I hate to be the one that breaks it to the world (agreeing with you in the process/grin), but the US economy was in a steep dive when Bush took it over in 2001. If I had to describe it, envision being the driver of a bus and being pissed off because you got caught getting a BJ by one of the passengers. Put a brick on the gas pedal, aim it towards a cliff and tap Bush on the shoulder and say hey you wanna drive for a while? Bush gets in the driver's seat and the next minute it flys off the cliff.
See also : prime lending rate 5x higher than it is now, outsourcing, a million H1-B visas issued, massive overvaluation of the tech sector, all the actual Enron operations, not getting OBL when several other governments had him and offered him to us, letting 20 Al-Q gooks take pilot training, giving nuclear secrets to China... I can go on if you like.
Simple - back in the old days they taught men to be engineers (the guys building the space ships that got us to the moon) and taught the ladies to be accountants (the ones responsible for the lost $565B.)
Anybody that says there is no such thing as 'truly random numbers' needs to let my wife balance his checkbook for a month. Plus or minus fifteen hundred dollars ($1,500.00) is considered 'close enough' in her world.
Half a million H1-B visas issued for tech positions that are currently filled by foreigners. Half a million unemployed in the tech sector that could be working right now. Do the math.
Actually I think the number of H1-B's working in the US right now exceeds a full million but I don't feel like looking it up. Right now the unemployment rate for people with college degrees is higher than the unemployment rate for high school dropouts. If we looked at only the tech sector, I would be willing to bet that the unemployment rate in the tech sector right now is even nastier than the overall unemployment during the Great Depression in the early 30's.
And there are reasons for the falling birth rate that are outside the scope of this discussion, but immigration isn't the means to fix it.
You are right about Social Security, though. Seven and half percent paid by you, seven and a half paid by your employer - paid only on the first $70k'ish dollars earned. If we could have personal accounts with that money we would all retire mega-wealthy at 55.
Harry Hogge: What do you know about Texas? Cole Trickle: Well... watched it on television, of course. Harry Hogge: You've seen it on television? Cole Trickle: ESPN. The coverage is excellent, you'd be surprised at how much you can pick up. Harry Hogge: I'm sure I would.
Lets just say that once upon a time I passed through Texas, and I took the concealed handgun permit class while I was there. And I read the news on cnn.com quite a bit.
I'm not saying they do all that stuff, I'm just saying they can. And that probation for a first time murder conviction wasn't unheard of in S. Texas 20 years ago - if the judge / jury could be convinced that 'he had it coming.' Today? Who knows.
Then again, Dallas represents Texas about as well as Detroit represents Texas. And no, never been to either, but I have had long talks with people that have (which is why I have never been to either.)
-what it all boils down to is that, usually, change doesn't lead to disaster.
Tell that to the Pharaohs of Egypt. Tell that to Nero and the Roman Empire. Tell that to Gorby and the Soviet Empire. Tell that to the country of Yugoslavia after you read about how they lived before the horrific economic policies of the early 1990s.
None of those 'empires' saw it coming either, and most of them did it to themselves.
Ouch bingo - you are right. That explains everything. Petty fist fights stop about age 18 in Texas, not because they grow up and are mature... but because that's when they all can legally buy rifles. When the law lets people shoot you if you hit them - people stop hitting each other. Yea maybe he was disrespectful, but if it isn't worth dying for, it isn't worth fighting about.
Actually Texas is the only place in the world (that I know of) where the law supports killing someone for vandalism or purse-snatching. Read literally, the law supports killing someone for stealing candy from a baby. Texas is the only place (that I know of) where a judge will ask 'Well... did he need killing?' In Texas a man with a gun can walk up to a fist fight between his friend and someone he does not know and simply say 'stop fighting' - if his friend backs off and the other guy swings at him again, he can be shot to death.
Then again, you never hear about full scale Riots in Texas and people are generally pretty polite. Kind of refreshing to hear that these cyberpunks could keep their streetfight civil. Completely funny to hear that the digital recording of the fight was used to prosecute some of the fighters. Who brings a digital camera to a street-brawl?
Quake? QUAKE? Why I oughta bust a cap in yo ass for suggesting such an old wimp ass program. In fact if I ever catch you in CounterStrike I'm gonna... do exactly that. I will AWP you so hard you will have my own team-mates complaining that I'm an AWP-camping aim-bot whore.
