That's a great application! I'm sure people with the money would spend a small fortune on that even if it's a novelty.
I was talking about it with my wife and she had a really good extension: sperm banks. Right now you get some written information about the donor, but can't get anything really detailed. Imagine if you could offer women the opportunity to see what their children might look like based on their DNA and that of the donor. I'm sure that would be a very popular value-added service.
Someone help me out here. I can understand why they would be running XP. It was a stable OS and it was used in a lot of embedded systems. They probably don't want to just replace the underlying operating system on a computer running a nuclear submarine or something.
Office, though? What are they doing? Using a mail merge macro to address the nuclear missiles on said submarine? Why the heck can't they just replace that with minimal issues?
At the end of the day, though, I'm not that worried. $9.1 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the nearly $700 billion DoD budget. There's a whole lot more pork in that barrel to be worried about.
... to really drive it home, she does it in a performance that is thinly veiled as a commercial endeavor: Art posing as business in response to business posing as art. You'd have to be a complete philistine to not recognize it.
Brilliant! Everything is part of the performance! I really love it. It takes it to a whole new level of meta.Thank you for that insight. I had never thought of framing it like that. I had approached the situation from the assumption that her actions were of anger/spite, but you're absolutely correct. I wonder how deep this rabbit hole can go...
"The price point itself is an artistic expression of the desirable commoditization of art. By taking a formerly expensive piece of art and making it available to the masses, the artist instills in us the notion that the artificial scarcity of mass producible artifacts creates an elitist vehicle for abstract investments, whereas actual art belongs in the hearts and minds of people, not in their vaults. This performance makes palpable the disgust that we feel when confronted with the personality cult that drives the commercial art scene."
I completely agree and wish that I had mod points. I see her response almost as a parody of the ridiculousness of the entire situation. I don't know how a court would decide, but I would definitely argue that the response is transformative in the same way as Prince's work. The only problem is the way in which she was "marketing..these prints as cheaper alternatives to Prince’s.." and that would make the argument that they are a new work of art very difficult.
No problem. It sucks to see people suffer. Anyway, I just thought I'd clarify that Major Depressive Disorder essentially is clinical depression. It's the heading that the DSM-V (psych bible) puts continued depression of greater than two weeks. You might have heard the term unipolar depression as well. That just means that there are no manic states associated with the patient. Unless you're a nervous person by nature (think you're going to get every side effect and complication) it's probably worth your time to read up on your condition a bit. Increased health literacy is associated with improved outcomes.
People, in general, like two things:
1) Instant results
This I get. and this you will get instant results from these kinds of meds. When they first came out on the market, they pushed them for depression. Granted, they work great for that. We have, however, since then realized there are better ways to deal with the situation. So now we give people SSRI's because they're generally "safer" and less addictive (Don't let anyone tell you that the withdrawal doesn't suck, though. Back off them slowly...) The downside is that the SSRI's take a while (4-6 weeks) for full effectiveness if you're going to get any results from that particular agent at all.
2) The feeling that bad things are not their own fault in the least
So if someone has a stressful work life, rather than admit that they have a bad job and get out they try to get drugs to dull the stress. It's easier and offers cognitive disassociation.
This one needs to be smashed with a stick and nuked from orbit. No it's no all your fault (at least I hope it's not), but people need to learn personal responsibility in this world. I think that's the general sentiment around here, though, so no need to preach to the choir.
Which is not to say that everyone taking such medication is taking the easy way and don't actually need it. Personally, I'm on my fifth anti-depressant medication regimen (which is actually a combination of two meds I tried in the past individually), have briefly visited a psych ward in the past, and seen a handful of therapists/counselors. There is nothing majorly wrong in my life, I just hate myself indiscriminately without the medication (with the medication I only somewhat hate myself.)
I'm no psychiatrist and I've never met you, so I can't diagnose you. I am, however, glad that you're getting help from at least one. That sounds like it fits the bill for Major Depressive Disorder. The good news is that there are A LOT of options. The bad news is that sometimes it can take a while to find one that sticks. The interesting thing about a lot of those drugs is that in addition to taking the taking a bit of the edge off the depression is that they increase the plasticity of the brain. So, combined with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, they can help change the way you think about yourself. If you find that the medication alone just isn't cutting it and you're not already getting CBT, I would ask your doctor to recommend a therapist. Regardless, good luck with it and I hope you do find some kind of therapy (pharmaceutical or otherwise) that works.
smaller companies care about data privacy just as much as big ones do
so they care deeply until you ask them to spend money at which point they will do the minimum needed to avoid being sued. gotcha, they're directed by sociopath.
