care must be taken to ensure both the creater and reader get everything exactly right. The UPC or EAN-13 have the advantage of being simple. There may be multiple barcodes on a box, but only one of them would be in the UPC/EAN-13 symbology. I suppose you could create a new symbology just for that, but every reader in existence would be obsolete.
In the end, that's what it boils down too: anything that would allow varying length would make way too much software and hardware obsolete. The cost/benefit would be astronimically bad.
If you are willing to spend a few dollars for each tag, and install a tracking system, then what you are talking about should work. There is a good AIM reference summarizing this: What Is RFID?
The advantage of an active system is distance, it can be meters away from a receiver.
I remember talking to a friend working on this technology (14 years ago, sorry, I've lost touch and can't refer you). They were installing a system in a naval hospital to track the doctors by adding active tags to their base ID's, because the doctors were "too busy" to sign in and out at the guard desk. Sounds like what you want to do, substituting "laptops" for "doctors" .
If you go to this site, select "Radio Frequency Identification" then "Systems" you will get a list of manufacturers: RFID Resources
The truism that the USPS is an awful service is baloney. Whenever I hear about faster services it turns out to be in a much smaller country like England or Switzerland. Who, by the way, charge more to post a letter. Most mail I send in a few hundred mile radius gets delivered the next day. And I can send a letter several thousand miles away for 37 cents. And the USPS has to deliver to everyone (everyone!) in the US for the same price. Tell Fedex you want to deliver to Hawaii for 37 cents and see what they tell you. The USPS technology borders on the surreal. Forget Mr. Chaney sorting mail in the back of the general store. Try a half mile conveyor with mail moving so fast you literally only see a solid blur of white, with unbelievable high speed character recognition and Aunt Mabel's handwritten scrawl put into a 10 second holding pattern while the next available human sorter anywhere in the US gets a snapshot beamed by satelite to their monitor.
My friend once got a letter sent from Belize. It was addressed "Tom and Debbie. The Yellow House Next to the Meat Store on Atlantic Ave. Rochester, NY" It took a grand total of 6 days to get there.
I work in this industry and follow what Wal-Mart is doing very closely. Despite what you might gather from all the posts, Wal-Mart has backed away from primary RFID tags. In english, this means that they are not using RFID tags on the things you purchase. Instead, they are going with secondary and tertiary RFID tagging. In english, they will tag cases of products and pallets of cases. I can't see any privacy concerns in this whatsoever.
It differs from primary RFID in some fundamentally practical ways too. Everyone in the supply chain has a vested interested in making secondary coding work. If (and this is a far from certain "if" at this point) RFID can reliable track a carton out of a manufacturer, into a truck, into a Wal-Mart distribution center, into another truck, and finally into a local Wal-Mart, it will simplify life. (Before anyone jumps on the fact that the RFID tag makes it into the local Wal-Mart - the tag is attached to the corrugated shipping carton which is discarded and recycled when all the product is removed and placed on the shelves).
In contrast, there are a number of people who have a vested interest in not having primary RFID work. Aside from people concerned about privacy, there is an incentive to kill tags if they are used in an automatic checkout system. I foresee jammers, zappers, all kinds of shady, quasi-legal devices.
" I'm no legal expert, but couldn't all of this be avoided with a proper disclaimer in the licence for the software?"
ABSOLUTELY NOT! Trust me on this one. Insurance is about having a guy on your side with a team of experienced lawyers. That is what it is for. If you don't have that, they can skin you alive. Because of some bad advice I got from my insurance broker, I spent over $100,000 on attorneys fees for a case that a jury would have laughed out of court. But that's the rub: the plaintiff's lawyers make it as expensive as possible to get to court, and even there you better be good looking and well spoken or the jury might decide to split the difference. Heck, with all those big words getting thrown around, you could lose because a single juror misunderstood something trivial.
The reality is that there is no justice for a small business standing alone. Lawyers are sharks and you are penguins. Tasty, tasty, defenseless penquins. They know they can wear you down, because there is nothing you can do to stop them. You can't represent yourself, because one mistake in filing means you lose the whole case and your house, savings and life goes down the tubes.
