This has been alluded to by a couple of other posters, but what about the situations where the end user *does* get the bulk bottle? I get three-month supplies of prescription drugs via mail for some stuff, and I assure you that the mail-order prescription house is not bothering to remove the drugs from the manufacturer's bulk packaging except where necessary (in my case, one drug in particular comes in bottles of 100 from the manufacturer and my prescription is not for an even number of hundreds, so I'll get a number of manufacturer's bottles and one amber bottle with the difference). I don't think this is a rare case, and as others have already pointed out, pharmacists are quite likely to do the same if they have a manufacturer's bottle of 100 pills and they are filling a script for 100 pills (slap the label on the outside and drop it in the bag).
Several people have pointed out that the RFID number should only reveal a unique identifier that would help if you had the reference database to compare with, but somehow I have the feeling that the folks who are sophisticated enough to run scams that produce lookalike drugs to the point where pharmacists can't tell the difference are probably going to be able to get their hands on that database, or at least on periodic copies of it. Now, if they can get it, why wouldn't they be willing to sell copies to other scumbags who want to use the RFID info for other means? If your script delivery is sitting in your rural-route mailbox, I'd suspect that drive-by RFID reading might just reveal more than you'd care to reveal to everyone who drove by (particularly if the drugs in question have a significant grey-market resale value).
I believe they refer to the people selling pirated copies of CDs (and usually other stuff, eg DVDs as well) on street corners and such...I know someone who was in New York City recently and saw both new-release movie bootlegs as DVDs and plenty of recent, mainstream pop CDs for sale in the sub-$10 range...as long as the cops didn't get too close, at which point the merchants either hid the media or split.
There may be, but will it help? After all, I doubt most of the maledies cited are the result of car owners doing thorough (read: any) research before modding their cars...so reading a book is probably out of the question.
I'd second the recommendations to look at SOHO stuff; my personal experience at work is with a lower-end Netscreen device that is about the size of a 4-port hub, has two Ethernet ports (trusted and untrusted), does NAT, does port forwarding, has good logs, etc, and similar devices can be found on eBay in the $50-100 range. For example, this is a similar firewall device. I'd expect other companies have similar offerings, where you get the benefits of an embedded device (lower power consumption, no noise, smaller size, etc) along with more of the features from a custom Linux or BSD box.
If you've got an offsite broadband connection you can stick a PPTP server on (I use PopTop, http://www.poptop.org or http://poptop.sf.net ), try making a VPN connection out to that server and then back in. I've found that operating stuff over VPN at work tends to introduce significant latency (more than running over an 802.11b wireless bridge, which is also quite noticable compared to a hardwired Ethernet connection), so if you can VPN out and back in, you should have a fair amount of latency involved. If out-and-back-in doesn't work, just in (i.e. test machine A offsite, operating via VPN, talks to test machine B which is onsite) should still introduce noticable latency.
(This does, of course, assuming that you're testing with routable protocols)
That opens up the coercion problem again...watch and note who goes into the booth, in what order, and that's the order the "neatly folded" votes are in...oh, so you voted for X, you lousy scum-sucking anti-American leech? It's too bad that would be illegal to note on your next performance review, *wink*
(I think you'd have some issues with deterministic stacking; if it just spit receipts, cut them, and let them fall as you exited the booth or as the next person walked in, that might work, but you'd still run into the issue of later votes being on the top of the pile.)
If rain falls everywhere, he who has the most buckets (or the best-placed buckets) is going to catch the most rain. They are offered more protections, incentives, etc in the form that (to continue the analogy based on your choice of phrase) selling rainwater to the Army requires that one provide 10 buckets for testing and a guarantee that one can continue to provide at least 300 buckets a year for the remainder of the contract (numbers are completely made up, of course). If most people are sharing a rainbucket with their neighbors and catch barely enough rain for their own needs, only the rich (who can buy and place extra buckets) can even compete for the army contract.
They aren't benefitting from roads or the Army or the IRS (heh) any more than you
Er, yes, they are. I don't have substantial interests in any companies selling millions of dollars of ordinance and equipment to the army, nor do I have substantial interests in any companies making millions of dollars based on interestate road transit. I also don't have overseas corporate interests that are protected by US Armed Forces or where executives are prepared to run to the Embassy and hide behind the Marines if the local populace gets ticked off enough. I certainly do rely on a great many publicly-funded programs (including roads, federally-guaranteed student loans, et al), but my use of those publicly-funded resources--and my benefit from the process of implementing them--is vastly different from those with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars invested in trade based upon them.