See, that's how real nerds 'throw down', cept I have hence moved on to UT2004. And don't think I won't use that Redeemer, cause I will - and that's when things get real ugly.
About like a bunch of computer nerds to bring baseball bats to a gunfight.
Actually none of them sound like rocket scientists - but given that it happened in Texas I am shocked, awed, and dismayed at the complete lack of firearms in this disagreement. You would think that with upwards of 40 or so hooligans... somebody would have remembered that rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, and a few H&K MP5A3s full of 9mm Hydroshok ammo and laser designators beats a bunch of punks with baseball bats.
I think the guesstimate for Google was more like 80,000 boxes sporting P2/P3/P4 processors. That's an order of magnitude difference. The Ethernet backplane may cause some latency issues for some types of problems but remember what it currently processes every minute of every day right now.
I'm guessing someone that hasn't been laid in a while.
I'm sure there are real good applications to this, but given the need for proximity to rig all this up I think that some sort of inductive transducer set next to the keyboard cable, or a hacked duplicate receiver in the case of wireless keyboards would be a lot more accurate and easier to implement. And a keylogger is a LOT more accurate and a LOT easier to implement.
IBM M-series baby, IBM M-series. Part Number 1391401, made in the USA by IBM. Originally bundled with the IBM PS/2, it weighs like 5 pounds and carried a list price of $400 (just the keyboard.)
As a bonus it doesn't have the Windows meta-keys to kick you out of your full screen games at the least opportune moments.
Not really, and I will believe they can do it with modems at any speed faster than 2400 baud when I can see it. Something tells me that the rise/fall speed on LEDs isn't anywhere near 50KHz (50,000 up and down cycles per second, for the 56k connections they claim to do) and remember that modems use both amplitude modulation and frequency modulation in order to compress linear (binary) data into a three dimensional (amplitude, frequency, time) audio object on anything faster than v.22 (ie, v.22bis or faster - that's 2400 baud for you youngsters.) Trust me, I'm a toothpick counting, blackjack cheating, KMart underware wearing certified RainMan that spent hours in front of a 300 baud modem watching those lights and if it can be done, I would have done it. The lights indicate traffic, but they don't blink at the 'bit' level, esp at the speeds they are claiming.
It isn't so much the difference in pitch (although that has a little to do with it) but the minute differences in the interval between keystrokes. I know, because I can do it too (sort-of.)
One of the benefits of being the nerd that wasn't cool enough to invite to Rock concerts is excellent hearing - a little too sensitive for my own good generally - but it makes this a trivial exercise.
You can tell the difference between the space bar by the bounce spring, the backspace key by how it gets used, the number keys on the right hand side of the keyboard by how they get used, and all the letters sound the same - but... if you pay attention you can generally make out the following : how fast they are typing in general, whether or not the typing is a constant stream or interspersed with pauses, whether or not the pauses are the same length of time as the typing spurts or are variable in length, the length of the individual words, whether or not they are editing what they are writing or just letting it freeflow, whether or not the words being typed are muscle memory words (like 'the' or the person's name or their password) or if the person has to think type through the word.
Given that you can generally profile (in the back of your head) not exactly what they are typing, but the nature if what they are typing : coding, writing an email, chatting in IM, surfing the web, working on a spreadsheet, playing games, etc...
It isn't what the OP talks about but it is along the same lines in an analog fashion.
Well that or you could just flip over his keyboard and read the password written on the bottom. Between that and post-it notes on the side of the monitor you will generally find what you are looking for.
I consider quite regularly getting rid of my car, 15mpg and 4950lbs - but I think I am going to keep driving it until I get that one good head on collision out of the way. Nothing says loving like two and a half tons of fine German steel.
You bring up a good point, though. What is the environmental impact in creating a new car in the first place? Would the world be a better place if we simply took a year off from building new cars and drove what we had for another year? Total environmental impact, from the strip mining to get the metals, to all the fabrication and painting and transporting them around the world... all that.
Even the most evil of cars on my list, at 15mpg, costs an extra $687 a year in gasoline... compare that to a pack a day cigarette habit at $3/pack = $1095 per year and all of a sudden even that doesn't look so bad. It would be funny to compare emissions from a Mercedes 560SEL driven 12,000 miles a year to 365 packs of cigarettes. Or a two stroke lawnmower and edger used once a week to mow the yard.