Very well might be cheaper, but probably not that much, especially if you have an insurance plan that will cover it. The advantage of Adderall over street meth is increased duration of action. Adderall is formulated as a combination of several different amphetamine salts that release and become active at different times. That way you get smoother, more constant blood levels without big peaks or big drops. Those smaller changes make for less abuse liability to boot.
It's worth mentioning that one reason amphetamine (Adderall) and methylphenidate (Ritalin) are such strong stimulants because they are what's called "impulse independent." They don't just make your neurons work better/fire faster; they actually REVERSE the flow of your reuptake transporter. Your neurotransmitters don't get recycled like normal. So, if you take too high of a dose for too long, you can use up the neurotransmitters faster than your body can replace them. That's why it can take so long to get back to normal. These ARE powerful stimulants and they shouldn't be abused. There IS addiction potential. There ARE downsides to them. This whole trend of overuse/reliance on pharmaceuticals is just bonkers to me. I don't get it. I really don't.
That's not even the worst of them. You get into the steroids and the estrogens and you're in for a real treat. They're all derived from cholesterol so they all have the same basic structure. Then there are several commonly accepted names for modified structures. So...some people will start with a simple base structure name and use the IUPAC rules to list all the substituents. Others will start with a more complicated (but named) base structure and just say 19-nor-whatever (to indicate that the substituent that SHOULD be attached to that carbon isn't) to refer to the same structure. It's confusing. I'm just glad I'm not a medicinal chemist and that the FDA gives us trade names so that one pharmacist knows what the other pharmacist is talking about.
Or you could just go with my favorite, n-acetyl-para-aminophenol (shortened to APAP in the pharmacy trade). Bottom line is that there are lots of ways to write chemical names, all correct. See here.
It's also worth pointing out that gravity decreases with the square of the distance between the objects which is especially significant on a cosmic scale. That being said, I still wonder about effects of gravitational time dilation and the odds of very rare things happening (such as life developing). Probably only the stuff of science fiction, but the first thing to pop into my head, nonetheless.
Better call your doctor if you get past 4 hours. But this is Slashdot, after all, and we know that unless you're married to your hand it'll be more like 0 hours.
Thanks. I appreciate the offer. I'm making progress figuring things out. Finally got my stupid Canon printer working with it's lame proprietary drivers. Took some doing, but I'm better off for it. I know have a better understanding of how deb containers work.:)
Anyway...next project is to figure out how to actually add a password at startup for the filesystem encryption. I'm pretty sure I clicked the box that said I would add a password later...but now I can't figure out how to add a password. LOL. Now I'm wondering if I did...that would be my luck.
Tsk, tsk, tsk. Someone fell asleep in pharmacology. Heroin IS stronger than morphine because it has higher lipophilicity. That means it crosses the blood, brain barrier more readily. That means it gets into the tissues better, to the site of action better, and is a better painkiller. Kind of like codeine except you get better than 10% conversion to morphine so it doesn't suck when the times comes to actually do it's thing.
tldr; Heroin is morphine in a ninja suit. It sneaks past your body's barriers and totally owns your mu-receptors.
Umm..at this point I have no clue. I didn't even know it used SystemD until yesterday when I saw the configuration panel in KDE's System Settings. The documentation is kind of crap. I used Gentoo for years until I get fed up with a few broken ebuilds and used Ubuntu for a while. We'll see how it works out in the end. I really liked upstart when I was using it and don't care for how all-encompassing SystemD has become, but if it works, it works.
Seriously?! Which part of that doesn't take a month to understand for someone that just wants to zip down to staples and grab a laptop with the expectation the install media will "just work" like it always has done for the last decade?
To use it, rename shim.efi to bootx64.efi and put it in/EFI/BOOT on your UEFI install media. Drop MokManager.efi in there as well. Finally, make sure your bootloader binary is called grubx64.efi and put it in the same directory.
Now generate a certificate and put the public half as a binary DER file somewhere on your install media. On boot, the end-user will be prompted with a 10-second countdown and a menu. Choose "Enroll key from disk" and then browse the filesystem to select the key and follow the enrolment prompts. Any bootloader signed with that key will then be trusted by shim, so you probably want to make sure that your grubx64.efi image is signed with it.