Be extremely cautious with that copy-applications step; Mac apps are bundles (i.e./Applications actually has a bunch of Name.app subdirs that appear as single entities in Finder), and it would seem quite possible for someone to hide stuff in an application subdir. For apps that autoload plugins on startup, this would seem particularly risky.
Hey now, you leave Enos out of this...he's probably off in the city, otherwise he would've sweet-talked the switchboard operator into letting him know who made the calls.
I hate to point this out, but majoring in something other than CS really wouldn't help much. I graduated about a year ago with a BS, majoring in CS and English Lit, and it took me about four or five months to find a job. Most of my friends, with the exception of the ed majors with teaching certs and the ROTC guys, took at least that long to find "Real Jobs" in their fields of study. I realize that's highly unscientific, but it seems to mesh with anecdotal evidence from other sources (i.e. the economy stinks).
I'm not going to argue that there should be any guarantee of a job coming out of college, but CS majors are still on the more-employable side of things.
From your post, I'd gather that you don't think college is particularly worthwhile; I guess that means you're happy to see the economic case for college more or less disappearing (it used to be a clear-cut case that getting a four-year degree paid off within 10 years; the last set of statistics I saw suggested that, if financial well-being was your primary concern, you were better off getting a low-end job and working instead of going to college because the pay differential was much smaller). Personally, I don't think that's a good thing--a good college education is about thinking, even if a lot of it is academic and the whole thing is sheltered because most college students aren't paying their own way (although many are mortaging their lives against their educations).
I use Ethereal on Windows, Linux, and OS X, and I've found it to be quite useful, particularly when figuring out that the file-based message passing in a custom app wasn't working right over higher-latency links (App A writes file, App B on server reads and deletes, App B then writes response which is read and by App A. In this case, however, App A writes file, App B on server reads and deletes, App A hasn't yet received SMB response that file was successfully written, App A or SMB client on App A's behalf, not quite sure which, checks for file existence, doesn't find it, writes again, App B then reads and deletes and acts on file *again*...etc)
Figures...a week after I figure out how to manually add a CUPS printer with a username and password embedded in the smb://... URL, they fix the damn browser so it prompts for a password (before, it would try to enumerate printers anonymously and the result, at least on our Win2k Server, is that it wouldn't even see the server--I couldn't even click on it to get prompted for a username/password pair).
So does this mean all the iMacs, PowerMacs, PowerBooks, etc sold in France are also supposed to be taxed and Apple is refusing to pay? Or are those somehow "different"? (or, perhaps, is Apple paying those royalties but not the iPod royalties?)
I'm considering a new phone (er, well, I was until I found out that WNP doesn't come to my area until may...but anyhow...), and the "no-camera-zone" issue has crossed my mind a few times. I want to be able to take my phone into the gym, put it in my locker, and leave it there with my street clothes...or bring it with me if I'm concerned about the likelihood of an important call. I'd be willing to go for a camera phone that disabled itself on entering such zones if that was supported by the places banning camera-phones (i.e. if they trusted the "camera-off" functionality and let me carry the phone) as opposed to needing to find a place to ditch the phone. I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask people not to take pictures in a gym, and the ease with which one can take clandestine pics with cellcams does make it different than picking up a small camera from RadioShack or some security place and building a hiding spot for it in your weight belt or your shoe or whatever.
OK, man, do you want to end up recovering from a night of heavy drinking on the same bed that three random guys and two random girls were boinking on the night before? There seem to be some serious sanitation issues...*shudders*
Do you know of many "car collectors" in the middle or lower tax brackets?
Actually, yes. Although most of them probably can't afford to import a rare car from Europe, there are a lot of people not in higher tax brackets that are big car enthusiasts. They do tend to drive their cars more than "car collectors", but that's a generalization (and if someone owns more than 3 cars, he/she is probably a de facto collector even if those cars get driven on the streets). One of the more common reasons is that car enthusiasts often do a lot of work themselves; if you buy a 911 turbo that got thrashed by the previous owner and restore it yourself, you will probably end up with a car worth well more than you put into it (not counting time). If you enjoy restoring cars, then the time is effectively free (i.e. it's leisure time therefore you would conceivably otherwise use it for watching ballgames, movies, drinking at the bar, golfing, plinking stuff at teh gravel pit--all activities that cost money). Do that successfully a few times and you might just be able to scrape together enough cash to import a trashed car from Europe without being in a particularly high income bracket.
