My "favorite" traditional-recruitment style IT interview question: "What TCP port does {service} use?" Examples have been SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, MSSQL, etc. Good lord, do they really think somebody having those memorized is a good IT worker, and somebody who doesn't but knows how to do a two-second Google search would somehow be unable to troubleshoot a never-seen-before issue? I was able to explain in one interview how "No, I haven't memorized such-and-such port, but I have the ability to learn new things" but in another it was an HR person doing a pre-screening and simply passing answers back to the hiring manage - I doubt she said anything to the manager beyond "Doesn't know" for particular questions. A better sort of question would be, IMO, something along the lines of "A server suddenly can't be pinged. What do you check?" Does it have power, are there link lights, did the switch fail, did the DBA change the IP address, is DNS resolving, did the networking department change the VLAN config for that port, etc. But no, I get gems like "What DOS command do you use to stop the spooler service."
Ignoring the article, which has gems such as "Compared with Gen Y, he says, they [Gen Xers] are less adept at working in groups, more entitlement- than achievement-oriented, and less willing to accept advice or mentoring" I only have one bit of advice for somebody who's wondering what sort of tech to focus on - intrusion detection, data security, and that sort of thing. A TS/SCI clearance helps a lot. Defense industries and agencies in the beltway are hiring such like mad. Other than that, most employers seem to be looking for either people with experience that can hit the ground running (and it won't matter to them how much certification or education you have if you've never actually done the work) or are looking for entry-level helpdesk bodies (and again, the same stuff won't matter.) You can only really swap to new techs through moves internal to your existing company, in my experience.
whenever our traders got off the elevator, coming back from lunch, they would hit all the floor buttons to delay the traders returning to the higher floors
Interesting trick. It wouldn't work in Tokyo, though. At least, not at the hotel I stayed at once. You could double-tap an elevator button that had been hit, and it would de-select that floor. I've yet to find an elevator in the US that would do the same. Sad.
For what it's worth, here's my anecdotal experience with my first-gen iPhone and field test. Sitting on its own, it shows three bars or about -85 to -89 dB. Holding it in the popularized way, signal strength drops to -101 to -107 dB, showing one or maybe two bars. Occasionally it'll go all the way to "Searching..." Call it -20 dB attenuation on average, similar to what Anandtech saw on the iPhone 4. So the iPhone 4 doesn't appear to be any worse than a first-gen iPhone.
The USGS has a nice earthquake webpage http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/ with realtime earthquake reporting, with all earthquakes (hundreds of 4.5+ magnitudes per week around the world, thousands of 1.0+ magnitudes in/near the US per week) mapped out.
I've been a poster to that MacRumors thread for a few days now, chronicling my phone's behavior when turned off every night. Normally, when I go to AT&T's site and check my data usage I see some amount of usage (a few KB to a few MB) around 1:30am, give or take, when I'm definitely not using my phone. (It spends the night in its dock, awake, showing the weather app. So it's also got an active wifi connection.) Whenever my phone spends the night turned off, I don't get any data usage reported for overnight - suggesting the phone is indeed sending data at that time. However, I instead see the data usage reported for the time that I turned my phone on in the morning. And the data usage amounts reported correlate to the amount that I actually used during the previous day, as far as I can tell.
So I've amended my theory - I now believe that the data usage that AT&T is reporting is a summary for the day's use, yet for some reason requires communication between the phone and AT&T's network to produce the summary. (Which rather surprises me, since it opens the possibility, depending on what's really going on, to somebody messing with their smartphone in order to change their officially reported data usage.) But I think I have a reasonable grasp on what's going on - my phone is NOT sending megabytes of data while unattended at 1:30am, despite what AT&T's website is reporting.
Not quite as definitive as sniffing the RF transmissions. (No special equipment required for that, though - just set the phone next to a set of powered speakers and listen for the tell-tale GSM interference noise. Somebody will then have to spend the night awake next to their phone and record the timestamp of hearing the noise.)