Despite the above, I'm not really bitter. It's over and I'm glad it is over. But I really understand the need for insurance now, which is to bring your own personal shark to the party...
Of course, physical separtation only works if you design the operating system around it. Basically, you assume all sources of data are potentially corrupted. You never give deep access to anything that comes in over the wire. Deep access is only possible with a physical key on that specific machine. When the key is connected, no access is allowed by wire.
>What military networks need, Gosh said, is a way to isolate software programs at the hardware level.
Hallelujah! Unix-like or mainframe operating systems are the best you can do with the von Neumann machines, but there is nothing like physical security. The application can't corrupt the operating system because it runs on separate unconnected hardware. The application simply cannot reach the OS, no matter how clever or devious it is.
I know this "Al Gore created the internet" joke was meant as a mindless throw-away, but it is so emblamatic of the dark side of our culture of elitist sarcsam that I'm going to waste Karma here by trying to correct it.
A little searching would show you what really happened. There are many, many sources available, this one is from salon.com (http://dir.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/10/05/gor e_internet/index.html) Gore never claimed to have "invented" the Internet. What he said was: During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet.... Several of the people who could claim to have "invented" the Internet, or key pieces of its protocols -- in particular, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn -- are out there on the Net today defending Gore, asserting that he was the politician in Washington who took the "initiative" to support the Net in its early days.... It took social engineers as well as software engineers to build the Net. And that may be why the response to Gore's original statement was so savage: Not because his claim was a lie, but because it was a truth that a lot of people today are trying to forget or bury.
The Internet didn't spring full-blown out of some scientists' heads, nor did it just grow, like some techno-Topsy powered by the mysterious magic of the marketplace. It emerged from the world of government-subsidized university research, and every step of the way along its passage from academic network to global information infrastructure was shepherded by the state. As the Net's parent, the government didn't do everything right; but it managed to nurture the network through its youth -- then get out of the way once it was mature enough to move out of its parents' digs and shack up with private industry.
Libertarians and conservatives are uncomfortable admitting this. Their vision of Net history is a stirring saga of markets overwhelming states, technological imperatives vanquishing stifling bureaucracies and free information "routing around" government blockages. There's some truth in this vision -- but it's only part of the story.... Libertarians typically believe that the government can't do anything right, and they prefer to forget or ignore the part government has played in the Net's triumph. Giving Gore credit means admitting the government's role; distorting and mocking his claims helps deny it.
Whoa. While checking the box is the right way to go , simply adding up the current available on individual breakers is absoltely NOT! What you need to know is what kind of service the building has. If your space has its own service, then that is what you get, 200 Amps, 500 Amps, 1000 Amps. That is the total you can draw at once.
You still are not homefree though. State electrical codes limit how much each run can draw, say 20 amps. Even if you have a 10,000 Amp service, you can't draw more than 20 amps on that line. Note that the line can, and probably does, have mulitple outlets on it.
This is why you need a professional electrician. But you have to arm him with some prior information: In this room I want to have X pieces of equipment plugged in. Piece 1 draws 3 Amps, Piece 2 draws 1 amp, etc.
You can find out how much each piece draws with a clamp type ammeter, or rather your electrician can. Note that it is not unusual for equipment to draw significantly more at system startup.
The electrician can then calculate how many outlets and how many pieces you can plug in.
A suggestion: Color code and number the outlets for sensitive equipment and keelhaul anyone who plugs in a hair dryer or microwave. In fact, banish microwaves to some far off dungeon, as they emit noise at exactly WiFi frequencies (both use the unregulated spectrum, because, well, it is unregulated.)
Finally, I would also suggest putting all your sensitive stuff on an isolating power conditioner. This is NOT a battery backup, you can add one of those before or after it.
Many (but certainly not all) employers, would understand you wanting to protect existing business. But their lawyers will feel a lot better if you are specific in what you want to exclude. They may worry about you creating a program that is really necessary or obvious for one of the employers projects, then claiming that you have rights to it because you did it after hours. On the other hand, something that specifically mentions the work that you are talking about is much more reasonable.