The bumper requirements include crash testing. Europe has different bumper standards thanks to US insurance companies, who wanted to make sure that they could repair sub-15 MPH damage more cheaply.
According to/Volkswagen Tuning for Sport and Competition/, the difference in bumper specs makes no difference at higher speeds, and furthermore the Euro bumpers look a lot better on a lot of European cars. They're also substantially lighter, for better handling and gas mileage.
Anyhow, I agree with some of the posters pointing out that we have a clear case of a rich guy buying the laws he wants; however, I also happen to think that those laws are rather reasonable. I'm one of them car folks who would really like to see a lot more European cars that we don't get. Heck, I'd be kinda happy if we all went to European lighting standards.
...or, rather, my alma matter, things are a mess. This, I might add, is despite a requirement instituted last year that all student systems on the campus network run Inoculate-IT from CA.
First problem: the on-campus debit-card system is Internet-reliant. No residence-area Internet == no way to pay for laundry == no laundry.
Second problem: when the network gets really bad, even the non-residential areas (such as the bookstore) can't do those particular debit transactions (credit cards were not affected, at least in the bookstore).
Third problem: students want to (or, rather, need to) buy books and a lot of them have hundreds of dollars locked into their debit accounts for this purpose.
Fourth problem: bookstore needs to do returns by same method of payment as purchases and therefore can't do any campus-debit-based returns when system is down.
Fifth problem: a lot of classes are net-dependent, and Net access has been haphazard at best and virtually nonexistant from student buildings. My girlfriend actually came over to my house last night to use the computer here because she had to do homework and couldn't do it at school.
Of course, that's all secondary. Original problem: the IT department is horribly underbudgeted, understaffed, and overworked, so it can't keep up with the disasters that can (and will) occur on any campus with an insecure and homogenous computing environment.
One of my professors at Saint Michael's College actually wrote his own text for Linear Algebra and put it on his web site (not a deep link because the school net is slow as molasses in January right now and I'm not digging for it). I think a printed and plastic-bound copy runs in the $20-30 range in the bookstore (and the figure is based on the printing and stocking costs).
My personal pet peeve: shrinkwrapped books that need not be shrinkwrapped. The latest edition of the calc book SMC uses (Fundamentals of Calculus by authors whose names I forget, edition 5e at this point) is two editions newer than the one I used for Calc II and Calc III when I started four years ago (I'm now an alum, yes), and it now comes shrinkwrapped. That means that any student who signs up for the class, goes to a week or two of it, and then drops it won't be able to return the book for full price even if it's in like-new condition. Likewise for a few other books that the SMC bookstore stocks.
And as far as ripoffs go, the bookstores aren't the ones reaming you for books. I know people who actually work in them, and they don't make much on textbook sales; usually it's just enough to cover the cost of stocking the books, staffing the store so you can find the books you need and they can reorder them when necessary because the enrollment for a class jumped by 5 students two days into the semester, and hiring people like me to work as temp cashiers during the really heavy times. The college-logo crap...er, I mean novelty items...now that's a different story. As is the softgoods (hint: if you walk by a 50%-off rack of last season's styles on the way in to any store, there's probably a pretty good margin on the current stuff in the store).
Now, since we all know that money is going somewhere, I suggest that we indict the textbook manufacturers as imposing an undue burden on the growing number of college students and thus prolonging the recession. Make it part of the 2004 presidential race--cheap textbooks!
A third case, reverse engineering to get around a limitation in the product, doesn't really apply to the car analogy.
Actually, that's precisely what a lot of aftermarket car products do. Let's start with the most direct example: ECU control chips. In almost any (perhaps any, but I'm not enough of an expert to claim that), the product has certain limitations on running ability. Usually the computer is preprogrammed for a certain fuel and timing advance curve, which more often than not is tilted away from power production in the name of fuel economy. In some cases (e.g. 1988-1992 Volkswagen 8-valve engines, with which I am somewhat familiar), the attempts to increase fuel economy actually hurt fuel economy because an aftermarket fuelmap chip available for 1988-92 8vs will often yield a 5 MPG increase as well as increased horsepower (apparently the engine just likes to run a bit lean and then retards the timing as a result). Of course, there's no way they could've built that chip without reverse-engineering the original first (well, there are a few, but I don't think that VW released full specs on the OEM chip, so I'm assuming there was some reverse-engineering going on).