(This still doesn't explain why there are sometimes more than one reported instances of data usage in a 24 hour period. I can't discern any pattern to it. But I haven't been paying much attention to times my phone is turned off, put into airplane mode, or looses all signal to AT&T, which would be the first theory to check IMO.)
I do like the idea of not needing an explanatory tool like "Dark Energy"... that has always bothered me. Far more than "Dark Matter".
And yet do we not have experimental evidence for this dark energy you don't like? I agree its a very odd concept, intuitively, yet it appears to be more than just a hand-waving or mathematical construct.
Clarke is talking about what's possible at a much higher level than discussing the capabilities of an already-built machine. Consider the difference between saying "It's impossible for people to fly" and "It's impossible for this Audi to fly." That's the same difference between saying "It's impossible to create a black hole that will swallow the Earth" and "It's impossible the LHC will destroy the Earth." With enough advancement and resources, we might be able to do the former some day - who knows. But that doesn't mean the boffins don't understand the energy levels that will be seen in the LHC, and how those energy levels compare to cosmic radiation collisions that happen naturally in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Based on my very non-technical understanding of the argument, saying the LHC can destroy the Earth via creating a black hole is analogous to saying that turning on my TV will cause a matter/antimatter explosion big enough to destroy the Earth.
Another related series of books worth reading, but seemingly less known than the Pliocene Exile series, is the Gandalara Cycle by Randall Garret and Vicki Ann Heydron. It imagines life on the floor of the dry Mediterranean bed, including dealing with the salt, dryness, heat, lack of heavy metals, etc., and dealing with the return of the water. (At a much slower rate than TFA indicates.)
I don't remember the exact timeframe, but I recall Wired (and possibly other mags) doing the exact same thing during the dotcom bubble. Hold up your print magazine to a webcam on a computer running the right software and it'd scan embedded codes and you'd get what you've always wanted - more advertising! This Esquire thing has been done before, and failed before, and hopefully it'll fail again. Next thing you know, they'll be shipping out little cat-shaped barcode readers to their circulation for those people who don't have webcames. Now THAT'S innovation!
Gaming console + Apple TV + DVR + IPTV receiver (eg, for use with AT&T U-Verse) + Mac Mini = my ideal living room home entertainment convergence box.
I wonder if Apple could leverage its relationship with AT&T on the iPhone to further such a concept. (At least on the IPTV part...)
AFAIK, an audiobook is a derivative work of a normal print book, just like a screenplay and a movie are derivative works. And is therefore protected by copyright law. Just because I own a paper copy of a book does not mean that I can walk out of a bookstore with a free version of the audio book, or go see the movie for free. The fact that it's produced by a computer algorithm rather than a person reading out loud doesn't really have any bearing on the issue.
Usually, the "official" termination date occurs at the end of the severance period. Most companies retain the "right" to recall you from your enforced sabbatical during that period.
Not so, at least in my case. I was laid off recently and the severance document clearly listed the termination date as two weeks after I was notified. Additionally, in order to receive the severance payments I had to sign a NEW contract that laid out the terms and conditions of the payments, their amount, the duration of payments, the conditions under which the payments would be stopped, etc. Maybe it's different for different companies, but my severance didn't include any provisions for being recalled or anything like that.
Even Detroit would have difficulty coming up with a way to make a $10 keyboard cost $100. $40/hour with a production rate of two keyboards per hour and markups galore?
As was reported on NPR a little while ago http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100076874 there's a little company in Lexington, KY called Unicomp http://www.pckeyboard.com/ that still produces the old IBM Model M keyboard, the one with the really loud click and lots of tactile feedback. They charge $69 per keyboard. Not quite a four dollar keyboard, which can be had today, but compares well to the fancy $100+ keyboards that some other brands market. (Although arguably with less gee-whiz functionality.)