Another point: I wouldn't stress how much time you will be spending on these other projects. It may make the employer wonder where the bulk of your attention will be placed.
And finally, for people who have already signed such an agreement, some companies have a policy of releasing specific items, provided they are deemed not applicable to the mainline business. Xerox used to do this quite regularly.
You said: The (federal) motor-voter law requires that voter registration forms be conveniently available in certain public offices - including especially secretary of state's drivers' license offices. In California, at least, (I don't know if THIS is mandated) the implementation also promotes people taking stacks of forms and making them available elsewhere (i've found them at supermarkets for instance), or setting up tables in public places for people to register and mailing the forms for them.
OK, valid point. It wasn't clear from the original post. But I would contend that although the problem may be real, the benefits are real too. It is no accident that in general the democrats favored this, since it truly does make it easier for their supporters to register, and the repuclicans opposed it, since they also believed it would register more democrats.
If there are serious flaws with this, then the republicans could have tried to change the law to fix those flaws. But since their main concern was trying to keep democrats from registering, they were only interested in keeping the status quo, not in trying to make it easier for people to register.
BTW, I recently heard a historian talking about why we still have voting on Tuesdays (It was originally done to benefit farmers who may have had a day or more journey to reach the polling place). He contended that it makes it more difficult for the clock punching working class to vote.
Here's an interesting and reasonably argued support of that position. http://www.bostonvote.org/vra/3/
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There are so many things wrong with the parent statement, I don't even know where to begin. Picking one, How do you explain that in the past, when governments did not guarantee universal education, companies, lords, kings, warlords, whatever, had much more power over the average person than is true today in the developed world?
"Are you saying that our current political system is less predicated on people behaving a certain way?"
Of course not.
Can our current political system exist? Yes, because... well, it does. Therefore people behave in such a way that our current political system can exist. Can Libertarianism exist (as libertarians posit it)? I contend that it cannot, because it is dependant on people acting in a way that, in 10,000 years of human history, they do not.
Even if, given a libertarian system sprung whole cloth from the ground, such a system was self sustaining (something I highly doubt), there simply ain't no way to get there from here.
I flirted with libertarianism when I was in college, but soon realized the fundamental problem with it: all success is predicated on people behaving a certain way, a way which 10,000 years of human experience shows is antithetical to human nature. (This by the way, is true of many ideologies - communism, facsim, etc.) As an example, the libertarian view on pollution (in a nutshell) is that government should not be involved. The marketplace will triumph because people collectively will boycott companies that pollute, and individually sue companies that pollute their specific air or land. But how does word get out that a specific company is polluting? Easy enough to make sure newspapers and television that do this kind of investigative reporting don't get ad dollars - under libertarianism there would be nothing to prevent corporations generating a blacklist of media outlets to kill. And if a multibillion dollar corporation says, "hey, my twenty highly paid scientific experts say that pollution didn't come from my drainpipe", how does a $30K/year individual marshall a lawsuit against them? Especially if it is legal for the corporation to call in favors from other corporations and have that individual fired, their mortgage forclosed, their health insurance dropped, and their kids kicked out of school. Public approbation? How does the individual talk to "The Public"? If a few people do get wind of it, the polluters will run some happiness-and-fluff commercials about how they really care about the environment and are working hard every day to protect it, and any tiny disturbance in their bottom line will be reversed (anyone else remember those bizarre 1970's era commercials that showed a thoughtful, intelligent Mom making sure her kids got only the nutritionally best snacks: Hostess Twinkies"?)
Bottom line of the libertarians: "Well, if people aren't willing to fight for something, then the market has decided, and they have to accept the consequences." The problem with that is the little guy did figure out a way to fight the big corporations without having to spend all day every day monitoring and coordinating. A strong representational government. But the first thing the libertarians want to see killed is that government.