Ok - on the subjects of 'quite a bit different.' No, not really. And if the gp is turning off his AC for fuel efficiency, he can rest easy and turn it back on.
Assuming the generally accepted 12,000 miles per year that car manufacturers intend as a lifecycle for domestic vehicles, here is the difference in costs per year in fuel (at $1.50 a gallon.)
Lets take 35mpg as a baseline. Roughly (12,000/35) 343 gallons, or $514 for the year.
Cost difference for a car getting 45mpg : save $114.60 for the whole year. Cost difference for a car getting 40mpg : save $65 for the whole year. Cost difference for a car getting 32mpg : use an extra 32 gallons, costing $48 more for the whole year. Cost difference for a car getting 26mpg : use an extra 120 gallons, costing $180 more for the whole year. Cost difference for a car getting 15mpg : use an extra 458 gallons, costing $687 more for the whole year.
The difference between a car getting 37.4mpg and one getting 35mpg, annualized, is about $30 for the entire year. With the exception of the last car in the example (getting 15mpg), the range between the best car (45mpg) and the worst car (26mpg) is less than $6 per week - about $300 per year. If you have the car for 5 years (60,000 miles) the biggest difference, going from a 26mpg car to a 45mpg car, you will save a total of $1,500. The difference between a car that gets 32mpg and one that gets 35mpg, over a 5 year life of the car? 160 gallons ($250) spread out over 5 years, aka one dollar per week.
Oh yea, going from 45mpg to the TurboDiesel 56mpg : saves 52 gallons per year, about a buck and a half per week.
The law of diminishing returns kicks in about 30mpg, and things start to get ugly below 16mpg. Good gas mileage makes us feel good but the difference between 35mpg and 37mpg is about the same difference between a P4/2.8GHz and a P4/3.0GHz. You know in your heart it is better, but you really can't tell the difference.
Based on the efficiency and cleanliness of the engine, different crap can come out.
Take two pieces of paper, light both on fire. Blow out one the pieces of paper half burned and toss it in a glass jar. Toss the other one still burning in a different glass jar, insure enough air circulates in to keep it burning. One jar will be full of paper ashes and fairly clean looking air, the other one will be full of smoke.
Some of the differences between engines are : unburned hydrocarbons (pretty bad), carbon dioxide (not so bad), carbon monoxide (very bad), etc... all depending on how well the fire in the hole burns the gas.
Yes but you have to remember - your buddy's Escort gets 31MPG and the Hybrid car may get 31.5MPG - but the Hybrid's mileage is 31.5 environmentally friendly miles per gallon of gasoline where your bud's Escort's mileage is 31 environment destroying miles per gallon.
Miles per gallon of gas in a Hybrid car are way better for the environment because the Hybrid also uses electricity, where miles per gallon of gas in a regular car are bad for the environment because of emissions, resource depletion, depending on OPEC, all that stuff.
Big difference. Or so the Honda ads would have me believe.
It might be worth experimenting some with a single workstation to see if adding another Gig of memory makes a difference. I am assuming Windows 2000 Professional as your standard workstation, or WinXP Pro. Even if it has 512M in it, which is plenty for the every day use for normal office users and maybe even developers, at least run some experiments on what sort of difference going to a full 2G makes (you may have to temporarily cannibalize a few machines to come up with 2G.) I would love to hear the results from that test.
I have found that adding unjustifiable amounts of memory (ie. 512M more or so than the system uses when it is being fully utilized, 1.25G in my current development desktop for example) and keeping the MFT defragged (Diskeeper 7.0 boot time defrag with MFT defrag set) make the difference between a machine that chugs along and a smooth running (fast) machine. I honestly don't know that more memory / defragged MFT would make a difference, but I would love to hear one way or the other for sure.
Why didn't you throttle it back to a regular or low priority process? If the user wasn't doing anything else with the CPU (attn users : turn off the damn OpenGL screensavers!) it would still scan just fine, but if a user needed to work through lunch it wouldn't hammer them nearly as bad.
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I hate to be the one that breaks it to the world (agreeing with you in the process /grin), but the US economy was in a steep dive when Bush took it over in 2001. If I had to describe it, envision being the driver of a bus and being pissed off because you got caught getting a BJ by one of the passengers. Put a brick on the gas pedal, aim it towards a cliff and tap Bush on the shoulder and say hey you wanna drive for a while? Bush gets in the driver's seat and the next minute it flys off the cliff.