According to the Copyright Act, a derivative work is:
"a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted."
A derivative work usually involves a type of transformation, such as the transformation of a novel into a motion picture. In the computer industry, a second version of a software program is generally considered a derivative work based upon the earlier version.
Given that, creating an audiobook from a text (whether by recording a person speaking, or on-the-fly with a computer program) is a derivative work, the right to which is reserved for the copyright holder. A lot of people talk about reading a bedtime story to their kids being okay and it obviously is - IANAL, but I suspect that if you recorded that reading of Harry Potter and posted it on the 'net for download for a small fee, or even free, you'd face some swift legal action. My understanding is that just because you purchased the rights to a work in one form does not mean you can, other than for personal use, convert it to any other form.
Consider the following what-if: some CGI and AI genius creates an algorithm that can take a book, interpret the descriptions and generate a visual adaption, not just an audio one via text-to-speech. Would that be considered
Fact is (as far as I can tell, again IANAcopyrightL) an audiobook, whether created by a human or a computer, is an established derivative of a book, and is protected by copyright law, and you cannot distribute such without being given the right by the copyright holder. (Although I guess it could be argued that a text-to-speech algorithm generating the audio on the fly is entirely different from doing the exact same thing in a studio and transmitting the result as an audio file? It's not like Amazon is sending out actual audio information. Hmm...)
The authority highschools have over students in the US is weird. For example, they can (or feel they can, the case is still pending http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/16/teen.strip.search/) strip naked a 13 year old female student and search her because another student said she gave out 400mg ibuprofen pills. In any other setting, the people doing that would be thrown in jail for many years for sexual assault and be branded as sex-offenders for life. But in this case they said it was a reasonable step for student safety.
Taking notes out of a personal backpack is nothing compared to this. I doubt anybody with any authority to do anything about it will care in the slightest, unfortunately.
If you want a dose of wacky technology stories (or, at least, wacky IT stories) you need to visit with the Daily WTF (Worse Than Failure) at http://thedailywtf.com/
I'm not sure where you'd go for wacky science/engineering stories though. Some website called "slashdot" or something like that, probably.
Keep in mind that the filament of a 100 watt incandescent light bulb operates at about 2500 degrees C. Also, did you notice that the runtime of this laser is continuous? So imagine holding 150 tungsten filaments at 2500 degrees onto a surface the size of a pencil, or heck even a quarter, for as long as you can hold the aim steady. That's a lot of energy transfer, probably enough to vaporize just about any material in a very short time. Aim this laser at your couch, and in short order I suspect it'll burn though your couch, your walls, out the house and through your car, through the neighbor's house, the neighbor's dog, and continue on for a while yet.
My impression is that the big cell providers don't bother with pagers anymore because the profit margin isn't big enough for the corporate bloat. I think pagers are now a niche market, handled by pager-specific companies. That said, as a sysadmin until I got laid off recently, my pager was serviced though USA Mobility. They do local and national, one-way and two-way. My specific pager was a Motorola T900. No five-nines reliability (I was once unable to receive pages at my house for several days - they would show up as soon as I drove a couple miles to a different location though, so I assume it was a transmitter issue) so I had to set up my cell phone as a backup channel. But otherwise it worked well enough.
One thing about pagers, though - I got paged enough that I came to absolutely hate the pager noise. I used to have it set to alert with a single beep tone, but my stress would spike whenever I heard that tone on TV, the radio, or wherever. Then I chose a rising/falling tone (what's the musical term for that?) which worked for a while until a recent commercial showing somebody trapped in an elevator while everybody's pager/phone goes off around them. That specific tone was played and it bothered the hell out of me. Oh well, I don't have to worry about that until my next job I guess.