This part:
Secure Boot bootloader for distributions available now
Nov. 30th, 2012 07:51 pm
That link, as the text following the hyperlink says, is an announcement from 2 years ago. I referenced it to show how long this software has been available for use in other distributions. Also, how many people who fit into your "just works" category are going to be making their own boot media? or managing their/boot partition manually? Zero. The hard part of those instructions are for the distribution maintainers. The second part is a one-time procedure of selecting "enroll-me.cer" from a list and then never doing it again. If you can select which partition you want to install your linux distro on, you can select which certificate to enroll.
You need to go into the BIOS and disable secure boot.
You don't even need to do that if you pick your linux version properly. I just finished installing Sabayon/Linux on my Lenovo U430p laptop after I decided I was going to reformat it anyway because of the recent Superfish fiasco. We've had a working secure boot shim for over 2 years now. No need to disable secure boot. Red Hat and Ubuntu both support it as well if you're looking for something a little more mainstream. At worst you may need to register a key with the BIOS (I did for Sabayon), but I'm not sure you even need to do that with Red Hat since their shim is actually signed by MS.
Amen to that. I finally had to make the switch, too. The ads and Javascript everywhere were just too much to bear on my tiny screen. There's even a version of NoScript for mobile Firefox . I tried AdBlock Plus but it broke updates for MedScape and a couple other apps that I need. The Firefox addon version works like a charm, though.
Does any of that mean that the FDA is perfect? No. The structure of the FDA is retarded. They require a whole series of clinical trials, have the evidence presented to their advisory team (composed of actual scientist and medical professionals) who make a recommendation, then a group of people (who have no legal requirement to know ANYTHING about medicine) vote on whether to approve the drug or not. That's how you end up with stupid garbage like Aricept 23mg getting regulatory approval (Over 2x the side effects with almost negligible gain on Mini Metal Status Exam compared to the 10mg dose? Yay! Put Grandpa on it today!)
The FDA is also only allowed to look at safety and efficacy data. They can't deny something on the basis of utility. Companies like this one make a killing on it. I'm not aware of a single novel medication that company makes. All they do is take stuff that has been on the market for decades, make it a gel instead of a cream or combine two products (so convenient), sell it for 10 or 20 times the generic price, and send an army of sales reps to convince gullible dermatologists to prescribe their products.
It would be crazy if it weren't true. There are some serious problems with the FDA that need to resolved. The ability to assess whether something is safe/effective or not is not one of them. The testing process is sound. The requirement to listen to the people who CAN assess the results, however, needs to be changed. Just for crying out loud, don't use Mercola as a source. His scientific reasoning ability is clearly questionable.
While it's true that Alaska is sizeable, it's not very sporting to use a country's former peninsula against it. Perhaps we could offer up Florida as the US example instead? That one used to be Spanish. Plus, it's got a more appropriate shape. You know...now that I'm thinking about it. The US must have some serious peninsula envy if it keeps taking them from other countries...
so when Google released their 7" tablet in July 2012, I bought one.
Then, in October 2012, Apple did a "me too!" and announced the iPad mini. I still think it was a reactionary move and I doubt the iPad mini would have surfaced at all if someone else hadn't released it first.
Wait, you think the iPad mini was approved, designed, engineered, mass manufactured and released in four months?
Haven't you ever heard of rapid prototyping?
This it's the Apple development cycle here! It's not like anyone expects a finished product out of anything first generation.
Forget even connecting the Nook to your computer. I rooted my Nook Simple Touch and installed DropSync on it. That combined with Calibre's "connect to folder" feature and dropbox on my PC allows me to remotely manage all the books on my Nook. The set up isn't as easy as simply logging into your Kindle for Amazon's Whispersync, but it is more powerful since I can also REMOVE books as well as add them.
I have had so many problems with Bank of America it's not even funny. They don't understand the words "close my account." After I get fed up with them nickel and dimeing me to death, I closed my account with them. I moved everything over to my new bank, but forgot to delete my debit card from paypal. Bad move.
Six months later, my wife bought something on ebay and selected the debit card by accident. Not only did they let the charge go through, the tried to charge me overdraft fees galore. They even proceeded to send me letters threatening to turn me over to some agency so I would be banned from opening a checking account with any major bank. Remember, this is SIX MONTHS after I had them "close" that account.
I will NEVER open an account with them again.