Another example is the seatbelts in 1988-1992 US-spec VW A2-chassis cars; due to federal regs, VW introduced a "passive restraint system" that has the belt attached to the door and a starter cutoff if the door belt isn't buckled. Unlike the earlier 3-point, B-pillar-mounted belts (which were retained on non-US-spec A2s), the door belts don't hold the driver in place like a 3-point racing harness would. To swap the 3-point belts for the door belts requires the knowledge that (a) the 3-point belts for non-US-spec cars still work, (b) you can mount the 3-point belts in the later US-spec cars because the mounting points are still there below the trim. Sounds like the same kind of retrofit knowledge you'd need to swap software components.
Another example was the A/C retrofit cited earlier--most of the time, aftermarket A/C kits are remedying either a lack of an A/C option originally or a poor choice of refrigerant originally ("poor" in the sense of "no longer available due to federal regulations").
Of course, God help you if you do any modifications to a car under warranty and try to bring it in, even if the warranty work you want done is a recall. And this speaks to the support end of things--if you modify it or run it on a non-supported setup, you're own your own.
[blockquote]So...maybe it's NOT the best job for an intern? Or, maybe not the best job for a 250lb offensive linemen:P[/blockquote]
Probably not...given the "240V is like 110V except you go 3 meters further" someone posted above (quoting an Aussie, apparently), I'd hate to see the damage to the opposing wall when a 250lb offensive lineman got a 220V jolt.
For me, that's what it boils down to. I paid like $5 on a $60 multimeter at Radio Shack for the extended warranty, because it's a "if it isn't working, bring it back and we'll replace it, no problem" warranty and the DMM has an unfused current (amp) measurement mode rated for 10A max. I figure that there's a good chance I'll manage to blow it up at some point by forgetting to switch the probes back to the voltage ports and voltage mode on the DMM at some point, so the $5 will probably be worth it...
When BestBuy wanted to sell me a $10 extended warranty on my wireless keyboard and mouse, I said no. If the thing doesn't fail in the manufacturer's warranty, I don't expect it to unless I do something stupid (that, IIRC, wouldn't have been covered).
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This has been alluded to by a couple of other posters, but what about the situations where the end user *does* get the bulk bottle? I get three-month supplies of prescription drugs via mail for some stuff, and I assure you that the mail-order prescription house is not bothering to remove the drugs from the manufacturer's bulk packaging except where necessary (in my case, one drug in particular comes in bottles of 100 from the manufacturer and my prescription is not for an even number of hundreds, so I'll get a number of manufacturer's bottles and one amber bottle with the difference). I don't think this is a rare case, and as others have already pointed out, pharmacists are quite likely to do the same if they have a manufacturer's bottle of 100 pills and they are filling a script for 100 pills (slap the label on the outside and drop it in the bag).
Several people have pointed out that the RFID number should only reveal a unique identifier that would help if you had the reference database to compare with, but somehow I have the feeling that the folks who are sophisticated enough to run scams that produce lookalike drugs to the point where pharmacists can't tell the difference are probably going to be able to get their hands on that database, or at least on periodic copies of it. Now, if they can get it, why wouldn't they be willing to sell copies to other scumbags who want to use the RFID info for other means? If your script delivery is sitting in your rural-route mailbox, I'd suspect that drive-by RFID reading might just reveal more than you'd care to reveal to everyone who drove by (particularly if the drugs in question have a significant grey-market resale value).
I believe they refer to the people selling pirated copies of CDs (and usually other stuff, eg DVDs as well) on street corners and such...I know someone who was in New York City recently and saw both new-release movie bootlegs as DVDs and plenty of recent, mainstream pop CDs for sale in the sub-$10 range...as long as the cops didn't get too close, at which point the merchants either hid the media or split.
There may be, but will it help? After all, I doubt most of the maledies cited are the result of car owners doing thorough (read: any) research before modding their cars...so reading a book is probably out of the question.
I'd second the recommendations to look at SOHO stuff; my personal experience at work is with a lower-end Netscreen device that is about the size of a 4-port hub, has two Ethernet ports (trusted and untrusted), does NAT, does port forwarding, has good logs, etc, and similar devices can be found on eBay in the $50-100 range. For example, this is a similar firewall device. I'd expect other companies have similar offerings, where you get the benefits of an embedded device (lower power consumption, no noise, smaller size, etc) along with more of the features from a custom Linux or BSD box.