Here's my anecdote for your enjoyment and education: A friend worked at a cheese plant. Her job was to do QA tests - bacterial and antibiotic content of the incoming milk; protein, fat and moisture content of the outgoing cheese, etc. She was once told by the boss to falsify the reports of the outgoing product, to make it look like higher quality cheese than it really was. (No health issues, just a question of how much the customer would pay for the product.) She refused, as she was required to sign her name on the report. Instead, she performed her tests like normal, gave her boss an unsigned report with the real numbers, along with a blank report with no signature. He filled in what he wanted and signed it himself. She did experience retribution - poor performance reviews and reports saying she wasn't doing her job. I guess she could have gone to the FDA or USDA or something, but I'd bee surprised if anything positive would have happened, and she would have been working in a hostile environment in the meantime. Instead, she ended up quitting soon after, without even having a new job lined up. Fortunately, she quickly found something better and was much happier. Karma, if you believe in such a thing - she did the right thing and it definitely was the right move for her.
So my advice (IANAL) - refuse to do the work you know is wrong, prepare for a crappy work environment, and get that resume and those contacts warmed up. Because you should be in a better job regardless.
I've found that powered noise cancelling headphones are particularly bad about picking up the GSM noise. I read somewhere that putting the phone into an anti-static bag, like what RAM comes in, will prevent the interference while still allowing calls through. While I found that it does work, on the iPhone it's an annoying solution because it causes problems seeing and operating the touch screen. Playing around with it, I was surprised to learn that simply placing the iPhone flat on top of the anti-static bag attenuated the interference noise tremendously. It can still be heard, but only very very faintly. Signal strength drops by a bar or two, but calls still go through with ease. This isn't a solution if you use the iPhone dock, but when you're listening to music at your desk at work its an excellent work-around. (This is on my first-gen iPhone, I have no idea if this would work for the curved back 3G iPhone.)
I release into the public domain the concept of an iPhone case (or car holster) that has anti-static material built into the backing, so that you can connect it to your car stereo or headphones without being bothered by the GSM noise. I'd patent the idea (I don't think there's any prior art on this, is there?) but patents are evil, right?
We're talking 25 years, however. Think back to 25 years ago - 1983. Then consider that computer technology is changing at an ever increasing rate, meaning that tech 25 years from now will likely be even more different from today than today is from 1983.
I was just a kid then, and we had an IBM PC. The original one, I think. It had a single 5.25" floppy - max capacity of 264 kb I think. Hard drives hadn't made it to the consumer level yet. A friend had some TI thing that used audio cassettes. I don't believe you can buy anything from Newegg that'll read those! Of course, some vintage gear probably could be found, but I'm not sure it'll be especially easy to acquire. It'll be even more difficult to find today's cutting edge tech 25 years later, I suspect.
If somebody packaged an entire 1983 IBM PC including proper software, you'd be able to display it on the monitor just fine - but you wouldn't be able to do anything else with it. Hmm, maybe over the 15 pin serial port? Assuming the person 25 years ago thought to include a program that'll send data over it.
So a digital picture frame packaged with the data, assuming it all survives, will be able to display the images, but that's about all you'll be able to do. A quality printout would be a much better choice IMO.
Throw in a USB thumbdrive, and I'd say there's over an extremely small chance that a computer 25 years from now would have a compatible port and the appropriate software to read any of our formats today.
And the Rangers won a double-header last night, too. Wonders never cease. You're right, they don't cease - the Starts shut out the Ducks 4-0 in game 1 of round 1. Wow. (Sorry, completely off-topic, I know.:-)
A bit more on-topic - I find it interesting that some studies show that red light cameras increase the total number of collisions because rear-end collisions go up. So while the amount of revenue from red-light tickets goes down due to fewer red-light violations, I don't think we can yet claim that Dallas is a safer city due to the cameras. Could be that they accomplish two things - less red light violations and more crashes. The two are not mutually exclusive. In which case, there's still the argument for making yellows longer, cameras present or not.