Oh come on. Let's say you want to do something incredibly complicated (sarcasm) like run a backup tape at night. Unix/Linux is great in that you can do anything with any weird hardware that has ever existed. But for crying out loud, by the time you work through the twenty different suggestions on what is the "really really easy way" to do this, then realize that if if fails overnight, there is no warning when you log on, so you find out about logs, then find out there is a standard log location (usuallly), then realize they don't turn on automatically, then figure out they have different levels of reporting (which is called verbosity, which is funny but not intuitive) then realize that the error doesn't really tell you anything (it turned out to mean "too many files to fit on the tape", I mean for chrissake, how about that as a frickin error message instead of the deep level crap that I got!), so let me look that up in the documentation, which is where, oh I'll browse for it, I'll just click on the directory browser icon oh an by the way I upgraded something and it didn't upgrade the old one, but simply created a new one, so I'll just change my KDE icons to point at the new one so it will call up the directory browser, but hey, where do I do that,it should be obivious, but no, not there, or there, or there, oh let me look that up in the manual or on the web or on the wait where is that manual or let me call up the directory browser manually to find the manual manually, oh shit it is in icon view how can I change that permanantly why do I have to keep changing it at least that should be simple to change it permanantly, it should be obvious, where is it must be here, no maybe here, how about here, oh well I'll ask on usenet, and get my answer... RTFM!!!! WARNING WILL ROBINSON SYSTEM OVERLOAD!!!
Couldn't agree more about the lack of examples. I find the example-less man pages extremely frustrating as they seem to require a pretty detailed understanding of the inner workings of every command. They mix detailed, "wires and bolts" stuff with the basics. Perfect example is the "locate" command. I wanted to find a file and "locate" seemed like a dream come true. But doing a little research showed up all this abrupt language about databases. What databases? What are they for? Oh wait, maybe these switches do what I want... no, they are for the database? I still don't know what that is? My god, I just want to see if there is a file with "RS232" in the name, but not in the directory name. Why does this have to be so confusing?!
In the 1979-80 timeframe there was a typewriter in use at Xerox (where I worked) that had "th", "st" and a few other things superscripted. It also had some fractions - "1/2" for sure and I remember some others. I'm pretty sure the typewriter was at least several years old, perhaps more, because the secretary (remember those?) who used it was keeping it because she didn't like the word processing system her boss was trying to get her to use. (And before anyone says they didn't have word processors than, I was using a mouse, a GUI, ethernet, a hard drive, a laser printer, and a high resolution monitor in 1980, the Xerox Alto, and it wasn't brand new.
"Note, before anyone starts whining about nuclear power not being clean, that Hanford isn't about nuclear power, but about nuclear weapons."
But its the same players. The consultants, contractors, etc, who gave the US the radioactive disaster that is Hanford are the same ones who are running reactors all over the US and the world.
I used to be pro nuclear power but after witnessing the amaturish and dishonest reaction during a crisis at the nuke plant near Rochester NY (with 1 million in the greater metropolitan area), and having a very disturbing cocktail party conversation with the head of safety for a nuke plant in Louisiana, I started to investigate more. Whatever the benefits of the technology, the culture of nuclear power is one of lies, coverup and other forms of deceit.
It's a shame, because judged only on technology nukes come out ahead.
Didn't I see something about the use of the DMCA to prevent mod chips in game systems? If so, how does your Real efforts square with that?
"That yell didn't help..."
Ah, the hazards of the digital processing age. What was the yell? It was a direct feed from a noise cancelling microphone. Inside the room was a thunder of noise, nothing could be heard with people screaming and cheering at the top of their lungs. Dean shouted out to them, they probably couldn't even hear him, amplification or no. But the feed was taken from that darned noise cancelling mike, so you heard Dean seemingly shouting out into a virtually quiet room. The press ran with it because it was a "good" story, and Dean will forever be branded an out of control lunatic.
I'm not even a big fan of Dean's, but to have a career end like this... what a bummer.
I think you are confusing profit margin with profits. Their gross margin was good (28% or thereabouts). Roughly, that's what they make on each piece of hardware or software they sell (on average). Profits are what's left over after you spend your revenue. That includes all expenses including purchases, opening up new R&D labs, etc. If a company does not pay dividends (which is far and away the norm nowadays) it is generally in their interest to keep profits low. If you spend money on infrastructure, you are left with capital and a future tax DEDUCTION (x dollars worth of infrastructure + time adjusted value of the depreciation deduction). If you keep it as a profit, you have a smaller amount of capital since you are taxed on it (X dollars - corporate taxes).