If you've got an offsite broadband connection you can stick a PPTP server on (I use PopTop, http://www.poptop.org or http://poptop.sf.net ), try making a VPN connection out to that server and then back in. I've found that operating stuff over VPN at work tends to introduce significant latency (more than running over an 802.11b wireless bridge, which is also quite noticable compared to a hardwired Ethernet connection), so if you can VPN out and back in, you should have a fair amount of latency involved. If out-and-back-in doesn't work, just in (i.e. test machine A offsite, operating via VPN, talks to test machine B which is onsite) should still introduce noticable latency.
(This does, of course, assuming that you're testing with routable protocols)
That opens up the coercion problem again...watch and note who goes into the booth, in what order, and that's the order the "neatly folded" votes are in...oh, so you voted for X, you lousy scum-sucking anti-American leech? It's too bad that would be illegal to note on your next performance review, *wink*
(I think you'd have some issues with deterministic stacking; if it just spit receipts, cut them, and let them fall as you exited the booth or as the next person walked in, that might work, but you'd still run into the issue of later votes being on the top of the pile.)
If rain falls everywhere, he who has the most buckets (or the best-placed buckets) is going to catch the most rain. They are offered more protections, incentives, etc in the form that (to continue the analogy based on your choice of phrase) selling rainwater to the Army requires that one provide 10 buckets for testing and a guarantee that one can continue to provide at least 300 buckets a year for the remainder of the contract (numbers are completely made up, of course). If most people are sharing a rainbucket with their neighbors and catch barely enough rain for their own needs, only the rich (who can buy and place extra buckets) can even compete for the army contract.
Er, yes, they are. I don't have substantial interests in any companies selling millions of dollars of ordinance and equipment to the army, nor do I have substantial interests in any companies making millions of dollars based on interestate road transit. I also don't have overseas corporate interests that are protected by US Armed Forces or where executives are prepared to run to the Embassy and hide behind the Marines if the local populace gets ticked off enough. I certainly do rely on a great many publicly-funded programs (including roads, federally-guaranteed student loans, et al), but my use of those publicly-funded resources--and my benefit from the process of implementing them--is vastly different from those with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars invested in trade based upon them.
Be extremely cautious with that copy-applications step; Mac apps are bundles (i.e. /Applications actually has a bunch of Name.app subdirs that appear as single entities in Finder), and it would seem quite possible for someone to hide stuff in an application subdir. For apps that autoload plugins on startup, this would seem particularly risky.
Hey now, you leave Enos out of this...he's probably off in the city, otherwise he would've sweet-talked the switchboard operator into letting him know who made the calls.
I hate to point this out, but majoring in something other than CS really wouldn't help much. I graduated about a year ago with a BS, majoring in CS and English Lit, and it took me about four or five months to find a job. Most of my friends, with the exception of the ed majors with teaching certs and the ROTC guys, took at least that long to find "Real Jobs" in their fields of study. I realize that's highly unscientific, but it seems to mesh with anecdotal evidence from other sources (i.e. the economy stinks).
I'm not going to argue that there should be any guarantee of a job coming out of college, but CS majors are still on the more-employable side of things.
From your post, I'd gather that you don't think college is particularly worthwhile; I guess that means you're happy to see the economic case for college more or less disappearing (it used to be a clear-cut case that getting a four-year degree paid off within 10 years; the last set of statistics I saw suggested that, if financial well-being was your primary concern, you were better off getting a low-end job and working instead of going to college because the pay differential was much smaller). Personally, I don't think that's a good thing--a good college education is about thinking, even if a lot of it is academic and the whole thing is sheltered because most college students aren't paying their own way (although many are mortaging their lives against their educations).
I use Ethereal on Windows, Linux, and OS X, and I've found it to be quite useful, particularly when figuring out that the file-based message passing in a custom app wasn't working right over higher-latency links (App A writes file, App B on server reads and deletes, App B then writes response which is read and by App A. In this case, however, App A writes file, App B on server reads and deletes, App A hasn't yet received SMB response that file was successfully written, App A or SMB client on App A's behalf, not quite sure which, checks for file existence, doesn't find it, writes again, App B then reads and deletes and acts on file *again*...etc)
Figures...a week after I figure out how to manually add a CUPS printer with a username and password embedded in the smb://... URL, they fix the damn browser so it prompts for a password (before, it would try to enumerate printers anonymously and the result, at least on our Win2k Server, is that it wouldn't even see the server--I couldn't even click on it to get prompted for a username/password pair).