Slashdot Mirror
My "favorite" traditional-recruitment style IT interview question: "What TCP port does {service} use?" Examples have been SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, MSSQL, etc. Good lord, do they really think somebody having those memorized is a good IT worker, and somebody who doesn't but knows how to do a two-second Google search would somehow be unable to troubleshoot a never-seen-before issue? I was able to explain in one interview how "No, I haven't memorized such-and-such port, but I have the ability to learn new things" but in another it was an HR person doing a pre-screening and simply passing answers back to the hiring manage - I doubt she said anything to the manager beyond "Doesn't know" for particular questions. A better sort of question would be, IMO, something along the lines of "A server suddenly can't be pinged. What do you check?" Does it have power, are there link lights, did the switch fail, did the DBA change the IP address, is DNS resolving, did the networking department change the VLAN config for that port, etc. But no, I get gems like "What DOS command do you use to stop the spooler service."
Ignoring the article, which has gems such as "Compared with Gen Y, he says, they [Gen Xers] are less adept at working in groups, more entitlement- than achievement-oriented, and less willing to accept advice or mentoring" I only have one bit of advice for somebody who's wondering what sort of tech to focus on - intrusion detection, data security, and that sort of thing. A TS/SCI clearance helps a lot. Defense industries and agencies in the beltway are hiring such like mad. Other than that, most employers seem to be looking for either people with experience that can hit the ground running (and it won't matter to them how much certification or education you have if you've never actually done the work) or are looking for entry-level helpdesk bodies (and again, the same stuff won't matter.) You can only really swap to new techs through moves internal to your existing company, in my experience.
whenever our traders got off the elevator, coming back from lunch, they would hit all the floor buttons to delay the traders returning to the higher floors
Interesting trick. It wouldn't work in Tokyo, though. At least, not at the hotel I stayed at once. You could double-tap an elevator button that had been hit, and it would de-select that floor. I've yet to find an elevator in the US that would do the same. Sad.
For what it's worth, here's my anecdotal experience with my first-gen iPhone and field test. Sitting on its own, it shows three bars or about -85 to -89 dB. Holding it in the popularized way, signal strength drops to -101 to -107 dB, showing one or maybe two bars. Occasionally it'll go all the way to "Searching..." Call it -20 dB attenuation on average, similar to what Anandtech saw on the iPhone 4. So the iPhone 4 doesn't appear to be any worse than a first-gen iPhone.
You had a chance there to post all the links to those stories, so we could have read them ourselves!
It's easy to get to anybody's submissions.
http://slashdot.org/~geekoid/submissions
The USGS has a nice earthquake webpage http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/ with realtime earthquake reporting, with all earthquakes (hundreds of 4.5+ magnitudes per week around the world, thousands of 1.0+ magnitudes in/near the US per week) mapped out.
Here's their info on this particular 5.0 event. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/us2010xwa7.php
I tend to go to the USGS site every few days to see what's up, just out of curiosity's sake.
I've been a poster to that MacRumors thread for a few days now, chronicling my phone's behavior when turned off every night. Normally, when I go to AT&T's site and check my data usage I see some amount of usage (a few KB to a few MB) around 1:30am, give or take, when I'm definitely not using my phone. (It spends the night in its dock, awake, showing the weather app. So it's also got an active wifi connection.) Whenever my phone spends the night turned off, I don't get any data usage reported for overnight - suggesting the phone is indeed sending data at that time. However, I instead see the data usage reported for the time that I turned my phone on in the morning. And the data usage amounts reported correlate to the amount that I actually used during the previous day, as far as I can tell.
So I've amended my theory - I now believe that the data usage that AT&T is reporting is a summary for the day's use, yet for some reason requires communication between the phone and AT&T's network to produce the summary. (Which rather surprises me, since it opens the possibility, depending on what's really going on, to somebody messing with their smartphone in order to change their officially reported data usage.) But I think I have a reasonable grasp on what's going on - my phone is NOT sending megabytes of data while unattended at 1:30am, despite what AT&T's website is reporting.