As I mentioned above, the input is from several different historical sources as well as operator input. We have to live with the mish mash that is already in existence.
"Are the standards being followed re human readable? Or is it me who is mistaken? In the ISS specs for Code 128 (available from AIM International). On page 18 Section A.1...
It is correct (and required) for a UPC to print the check digit. If you look at one, the interpretation looks like this "1 00000 00000 2" The "2" is the check digit.
You are right about a standard 128. It should not print the check code built into the symbology. However, just to make life interesting, there are barcode standards which use the Code 128 symbology that have their own check digits (in addition to the one built into the 128 symbology). It is up to the standard to define whether this check digit is printable or not.
In a perfect world, you are absolutely correct. But the reality, which is what I have to deal with, is far from that perfect world. UPC codes can come from a database, in which case they were obtained or generated without the check digit, or they can come from an operator. Any practical system must accomodate both inputs (plus even more, but these two make my point).
Believe me, it would never be acceptable in a production environment to say "our product will shut down your production until a) you have the database fixed or b) you have the operator better trained.
BTW, input is only one reason for the check digit. Probably more important is that it allows the scanner to know whether or not it misread the barcode.
Just a nit, but one that happens to affect me greatly. The reality is that the people printing and/or applying the barcodes are the packaging operations. They typically understand very little. For some odd reason, the UPC standard prints the check digit in the interpretation (the human readable part of the barcode). Why is this an issue? Because one of the common mistakes operators make is to enter the entire code, including the check digit. So there are twelve digits when we were expecting eleven. Did they fat finger an extra character or enter the check digit?
We've tried a few different ways over the years to insure the right number of characters, including forcing eleven by cropping, forcing eleven by not allowing entry (no good if the table is a linked one and the entry is outside of our software) or allowing 11 or 12 and checking the checksum if there are twelve. All this matters because the equipment used to print the barcode typcially generates the check digit on its own, and the different manufacturers handle excess digits in several different ways.
The new standard now says we have three choices: 11,12 or 13. What do we do now? I'm not expecting an answer, because in the end we have to balance all the considerations and make Hobson's choice.
I'm not even going to go into the major US corporation whose database consists of 10,11 or 12 digit UPC codes, because in the beginning, that first digit was always the same, so why waste space on it?
Just goes to show you that when volume and/or speed increases, everything gets complicated (except rock).
Arbitrary length barcode standards do exist (EAN-128 for example), but they are complex beasts and great care must be taken to ensure both the creater and reader get everything exactly right. The UPC or EAN-13 have the advantage of being simple. There may be multiple barcodes on a box, but only one of them would be in the UPC/EAN-13 symbology. I suppose you could create a new symbology just for that, but every reader in existence would be obsolete.
In the end, that's what it boils down too: anything that would allow varying length would make way too much software and hardware obsolete. The cost/benefit would be astronimically bad.
If you are willing to spend a few dollars for each tag, and install a tracking system, then what you are talking about should work. There is a good AIM reference summarizing this: What Is RFID? The advantage of an active system is distance, it can be meters away from a receiver. I remember talking to a friend working on this technology (14 years ago, sorry, I've lost touch and can't refer you). They were installing a system in a naval hospital to track the doctors by adding active tags to their base ID's, because the doctors were "too busy" to sign in and out at the guard desk. Sounds like what you want to do, substituting "laptops" for "doctors" . If you go to this site, select "Radio Frequency Identification" then "Systems" you will get a list of manufacturers: RFID Resources
The truism that the USPS is an awful service is baloney. Whenever I hear about faster services it turns out to be in a much smaller country like England or Switzerland. Who, by the way, charge more to post a letter. Most mail I send in a few hundred mile radius gets delivered the next day. And I can send a letter several thousand miles away for 37 cents. And the USPS has to deliver to everyone (everyone!) in the US for the same price. Tell Fedex you want to deliver to Hawaii for 37 cents and see what they tell you. The USPS technology borders on the surreal. Forget Mr. Chaney sorting mail in the back of the general store. Try a half mile conveyor with mail moving so fast you literally only see a solid blur of white, with unbelievable high speed character recognition and Aunt Mabel's handwritten scrawl put into a 10 second holding pattern while the next available human sorter anywhere in the US gets a snapshot beamed by satelite to their monitor.