:)
However, I am happy that it works now.
So does this mean all the iMacs, PowerMacs, PowerBooks, etc sold in France are also supposed to be taxed and Apple is refusing to pay? Or are those somehow "different"? (or, perhaps, is Apple paying those royalties but not the iPod royalties?)
Yeah, and then they don't auto-empty the Bulk folder, so you still end up with a full mailbox.
I'm considering a new phone (er, well, I was until I found out that WNP doesn't come to my area until may...but anyhow...), and the "no-camera-zone" issue has crossed my mind a few times. I want to be able to take my phone into the gym, put it in my locker, and leave it there with my street clothes...or bring it with me if I'm concerned about the likelihood of an important call. I'd be willing to go for a camera phone that disabled itself on entering such zones if that was supported by the places banning camera-phones (i.e. if they trusted the "camera-off" functionality and let me carry the phone) as opposed to needing to find a place to ditch the phone. I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask people not to take pictures in a gym, and the ease with which one can take clandestine pics with cellcams does make it different than picking up a small camera from RadioShack or some security place and building a hiding spot for it in your weight belt or your shoe or whatever.
OK, man, do you want to end up recovering from a night of heavy drinking on the same bed that three random guys and two random girls were boinking on the night before? There seem to be some serious sanitation issues...*shudders*
Actually, yes. Although most of them probably can't afford to import a rare car from Europe, there are a lot of people not in higher tax brackets that are big car enthusiasts. They do tend to drive their cars more than "car collectors", but that's a generalization (and if someone owns more than 3 cars, he/she is probably a de facto collector even if those cars get driven on the streets). One of the more common reasons is that car enthusiasts often do a lot of work themselves; if you buy a 911 turbo that got thrashed by the previous owner and restore it yourself, you will probably end up with a car worth well more than you put into it (not counting time). If you enjoy restoring cars, then the time is effectively free (i.e. it's leisure time therefore you would conceivably otherwise use it for watching ballgames, movies, drinking at the bar, golfing, plinking stuff at teh gravel pit--all activities that cost money). Do that successfully a few times and you might just be able to scrape together enough cash to import a trashed car from Europe without being in a particularly high income bracket.
The bumper requirements include crash testing. Europe has different bumper standards thanks to US insurance companies, who wanted to make sure that they could repair sub-15 MPH damage more cheaply.
/Volkswagen Tuning for Sport and Competition/, the difference in bumper specs makes no difference at higher speeds, and furthermore the Euro bumpers look a lot better on a lot of European cars. They're also substantially lighter, for better handling and gas mileage.
According to
Anyhow, I agree with some of the posters pointing out that we have a clear case of a rich guy buying the laws he wants; however, I also happen to think that those laws are rather reasonable. I'm one of them car folks who would really like to see a lot more European cars that we don't get. Heck, I'd be kinda happy if we all went to European lighting standards.
OK, soembdoy nedes to use tihs in viotlaoin of the licnese so taht he can sue--I raelly wnat to see how (if) tihs hldos up in corut.
...or, rather, my alma matter, things are a mess. This, I might add, is despite a requirement instituted last year that all student systems on the campus network run Inoculate-IT from CA.
First problem: the on-campus debit-card system is Internet-reliant. No residence-area Internet == no way to pay for laundry == no laundry. Second problem: when the network gets really bad, even the non-residential areas (such as the bookstore) can't do those particular debit transactions (credit cards were not affected, at least in the bookstore). Third problem: students want to (or, rather, need to) buy books and a lot of them have hundreds of dollars locked into their debit accounts for this purpose. Fourth problem: bookstore needs to do returns by same method of payment as purchases and therefore can't do any campus-debit-based returns when system is down. Fifth problem: a lot of classes are net-dependent, and Net access has been haphazard at best and virtually nonexistant from student buildings. My girlfriend actually came over to my house last night to use the computer here because she had to do homework and couldn't do it at school.
Of course, that's all secondary.
Original problem: the IT department is horribly underbudgeted, understaffed, and overworked, so it can't keep up with the disasters that can (and will) occur on any campus with an insecure and homogenous computing environment.
One of my professors at Saint Michael's College actually wrote his own text for Linear Algebra and put it on his web site (not a deep link because the school net is slow as molasses in January right now and I'm not digging for it). I think a printed and plastic-bound copy runs in the $20-30 range in the bookstore (and the figure is based on the printing and stocking costs).