Not quite as definitive as sniffing the RF transmissions. (No special equipment required for that, though - just set the phone next to a set of powered speakers and listen for the tell-tale GSM interference noise. Somebody will then have to spend the night awake next to their phone and record the timestamp of hearing the noise.)
(This still doesn't explain why there are sometimes more than one reported instances of data usage in a 24 hour period. I can't discern any pattern to it. But I haven't been paying much attention to times my phone is turned off, put into airplane mode, or looses all signal to AT&T, which would be the first theory to check IMO.)
This link from Google won't allow you to download the entire thing, but it'll allow you to browse through individual issues.
http://books.google.com/books?id=qR8DAAAAMBAJ
I do like the idea of not needing an explanatory tool like "Dark Energy" ... that has always bothered me. Far more than "Dark Matter".
And yet do we not have experimental evidence for this dark energy you don't like? I agree its a very odd concept, intuitively, yet it appears to be more than just a hand-waving or mathematical construct.
Clarke is talking about what's possible at a much higher level than discussing the capabilities of an already-built machine. Consider the difference between saying "It's impossible for people to fly" and "It's impossible for this Audi to fly." That's the same difference between saying "It's impossible to create a black hole that will swallow the Earth" and "It's impossible the LHC will destroy the Earth." With enough advancement and resources, we might be able to do the former some day - who knows. But that doesn't mean the boffins don't understand the energy levels that will be seen in the LHC, and how those energy levels compare to cosmic radiation collisions that happen naturally in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Based on my very non-technical understanding of the argument, saying the LHC can destroy the Earth via creating a black hole is analogous to saying that turning on my TV will cause a matter/antimatter explosion big enough to destroy the Earth.
Another related series of books worth reading, but seemingly less known than the Pliocene Exile series, is the Gandalara Cycle by Randall Garret and Vicki Ann Heydron. It imagines life on the floor of the dry Mediterranean bed, including dealing with the salt, dryness, heat, lack of heavy metals, etc., and dealing with the return of the water. (At a much slower rate than TFA indicates.)
I don't remember the exact timeframe, but I recall Wired (and possibly other mags) doing the exact same thing during the dotcom bubble. Hold up your print magazine to a webcam on a computer running the right software and it'd scan embedded codes and you'd get what you've always wanted - more advertising! This Esquire thing has been done before, and failed before, and hopefully it'll fail again. Next thing you know, they'll be shipping out little cat-shaped barcode readers to their circulation for those people who don't have webcames. Now THAT'S innovation!
"AR" my ass.
Gaming console + Apple TV + DVR + IPTV receiver (eg, for use with AT&T U-Verse) + Mac Mini = my ideal living room home entertainment convergence box.
I wonder if Apple could leverage its relationship with AT&T on the iPhone to further such a concept. (At least on the IPTV part...)
AFAIK, an audiobook is a derivative work of a normal print book, just like a screenplay and a movie are derivative works. And is therefore protected by copyright law. Just because I own a paper copy of a book does not mean that I can walk out of a bookstore with a free version of the audio book, or go see the movie for free. The fact that it's produced by a computer algorithm rather than a person reading out loud doesn't really have any bearing on the issue.
Usually, the "official" termination date occurs at the end of the severance period. Most companies retain the "right" to recall you from your enforced sabbatical during that period.
Not so, at least in my case. I was laid off recently and the severance document clearly listed the termination date as two weeks after I was notified. Additionally, in order to receive the severance payments I had to sign a NEW contract that laid out the terms and conditions of the payments, their amount, the duration of payments, the conditions under which the payments would be stopped, etc. Maybe it's different for different companies, but my severance didn't include any provisions for being recalled or anything like that.