My friend once got a letter sent from Belize. It was addressed "Tom and Debbie. The Yellow House Next to the Meat Store on Atlantic Ave. Rochester, NY" It took a grand total of 6 days to get there.
Flame off.
I work in this industry and follow what Wal-Mart is doing very closely. Despite what you might gather from all the posts, Wal-Mart has backed away from primary RFID tags. In english, this means that they are not using RFID tags on the things you purchase. Instead, they are going with secondary and tertiary RFID tagging. In english, they will tag cases of products and pallets of cases. I can't see any privacy concerns in this whatsoever.
It differs from primary RFID in some fundamentally practical ways too. Everyone in the supply chain has a vested interested in making secondary coding work. If (and this is a far from certain "if" at this point) RFID can reliable track a carton out of a manufacturer, into a truck, into a Wal-Mart distribution center, into another truck, and finally into a local Wal-Mart, it will simplify life. (Before anyone jumps on the fact that the RFID tag makes it into the local Wal-Mart - the tag is attached to the corrugated shipping carton which is discarded and recycled when all the product is removed and placed on the shelves).
In contrast, there are a number of people who have a vested interest in not having primary RFID work. Aside from people concerned about privacy, there is an incentive to kill tags if they are used in an automatic checkout system. I foresee jammers, zappers, all kinds of shady, quasi-legal devices.
" I'm no legal expert, but couldn't all of this be avoided with a proper disclaimer in the licence for the software?"
ABSOLUTELY NOT! Trust me on this one. Insurance is about having a guy on your side with a team of experienced lawyers. That is what it is for. If you don't have that, they can skin you alive. Because of some bad advice I got from my insurance broker, I spent over $100,000 on attorneys fees for a case that a jury would have laughed out of court. But that's the rub: the plaintiff's lawyers make it as expensive as possible to get to court, and even there you better be good looking and well spoken or the jury might decide to split the difference. Heck, with all those big words getting thrown around, you could lose because a single juror misunderstood something trivial.
The reality is that there is no justice for a small business standing alone. Lawyers are sharks and you are penguins. Tasty, tasty, defenseless penquins. They know they can wear you down, because there is nothing you can do to stop them. You can't represent yourself, because one mistake in filing means you lose the whole case and your house, savings and life goes down the tubes.
Despite the above, I'm not really bitter. It's over and I'm glad it is over. But I really understand the need for insurance now, which is to bring your own personal shark to the party...
-Jim
Of course, physical separtation only works if you design the operating system around it. Basically, you assume all sources of data are potentially corrupted. You never give deep access to anything that comes in over the wire. Deep access is only possible with a physical key on that specific machine. When the key is connected, no access is allowed by wire.
>What military networks need, Gosh said, is a way to isolate software programs at the hardware level.
Hallelujah! Unix-like or mainframe operating systems are the best you can do with the von Neumann machines, but there is nothing like physical security. The application can't corrupt the operating system because it runs on separate unconnected hardware. The application simply cannot reach the OS, no matter how clever or devious it is.
I know this "Al Gore created the internet" joke was meant as a mindless throw-away, but it is so emblamatic of the dark side of our culture of elitist sarcsam that I'm going to waste Karma here by trying to correct it.
r e_internet/index.html) ... ...
...
A little searching would show you what really happened. There are many, many sources available, this one is from salon.com (http://dir.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/10/05/go
Gore never claimed to have "invented" the Internet. What he said was: During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
Several of the people who could claim to have "invented" the Internet, or key pieces of its protocols -- in particular, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn -- are out there on the Net today defending Gore, asserting that he was the politician in Washington who took the "initiative" to support the Net in its early days.