... I can go on if you like.
See also : prime lending rate 5x higher than it is now, outsourcing, a million H1-B visas issued, massive overvaluation of the tech sector, all the actual Enron operations, not getting OBL when several other governments had him and offered him to us, letting 20 Al-Q gooks take pilot training, giving nuclear secrets to China
Simple - back in the old days they taught men to be engineers (the guys building the space ships that got us to the moon) and taught the ladies to be accountants (the ones responsible for the lost $565B.)
Anybody that says there is no such thing as 'truly random numbers' needs to let my wife balance his checkbook for a month.
Plus or minus fifteen hundred dollars ($1,500.00) is considered 'close enough' in her world.
A billion here, a billion there ... pretty soon it adds up to real money. - the late Sen. Everett Dirksen.
Half a million H1-B visas issued for tech positions that are currently filled by foreigners.
Half a million unemployed in the tech sector that could be working right now.
Do the math.
Actually I think the number of H1-B's working in the US right now exceeds a full million but I don't feel like looking it up. Right now the unemployment rate for people with college degrees is higher than the unemployment rate for high school dropouts. If we looked at only the tech sector, I would be willing to bet that the unemployment rate in the tech sector right now is even nastier than the overall unemployment during the Great Depression in the early 30's.
And there are reasons for the falling birth rate that are outside the scope of this discussion, but immigration isn't the means to fix it.
You are right about Social Security, though. Seven and half percent paid by you, seven and a half paid by your employer - paid only on the first $70k'ish dollars earned. If we could have personal accounts with that money we would all retire mega-wealthy at 55.
Harry Hogge: What do you know about Texas?
Cole Trickle: Well... watched it on television, of course.
Harry Hogge: You've seen it on television?
Cole Trickle: ESPN. The coverage is excellent, you'd be surprised at how much you can pick up.
Harry Hogge: I'm sure I would.
Lets just say that once upon a time I passed through Texas, and I took the concealed handgun permit class while I was there. And I read the news on cnn.com quite a bit.
I'm not saying they do all that stuff, I'm just saying they can. And that probation for a first time murder conviction wasn't unheard of in S. Texas 20 years ago - if the judge / jury could be convinced that 'he had it coming.' Today? Who knows.
Then again, Dallas represents Texas about as well as Detroit represents Texas. And no, never been to either, but I have had long talks with people that have (which is why I have never been to either.)
Amazingly, there are currently more unemployed workers with college degrees than there are unemployed high school dropouts. 25 May 2004.
Details
-what it all boils down to is that, usually, change doesn't lead to disaster.
Tell that to the Pharaohs of Egypt.
Tell that to Nero and the Roman Empire.
Tell that to Gorby and the Soviet Empire.
Tell that to the country of Yugoslavia after you read about how they lived before the horrific economic policies of the early 1990s.
None of those 'empires' saw it coming either, and most of them did it to themselves.
Ouch bingo - you are right. That explains everything. Petty fist fights stop about age 18 in Texas, not because they grow up and are mature ... but because that's when they all can legally buy rifles. When the law lets people shoot you if you hit them - people stop hitting each other. Yea maybe he was disrespectful, but if it isn't worth dying for, it isn't worth fighting about.
Actually Texas is the only place in the world (that I know of) where the law supports killing someone for vandalism or purse-snatching. ... did he need killing?'
Read literally, the law supports killing someone for stealing candy from a baby.
Texas is the only place (that I know of) where a judge will ask 'Well
In Texas a man with a gun can walk up to a fist fight between his friend and someone he does not know and simply say 'stop fighting' - if his friend backs off and the other guy swings at him again, he can be shot to death.
Then again, you never hear about full scale Riots in Texas and people are generally pretty polite. Kind of refreshing to hear that these cyberpunks could keep their streetfight civil. Completely funny to hear that the digital recording of the fight was used to prosecute some of the fighters. Who brings a digital camera to a street-brawl?
Quake? QUAKE? Why I oughta bust a cap in yo ass for suggesting such an old wimp ass program. In fact if I ever catch you in CounterStrike I'm gonna ... do exactly that. I will AWP you so hard you will have my own team-mates complaining that I'm an AWP-camping aim-bot whore.