As was reported on NPR a little while ago http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100076874 there's a little company in Lexington, KY called Unicomp http://www.pckeyboard.com/ that still produces the old IBM Model M keyboard, the one with the really loud click and lots of tactile feedback. They charge $69 per keyboard. Not quite a four dollar keyboard, which can be had today, but compares well to the fancy $100+ keyboards that some other brands market. (Although arguably with less gee-whiz functionality.)
First, we need to make sure we're all on the same page about what a derivative work is. From http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/scope.html
According to the Copyright Act, a derivative work is: "a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted."
A derivative work usually involves a type of transformation, such as the transformation of a novel into a motion picture. In the computer industry, a second version of a software program is generally considered a derivative work based upon the earlier version.
Given that, creating an audiobook from a text (whether by recording a person speaking, or on-the-fly with a computer program) is a derivative work, the right to which is reserved for the copyright holder. A lot of people talk about reading a bedtime story to their kids being okay and it obviously is - IANAL, but I suspect that if you recorded that reading of Harry Potter and posted it on the 'net for download for a small fee, or even free, you'd face some swift legal action. My understanding is that just because you purchased the rights to a work in one form does not mean you can, other than for personal use, convert it to any other form.
Consider the following what-if: some CGI and AI genius creates an algorithm that can take a book, interpret the descriptions and generate a visual adaption, not just an audio one via text-to-speech. Would that be considered
Fact is (as far as I can tell, again IANAcopyrightL) an audiobook, whether created by a human or a computer, is an established derivative of a book, and is protected by copyright law, and you cannot distribute such without being given the right by the copyright holder. (Although I guess it could be argued that a text-to-speech algorithm generating the audio on the fly is entirely different from doing the exact same thing in a studio and transmitting the result as an audio file? It's not like Amazon is sending out actual audio information. Hmm...)
The authority highschools have over students in the US is weird. For example, they can (or feel they can, the case is still pending http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/16/teen.strip.search/) strip naked a 13 year old female student and search her because another student said she gave out 400mg ibuprofen pills. In any other setting, the people doing that would be thrown in jail for many years for sexual assault and be branded as sex-offenders for life. But in this case they said it was a reasonable step for student safety.
Taking notes out of a personal backpack is nothing compared to this. I doubt anybody with any authority to do anything about it will care in the slightest, unfortunately.
If you want a dose of wacky technology stories (or, at least, wacky IT stories) you need to visit with the Daily WTF (Worse Than Failure) at http://thedailywtf.com/
I'm not sure where you'd go for wacky science/engineering stories though. Some website called "slashdot" or something like that, probably.
Keep in mind that the filament of a 100 watt incandescent light bulb operates at about 2500 degrees C. Also, did you notice that the runtime of this laser is continuous? So imagine holding 150 tungsten filaments at 2500 degrees onto a surface the size of a pencil, or heck even a quarter, for as long as you can hold the aim steady. That's a lot of energy transfer, probably enough to vaporize just about any material in a very short time. Aim this laser at your couch, and in short order I suspect it'll burn though your couch, your walls, out the house and through your car, through the neighbor's house, the neighbor's dog, and continue on for a while yet.
My impression is that the big cell providers don't bother with pagers anymore because the profit margin isn't big enough for the corporate bloat. I think pagers are now a niche market, handled by pager-specific companies. That said, as a sysadmin until I got laid off recently, my pager was serviced though USA Mobility. They do local and national, one-way and two-way. My specific pager was a Motorola T900. No five-nines reliability (I was once unable to receive pages at my house for several days - they would show up as soon as I drove a couple miles to a different location though, so I assume it was a transmitter issue) so I had to set up my cell phone as a backup channel. But otherwise it worked well enough.
One thing about pagers, though - I got paged enough that I came to absolutely hate the pager noise. I used to have it set to alert with a single beep tone, but my stress would spike whenever I heard that tone on TV, the radio, or wherever. Then I chose a rising/falling tone (what's the musical term for that?) which worked for a while until a recent commercial showing somebody trapped in an elevator while everybody's pager/phone goes off around them. That specific tone was played and it bothered the hell out of me. Oh well, I don't have to worry about that until my next job I guess.