Actually, they did make drives that used multiple beams. My friend had what claimed to be a 72x CD-ROM drive that used this technology. I guess it didn't really catch on so well, though, as I don't think I've seen any of these in the stores lately and I think Zen Research is out of business. Well, at least their website is dead.
Slashdot Mirror
I was talking about it with my wife and she had a really good extension: sperm banks. Right now you get some written information about the donor, but can't get anything really detailed. Imagine if you could offer women the opportunity to see what their children might look like based on their DNA and that of the donor. I'm sure that would be a very popular value-added service.
Office, though? What are they doing? Using a mail merge macro to address the nuclear missiles on said submarine? Why the heck can't they just replace that with minimal issues?
At the end of the day, though, I'm not that worried. $9.1 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the nearly $700 billion DoD budget. There's a whole lot more pork in that barrel to be worried about.
... to really drive it home, she does it in a performance that is thinly veiled as a commercial endeavor: Art posing as business in response to business posing as art. You'd have to be a complete philistine to not recognize it.
Brilliant! Everything is part of the performance! I really love it. It takes it to a whole new level of meta.Thank you for that insight.
I had never thought of framing it like that. I had approached the situation from the assumption that her actions were of anger/spite, but you're absolutely correct. I wonder how deep this rabbit hole can go...
"The price point itself is an artistic expression of the desirable commoditization of art. By taking a formerly expensive piece of art and making it available to the masses, the artist instills in us the notion that the artificial scarcity of mass producible artifacts creates an elitist vehicle for abstract investments, whereas actual art belongs in the hearts and minds of people, not in their vaults. This performance makes palpable the disgust that we feel when confronted with the personality cult that drives the commercial art scene."
I completely agree and wish that I had mod points. I see her response almost as a parody of the ridiculousness of the entire situation. I don't know how a court would decide, but I would definitely argue that the response is transformative in the same way as Prince's work. The only problem is the way in which she was "marketing..these prints as cheaper alternatives to Prince’s.." and that would make the argument that they are a new work of art very difficult.
No problem. It sucks to see people suffer.
Anyway, I just thought I'd clarify that Major Depressive Disorder essentially is clinical depression. It's the heading that the DSM-V (psych bible) puts continued depression of greater than two weeks. You might have heard the term unipolar depression as well. That just means that there are no manic states associated with the patient. Unless you're a nervous person by nature (think you're going to get every side effect and complication) it's probably worth your time to read up on your condition a bit. Increased health literacy is associated with improved outcomes.
People, in general, like two things: 1) Instant results
This I get. and this you will get instant results from these kinds of meds. When they first came out on the market, they pushed them for depression. Granted, they work great for that. We have, however, since then realized there are better ways to deal with the situation. So now we give people SSRI's because they're generally "safer" and less addictive (Don't let anyone tell you that the withdrawal doesn't suck, though. Back off them slowly...) The downside is that the SSRI's take a while (4-6 weeks) for full effectiveness if you're going to get any results from that particular agent at all.
2) The feeling that bad things are not their own fault in the least
So if someone has a stressful work life, rather than admit that they have a bad job and get out they try to get drugs to dull the stress. It's easier and offers cognitive disassociation.
This one needs to be smashed with a stick and nuked from orbit. No it's no all your fault (at least I hope it's not), but people need to learn personal responsibility in this world. I think that's the general sentiment around here, though, so no need to preach to the choir.
Which is not to say that everyone taking such medication is taking the easy way and don't actually need it. Personally, I'm on my fifth anti-depressant medication regimen (which is actually a combination of two meds I tried in the past individually), have briefly visited a psych ward in the past, and seen a handful of therapists/counselors. There is nothing majorly wrong in my life, I just hate myself indiscriminately without the medication (with the medication I only somewhat hate myself.)
I'm no psychiatrist and I've never met you, so I can't diagnose you. I am, however, glad that you're getting help from at least one. That sounds like it fits the bill for Major Depressive Disorder. The good news is that there are A LOT of options. The bad news is that sometimes it can take a while to find one that sticks. The interesting thing about a lot of those drugs is that in addition to taking the taking a bit of the edge off the depression is that they increase the plasticity of the brain. So, combined with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, they can help change the way you think about yourself. If you find that the medication alone just isn't cutting it and you're not already getting CBT, I would ask your doctor to recommend a therapist. Regardless, good luck with it and I hope you do find some kind of therapy (pharmaceutical or otherwise) that works.
smaller companies care about data privacy just as much as big ones do
so they care deeply until you ask them to spend money at which point they will do the minimum needed to avoid being sued. gotcha, they're directed by sociopath.