See, that's how real nerds 'throw down', cept I have hence moved on to UT2004. And don't think I won't use that Redeemer, cause I will - and that's when things get real ugly.
I tried subtle humor and sarcasm the other day in the Hybrid vehicle thread. It doesn't work. Trust me, I know.
About like a bunch of computer nerds to bring baseball bats to a gunfight.
... somebody would have remembered that rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, and a few H&K MP5A3s full of 9mm Hydroshok ammo and laser designators beats a bunch of punks with baseball bats.
...
Actually none of them sound like rocket scientists - but given that it happened in Texas I am shocked, awed, and dismayed at the complete lack of firearms in this disagreement. You would think that with upwards of 40 or so hooligans
Damn kids today
I think the guesstimate for Google was more like 80,000 boxes sporting P2/P3/P4 processors. That's an order of magnitude difference. The Ethernet backplane may cause some latency issues for some types of problems but remember what it currently processes every minute of every day right now.
-what kind of idiot would ...
I'm guessing someone that hasn't been laid in a while.
I'm sure there are real good applications to this, but given the need for proximity to rig all this up I think that some sort of inductive transducer set next to the keyboard cable, or a hacked duplicate receiver in the case of wireless keyboards would be a lot more accurate and easier to implement. And a keylogger is a LOT more accurate and a LOT easier to implement.
IBM M-series baby, IBM M-series.
Part Number 1391401, made in the USA by IBM. Originally bundled with the IBM PS/2, it weighs like 5 pounds and carried a list price of $400 (just the keyboard.)
As a bonus it doesn't have the Windows meta-keys to kick you out of your full screen games at the least opportune moments.
Not really, and I will believe they can do it with modems at any speed faster than 2400 baud when I can see it. Something tells me that the rise/fall speed on LEDs isn't anywhere near 50KHz (50,000 up and down cycles per second, for the 56k connections they claim to do) and remember that modems use both amplitude modulation and frequency modulation in order to compress linear (binary) data into a three dimensional (amplitude, frequency, time) audio object on anything faster than v.22 (ie, v.22bis or faster - that's 2400 baud for you youngsters.) Trust me, I'm a toothpick counting, blackjack cheating, KMart underware wearing certified RainMan that spent hours in front of a 300 baud modem watching those lights and if it can be done, I would have done it. The lights indicate traffic, but they don't blink at the 'bit' level, esp at the speeds they are claiming.
It isn't so much the difference in pitch (although that has a little to do with it) but the minute differences in the interval between keystrokes. I know, because I can do it too (sort-of.)
... if you pay attention you can generally make out the following : how fast they are typing in general, whether or not the typing is a constant stream or interspersed with pauses, whether or not the pauses are the same length of time as the typing spurts or are variable in length, the length of the individual words, whether or not they are editing what they are writing or just letting it freeflow, whether or not the words being typed are muscle memory words (like 'the' or the person's name or their password) or if the person has to think type through the word.
One of the benefits of being the nerd that wasn't cool enough to invite to Rock concerts is excellent hearing - a little too sensitive for my own good generally - but it makes this a trivial exercise.
You can tell the difference between the space bar by the bounce spring, the backspace key by how it gets used, the number keys on the right hand side of the keyboard by how they get used, and all the letters sound the same - but
Given that you can generally profile (in the back of your head) not exactly what they are typing, but the nature if what they are typing : coding, writing an email, chatting in IM, surfing the web, working on a spreadsheet, playing games, etc...
It isn't what the OP talks about but it is along the same lines in an analog fashion.
Well that or you could just flip over his keyboard and read the password written on the bottom. Between that and post-it notes on the side of the monitor you will generally find what you are looking for.
I consider quite regularly getting rid of my car, 15mpg and 4950lbs - but I think I am going to keep driving it until I get that one good head on collision out of the way. Nothing says loving like two and a half tons of fine German steel.
... all that.
You bring up a good point, though. What is the environmental impact in creating a new car in the first place? Would the world be a better place if we simply took a year off from building new cars and drove what we had for another year? Total environmental impact, from the strip mining to get the metals, to all the fabrication and painting and transporting them around the world
Whoops. (Continued)
... compare that to a pack a day cigarette habit at $3/pack = $1095 per year and all of a sudden even that doesn't look so bad. It would be funny to compare emissions from a Mercedes 560SEL driven 12,000 miles a year to 365 packs of cigarettes. Or a two stroke lawnmower and edger used once a week to mow the yard.