My personal pet peeve: shrinkwrapped books that need not be shrinkwrapped. The latest edition of the calc book SMC uses (Fundamentals of Calculus by authors whose names I forget, edition 5e at this point) is two editions newer than the one I used for Calc II and Calc III when I started four years ago (I'm now an alum, yes), and it now comes shrinkwrapped. That means that any student who signs up for the class, goes to a week or two of it, and then drops it won't be able to return the book for full price even if it's in like-new condition. Likewise for a few other books that the SMC bookstore stocks.
And as far as ripoffs go, the bookstores aren't the ones reaming you for books. I know people who actually work in them, and they don't make much on textbook sales; usually it's just enough to cover the cost of stocking the books, staffing the store so you can find the books you need and they can reorder them when necessary because the enrollment for a class jumped by 5 students two days into the semester, and hiring people like me to work as temp cashiers during the really heavy times. The college-logo crap...er, I mean novelty items...now that's a different story. As is the softgoods (hint: if you walk by a 50%-off rack of last season's styles on the way in to any store, there's probably a pretty good margin on the current stuff in the store).
Now, since we all know that money is going somewhere, I suggest that we indict the textbook manufacturers as imposing an undue burden on the growing number of college students and thus prolonging the recession. Make it part of the 2004 presidential race--cheap textbooks!
Actually, that's precisely what a lot of aftermarket car products do. Let's start with the most direct example: ECU control chips. In almost any (perhaps any, but I'm not enough of an expert to claim that), the product has certain limitations on running ability. Usually the computer is preprogrammed for a certain fuel and timing advance curve, which more often than not is tilted away from power production in the name of fuel economy. In some cases (e.g. 1988-1992 Volkswagen 8-valve engines, with which I am somewhat familiar), the attempts to increase fuel economy actually hurt fuel economy because an aftermarket fuelmap chip available for 1988-92 8vs will often yield a 5 MPG increase as well as increased horsepower (apparently the engine just likes to run a bit lean and then retards the timing as a result). Of course, there's no way they could've built that chip without reverse-engineering the original first (well, there are a few, but I don't think that VW released full specs on the OEM chip, so I'm assuming there was some reverse-engineering going on).
Another example is the seatbelts in 1988-1992 US-spec VW A2-chassis cars; due to federal regs, VW introduced a "passive restraint system" that has the belt attached to the door and a starter cutoff if the door belt isn't buckled. Unlike the earlier 3-point, B-pillar-mounted belts (which were retained on non-US-spec A2s), the door belts don't hold the driver in place like a 3-point racing harness would. To swap the 3-point belts for the door belts requires the knowledge that (a) the 3-point belts for non-US-spec cars still work, (b) you can mount the 3-point belts in the later US-spec cars because the mounting points are still there below the trim. Sounds like the same kind of retrofit knowledge you'd need to swap software components.
Another example was the A/C retrofit cited earlier--most of the time, aftermarket A/C kits are remedying either a lack of an A/C option originally or a poor choice of refrigerant originally ("poor" in the sense of "no longer available due to federal regulations").
Of course, God help you if you do any modifications to a car under warranty and try to bring it in, even if the warranty work you want done is a recall. And this speaks to the support end of things--if you modify it or run it on a non-supported setup, you're own your own.
[blockquote]So...maybe it's NOT the best job for an intern? Or, maybe not the best job for a 250lb offensive linemen :P[/blockquote]
Probably not...given the "240V is like 110V except you go 3 meters further" someone posted above (quoting an Aussie, apparently), I'd hate to see the damage to the opposing wall when a 250lb offensive lineman got a 220V jolt.
For me, that's what it boils down to. I paid like $5 on a $60 multimeter at Radio Shack for the extended warranty, because it's a "if it isn't working, bring it back and we'll replace it, no problem" warranty and the DMM has an unfused current (amp) measurement mode rated for 10A max. I figure that there's a good chance I'll manage to blow it up at some point by forgetting to switch the probes back to the voltage ports and voltage mode on the DMM at some point, so the $5 will probably be worth it...
When BestBuy wanted to sell me a $10 extended warranty on my wireless keyboard and mouse, I said no. If the thing doesn't fail in the manufacturer's warranty, I don't expect it to unless I do something stupid (that, IIRC, wouldn't have been covered).