I think you spelled MBA wrong.
Very well might be cheaper, but probably not that much, especially if you have an insurance plan that will cover it. The advantage of Adderall over street meth is increased duration of action. Adderall is formulated as a combination of several different amphetamine salts that release and become active at different times. That way you get smoother, more constant blood levels without big peaks or big drops. Those smaller changes make for less abuse liability to boot.
It's worth mentioning that one reason amphetamine (Adderall) and methylphenidate (Ritalin) are such strong stimulants because they are what's called "impulse independent." They don't just make your neurons work better/fire faster; they actually REVERSE the flow of your reuptake transporter. Your neurotransmitters don't get recycled like normal. So, if you take too high of a dose for too long, you can use up the neurotransmitters faster than your body can replace them. That's why it can take so long to get back to normal.
These ARE powerful stimulants and they shouldn't be abused. There IS addiction potential. There ARE downsides to them. This whole trend of overuse/reliance on pharmaceuticals is just bonkers to me. I don't get it. I really don't.
That's not even the worst of them. You get into the steroids and the estrogens and you're in for a real treat. They're all derived from cholesterol so they all have the same basic structure. Then there are several commonly accepted names for modified structures. So...some people will start with a simple base structure name and use the IUPAC rules to list all the substituents. Others will start with a more complicated (but named) base structure and just say 19-nor-whatever (to indicate that the substituent that SHOULD be attached to that carbon isn't) to refer to the same structure. It's confusing. I'm just glad I'm not a medicinal chemist and that the FDA gives us trade names so that one pharmacist knows what the other pharmacist is talking about.
Or you could just go with my favorite, n-acetyl-para-aminophenol (shortened to APAP in the pharmacy trade). Bottom line is that there are lots of ways to write chemical names, all correct. See here.
It's also worth pointing out that gravity decreases with the square of the distance between the objects which is especially significant on a cosmic scale.
That being said, I still wonder about effects of gravitational time dilation and the odds of very rare things happening (such as life developing). Probably only the stuff of science fiction, but the first thing to pop into my head, nonetheless.
Better call your doctor if you get past 4 hours. But this is Slashdot, after all, and we know that unless you're married to your hand it'll be more like 0 hours.
Thanks. I appreciate the offer. I'm making progress figuring things out. Finally got my stupid Canon printer working with it's lame proprietary drivers. Took some doing, but I'm better off for it. I know have a better understanding of how deb containers work. :)
Anyway...next project is to figure out how to actually add a password at startup for the filesystem encryption. I'm pretty sure I clicked the box that said I would add a password later...but now I can't figure out how to add a password. LOL. Now I'm wondering if I did...that would be my luck.
tldr; Heroin is morphine in a ninja suit. It sneaks past your body's barriers and totally owns your mu-receptors.
Umm..at this point I have no clue. I didn't even know it used SystemD until yesterday when I saw the configuration panel in KDE's System Settings. The documentation is kind of crap. I used Gentoo for years until I get fed up with a few broken ebuilds and used Ubuntu for a while.
We'll see how it works out in the end. I really liked upstart when I was using it and don't care for how all-encompassing SystemD has become, but if it works, it works.
Seriously?! Which part of that doesn't take a month to understand for someone that just wants to zip down to staples and grab a laptop with the expectation the install media will "just work" like it always has done for the last decade?
To use it, rename shim.efi to bootx64.efi and put it in /EFI/BOOT on your UEFI install media. Drop MokManager.efi in there as well. Finally, make sure your bootloader binary is called grubx64.efi and put it in the same directory.
Now generate a certificate and put the public half as a binary DER file somewhere on your install media. On boot, the end-user will be prompted with a 10-second countdown and a menu. Choose "Enroll key from disk" and then browse the filesystem to select the key and follow the enrolment prompts. Any bootloader signed with that key will then be trusted by shim, so you probably want to make sure that your grubx64.efi image is signed with it.
This part:
Secure Boot bootloader for distributions available now
Nov. 30th, 2012 07:51 pm
That link, as the text following the hyperlink says, is an announcement from 2 years ago. I referenced it to show how long this software has been available for use in other distributions. /boot partition manually? Zero. The hard part of those instructions are for the distribution maintainers. The second part is a one-time procedure of selecting "enroll-me.cer" from a list and then never doing it again. If you can select which partition you want to install your linux distro on, you can select which certificate to enroll.