Here's my anecdote for your enjoyment and education: A friend worked at a cheese plant. Her job was to do QA tests - bacterial and antibiotic content of the incoming milk; protein, fat and moisture content of the outgoing cheese, etc. She was once told by the boss to falsify the reports of the outgoing product, to make it look like higher quality cheese than it really was. (No health issues, just a question of how much the customer would pay for the product.) She refused, as she was required to sign her name on the report. Instead, she performed her tests like normal, gave her boss an unsigned report with the real numbers, along with a blank report with no signature. He filled in what he wanted and signed it himself. She did experience retribution - poor performance reviews and reports saying she wasn't doing her job. I guess she could have gone to the FDA or USDA or something, but I'd bee surprised if anything positive would have happened, and she would have been working in a hostile environment in the meantime. Instead, she ended up quitting soon after, without even having a new job lined up. Fortunately, she quickly found something better and was much happier. Karma, if you believe in such a thing - she did the right thing and it definitely was the right move for her.
So my advice (IANAL) - refuse to do the work you know is wrong, prepare for a crappy work environment, and get that resume and those contacts warmed up. Because you should be in a better job regardless.
I've found that powered noise cancelling headphones are particularly bad about picking up the GSM noise. I read somewhere that putting the phone into an anti-static bag, like what RAM comes in, will prevent the interference while still allowing calls through. While I found that it does work, on the iPhone it's an annoying solution because it causes problems seeing and operating the touch screen. Playing around with it, I was surprised to learn that simply placing the iPhone flat on top of the anti-static bag attenuated the interference noise tremendously. It can still be heard, but only very very faintly. Signal strength drops by a bar or two, but calls still go through with ease. This isn't a solution if you use the iPhone dock, but when you're listening to music at your desk at work its an excellent work-around. (This is on my first-gen iPhone, I have no idea if this would work for the curved back 3G iPhone.)
I release into the public domain the concept of an iPhone case (or car holster) that has anti-static material built into the backing, so that you can connect it to your car stereo or headphones without being bothered by the GSM noise. I'd patent the idea (I don't think there's any prior art on this, is there?) but patents are evil, right?
We're talking 25 years, however. Think back to 25 years ago - 1983. Then consider that computer technology is changing at an ever increasing rate, meaning that tech 25 years from now will likely be even more different from today than today is from 1983.
I was just a kid then, and we had an IBM PC. The original one, I think. It had a single 5.25" floppy - max capacity of 264 kb I think. Hard drives hadn't made it to the consumer level yet. A friend had some TI thing that used audio cassettes. I don't believe you can buy anything from Newegg that'll read those! Of course, some vintage gear probably could be found, but I'm not sure it'll be especially easy to acquire. It'll be even more difficult to find today's cutting edge tech 25 years later, I suspect.
If somebody packaged an entire 1983 IBM PC including proper software, you'd be able to display it on the monitor just fine - but you wouldn't be able to do anything else with it. Hmm, maybe over the 15 pin serial port? Assuming the person 25 years ago thought to include a program that'll send data over it.
So a digital picture frame packaged with the data, assuming it all survives, will be able to display the images, but that's about all you'll be able to do. A quality printout would be a much better choice IMO.
Throw in a USB thumbdrive, and I'd say there's over an extremely small chance that a computer 25 years from now would have a compatible port and the appropriate software to read any of our formats today.
A bit more on-topic - I find it interesting that some studies show that red light cameras increase the total number of collisions because rear-end collisions go up. So while the amount of revenue from red-light tickets goes down due to fewer red-light violations, I don't think we can yet claim that Dallas is a safer city due to the cameras. Could be that they accomplish two things - less red light violations and more crashes. The two are not mutually exclusive. In which case, there's still the argument for making yellows longer, cameras present or not.