Even the most evil of cars on my list, at 15mpg, costs an extra $687 a year in gasoline
Ok - on the subjects of 'quite a bit different.' No, not really. And if the gp is turning off his AC for fuel efficiency, he can rest easy and turn it back on.
Assuming the generally accepted 12,000 miles per year that car manufacturers intend as a lifecycle for domestic vehicles, here is the difference in costs per year in fuel (at $1.50 a gallon.)
Lets take 35mpg as a baseline. Roughly (12,000/35) 343 gallons, or $514 for the year.
Cost difference for a car getting 45mpg : save $114.60 for the whole year.
Cost difference for a car getting 40mpg : save $65 for the whole year.
Cost difference for a car getting 32mpg : use an extra 32 gallons, costing $48 more for the whole year.
Cost difference for a car getting 26mpg : use an extra 120 gallons, costing $180 more for the whole year.
Cost difference for a car getting 15mpg : use an extra 458 gallons, costing $687 more for the whole year.
The difference between a car getting 37.4mpg and one getting 35mpg, annualized, is about $30 for the entire year. With the exception of the last car in the example (getting 15mpg), the range between the best car (45mpg) and the worst car (26mpg) is less than $6 per week - about $300 per year. If you have the car for 5 years (60,000 miles) the biggest difference, going from a 26mpg car to a 45mpg car, you will save a total of $1,500. The difference between a car that gets 32mpg and one that gets 35mpg, over a 5 year life of the car? 160 gallons ($250) spread out over 5 years, aka one dollar per week.
Oh yea, going from 45mpg to the TurboDiesel 56mpg : saves 52 gallons per year, about a buck and a half per week.
The law of diminishing returns kicks in about 30mpg, and things start to get ugly below 16mpg. Good gas mileage makes us feel good but the difference between 35mpg and 37mpg is about the same difference between a P4/2.8GHz and a P4/3.0GHz. You know in your heart it is better, but you really can't tell the difference.
Based on the efficiency and cleanliness of the engine, different crap can come out.
... all depending on how well the fire in the hole burns the gas.
Take two pieces of paper, light both on fire. Blow out one the pieces of paper half burned and toss it in a glass jar. Toss the other one still burning in a different glass jar, insure enough air circulates in to keep it burning. One jar will be full of paper ashes and fairly clean looking air, the other one will be full of smoke.
Some of the differences between engines are : unburned hydrocarbons (pretty bad), carbon dioxide (not so bad), carbon monoxide (very bad), etc
Yes but you have to remember - your buddy's Escort gets 31MPG and the Hybrid car may get 31.5MPG - but the Hybrid's mileage is 31.5 environmentally friendly miles per gallon of gasoline where your bud's Escort's mileage is 31 environment destroying miles per gallon.
Miles per gallon of gas in a Hybrid car are way better for the environment because the Hybrid also uses electricity, where miles per gallon of gas in a regular car are bad for the environment because of emissions, resource depletion, depending on OPEC, all that stuff.
Big difference. Or so the Honda ads would have me believe.
It might be worth experimenting some with a single workstation to see if adding another Gig of memory makes a difference. I am assuming Windows 2000 Professional as your standard workstation, or WinXP Pro. Even if it has 512M in it, which is plenty for the every day use for normal office users and maybe even developers, at least run some experiments on what sort of difference going to a full 2G makes (you may have to temporarily cannibalize a few machines to come up with 2G.) I would love to hear the results from that test.
I have found that adding unjustifiable amounts of memory (ie. 512M more or so than the system uses when it is being fully utilized, 1.25G in my current development desktop for example) and keeping the MFT defragged (Diskeeper 7.0 boot time defrag with MFT defrag set) make the difference between a machine that chugs along and a smooth running (fast) machine. I honestly don't know that more memory / defragged MFT would make a difference, but I would love to hear one way or the other for sure.
Why didn't you throttle it back to a regular or low priority process? If the user wasn't doing anything else with the CPU (attn users : turn off the damn OpenGL screensavers!) it would still scan just fine, but if a user needed to work through lunch it wouldn't hammer them nearly as bad.