Also, how many people who fit into your "just works" category are going to be making their own boot media? or managing their
You need to go into the BIOS and disable secure boot.
You don't even need to do that if you pick your linux version properly. I just finished installing Sabayon/Linux on my Lenovo U430p laptop after I decided I was going to reformat it anyway because of the recent Superfish fiasco. We've had a working secure boot shim for over 2 years now. No need to disable secure boot. Red Hat and Ubuntu both support it as well if you're looking for something a little more mainstream. At worst you may need to register a key with the BIOS (I did for Sabayon), but I'm not sure you even need to do that with Red Hat since their shim is actually signed by MS.
Amen to that. I finally had to make the switch, too. The ads and Javascript everywhere were just too much to bear on my tiny screen. There's even a version of NoScript for mobile Firefox .
I tried AdBlock Plus but it broke updates for MedScape and a couple other apps that I need. The Firefox addon version works like a charm, though.
Are you kidding me? Did you read where that came from? It's reposted from Mercola.com. The guy is a anti-vaxx quack with a minor history of battling with the fda. Not only that, but those extra regulations on supplements threaten his livelihood.
Does any of that mean that the FDA is perfect? No. The structure of the FDA is retarded. They require a whole series of clinical trials, have the evidence presented to their advisory team (composed of actual scientist and medical professionals) who make a recommendation, then a group of people (who have no legal requirement to know ANYTHING about medicine) vote on whether to approve the drug or not. That's how you end up with stupid garbage like Aricept 23mg getting regulatory approval (Over 2x the side effects with almost negligible gain on Mini Metal Status Exam compared to the 10mg dose? Yay! Put Grandpa on it today!)
The FDA is also only allowed to look at safety and efficacy data. They can't deny something on the basis of utility. Companies like this one make a killing on it. I'm not aware of a single novel medication that company makes. All they do is take stuff that has been on the market for decades, make it a gel instead of a cream or combine two products (so convenient), sell it for 10 or 20 times the generic price, and send an army of sales reps to convince gullible dermatologists to prescribe their products.
It would be crazy if it weren't true. There are some serious problems with the FDA that need to resolved. The ability to assess whether something is safe/effective or not is not one of them. The testing process is sound. The requirement to listen to the people who CAN assess the results, however, needs to be changed. Just for crying out loud, don't use Mercola as a source. His scientific reasoning ability is clearly questionable.
While it's true that Alaska is sizeable, it's not very sporting to use a country's former peninsula against it. Perhaps we could offer up Florida as the US example instead? That one used to be Spanish. Plus, it's got a more appropriate shape.
You know...now that I'm thinking about it. The US must have some serious peninsula envy if it keeps taking them from other countries...
so when Google released their 7" tablet in July 2012, I bought one.
Then, in October 2012, Apple did a "me too!" and announced the iPad mini. I still think it was a reactionary move and I doubt the iPad mini would have surfaced at all if someone else hadn't released it first.
Wait, you think the iPad mini was approved, designed, engineered, mass manufactured and released in four months?
Haven't you ever heard of rapid prototyping?
This it's the Apple development cycle here! It's not like anyone expects a finished product out of anything first generation.
Forget even connecting the Nook to your computer. I rooted my Nook Simple Touch and installed DropSync on it. That combined with Calibre's "connect to folder" feature and dropbox on my PC allows me to remotely manage all the books on my Nook. The set up isn't as easy as simply logging into your Kindle for Amazon's Whispersync, but it is more powerful since I can also REMOVE books as well as add them.
I have had so many problems with Bank of America it's not even funny. They don't understand the words "close my account." After I get fed up with them nickel and dimeing me to death, I closed my account with them. I moved everything over to my new bank, but forgot to delete my debit card from paypal. Bad move. Six months later, my wife bought something on ebay and selected the debit card by accident. Not only did they let the charge go through, the tried to charge me overdraft fees galore. They even proceeded to send me letters threatening to turn me over to some agency so I would be banned from opening a checking account with any major bank. Remember, this is SIX MONTHS after I had them "close" that account. I will NEVER open an account with them again.
Actually, they did make drives that used multiple beams. My friend had what claimed to be a 72x CD-ROM drive that used this technology. I guess it didn't really catch on so well, though, as I don't think I've seen any of these in the stores lately and I think Zen Research is out of business. Well, at least their website is dead.