It took social engineers as well as software engineers to build the Net. And that may be why the response to Gore's original statement was so savage: Not because his claim was a lie, but because it was a truth that a lot of people today are trying to forget or bury.
The Internet didn't spring full-blown out of some scientists' heads, nor did it just grow, like some techno-Topsy powered by the mysterious magic of the marketplace. It emerged from the world of government-subsidized university research, and every step of the way along its passage from academic network to global information infrastructure was shepherded by the state. As the Net's parent, the government didn't do everything right; but it managed to nurture the network through its youth -- then get out of the way once it was mature enough to move out of its parents' digs and shack up with private industry.
Libertarians and conservatives are uncomfortable admitting this. Their vision of Net history is a stirring saga of markets overwhelming states, technological imperatives vanquishing stifling bureaucracies and free information "routing around" government blockages. There's some truth in this vision -- but it's only part of the story.
Libertarians typically believe that the government can't do anything right, and they prefer to forget or ignore the part government has played in the Net's triumph. Giving Gore credit means admitting the government's role; distorting and mocking his claims helps deny it.
Whoa. While checking the box is the right way to go , simply adding up the current available on individual breakers is absoltely NOT! What you need to know is what kind of service the building has. If your space has its own service, then that is what you get, 200 Amps, 500 Amps, 1000 Amps. That is the total you can draw at once.
You still are not homefree though. State electrical codes limit how much each run can draw, say 20 amps. Even if you have a 10,000 Amp service, you can't draw more than 20 amps on that line. Note that the line can, and probably does, have mulitple outlets on it.
This is why you need a professional electrician. But you have to arm him with some prior information: In this room I want to have X pieces of equipment plugged in. Piece 1 draws 3 Amps, Piece 2 draws 1 amp, etc.
You can find out how much each piece draws with a clamp type ammeter, or rather your electrician can. Note that it is not unusual for equipment to draw significantly more at system startup.
The electrician can then calculate how many outlets and how many pieces you can plug in.
A suggestion: Color code and number the outlets for sensitive equipment and keelhaul anyone who plugs in a hair dryer or microwave. In fact, banish microwaves to some far off dungeon, as they emit noise at exactly WiFi frequencies (both use the unregulated spectrum, because, well, it is unregulated.)
Finally, I would also suggest putting all your sensitive stuff on an isolating power conditioner. This is NOT a battery backup, you can add one of those before or after it.
Many (but certainly not all) employers, would understand you wanting to protect existing business. But their lawyers will feel a lot better if you are specific in what you want to exclude. They may worry about you creating a program that is really necessary or obvious for one of the employers projects, then claiming that you have rights to it because you did it after hours. On the other hand, something that specifically mentions the work that you are talking about is much more reasonable.
Another point: I wouldn't stress how much time you will be spending on these other projects. It may make the employer wonder where the bulk of your attention will be placed.
And finally, for people who have already signed such an agreement, some companies have a policy of releasing specific items, provided they are deemed not applicable to the mainline business. Xerox used to do this quite regularly.
You said:
The (federal) motor-voter law requires that voter registration forms be conveniently available in certain public offices - including especially secretary of state's drivers' license offices. In California, at least, (I don't know if THIS is mandated) the implementation also promotes people taking stacks of forms and making them available elsewhere (i've found them at supermarkets for instance), or setting up tables in public places for people to register and mailing the forms for them.
OK, valid point. It wasn't clear from the original post. But I would contend that although the problem may be real, the benefits are real too. It is no accident that in general the democrats favored this, since it truly does make it easier for their supporters to register, and the repuclicans opposed it, since they also believed it would register more democrats.
If there are serious flaws with this, then the republicans could have tried to change the law to fix those flaws. But since their main concern was trying to keep democrats from registering, they were only interested in keeping the status quo, not in trying to make it easier for people to register.
BTW, I recently heard a historian talking about why we still have voting on Tuesdays (It was originally done to benefit farmers who may have had a day or more journey to reach the polling place). He contended that it makes it more difficult for the clock punching working class to vote.
Here's an interesting and reasonably argued support of that position. http://www.bostonvote.org/vra/3/