After using a Dell laptop for work for several years, when my wife needed a laptop for school we shopped the Dell selection first and were very pleased in-store with the Studio line: 17" display, "full size" keyboard (as a developer with large hands it's not really "full size", but close enough...), good battery life, and the keypad is placed exactly where your right hand expects it to be (not a little higher, or a little lower, than the "home" row, but just right!) I inherited it as my "work" machine when she injured her knee and needed something lighter to lug around campus, and we got her a Dell notebook -- her chief complaint was the loss of the keypad!
The lone (but not trivial) drawback is that there's no real "break" key on the keyboard, and for some apps Ctrl-C just doesn't cut it. As such, when working with certain apps I plug-in an external USB keyboard just to have access to a Break key. Other than that, and the ~$800 price, it's a dream machine.
Oh, one more thing I just discovered quite by accident: last weekend I either hit the wrong button on the RedBox or it just screwed up and gave me a blue-ray disk instead of the standard DVD our living room player wants/needs. After trying unsuccessfully to get it to play in the living room, I tried popping it into he Studio laptop (this was before I realized it was blue-ray, or I wouldn't have even tried it...) and...surprise!! Played it just fine. Who knew?!
Nearly all good advice so far, both those who offer encouragement to take it seriously and those who insist you must enjoy the "alternate" routine.
However:
The one bit of advice I can think of that nobody else has hit upon was to warn you about that big metal box full of food just steps away from your new workspace. Sure, "at work" there's probably a vending machine or cafeteria nearby, or at least a coffee shop or fast-food joint right around the corner, but there you have to buy a pack of crackers or an ice cream sandwich or whatever. "At home" you have all your favorite foods, conveniently located right beside you, and you already own each and every delicious morsel! It's already yours, you bought it and brought it home for the express purpose of eating it, and if you aren't careful you can easily add a brand new "freshman 15" every few weeks or so.
"Sovereign Immunity" is nothing more than the government denying responsibility for some action it takes. Usually this works to everyone's advantage (government would grind to a halt under the crushing weight of lawsuits over mangled front-end-alignments by potholes in the nation's roadways, for instance) but when a double-standard set up by government allows one arm of the government to act in a manner that willfully disregards the rights and/or safety of the people in general (let alone the government's own employees) while simultaneously requiring (through another arm of that same government) those same activities to be strictly monitored and regulated when performed by private industry, then we should all cry "Foul!" (and no, I'm not calling for the deregulation of private industry, btw -- I simply think it would be nice for us to all play by the same rules. Congress included!)
From the Wikipedia article on the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (yeah, I know, I know...):
Definition of "search"
In Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), the Supreme Court ruled that a search occurs only when 1) a person expects privacy in the thing searched and 2) society believes that expectation is reasonable.
In Katz, the Supreme Court ruled that a search had occurred when the government wiretapped a telephone booth.[20] The Court's reasoning was that 1) the defendant expected that his phonebooth conversation would not be broadcast to the wider world and 2) society believes that expectation is reasonable.
This is a threshold question in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, since the Fourth Amendment only protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. If no search or seizure has occurred, the court ends its analysis.
Stop and frisk
Under Terry v. Ohio 392 U.S. 1 (1968), law enforcement officers are permitted to conduct a limited warrantless search on a level of suspicion less than probable cause under certain circumstances. In Terry, the Supreme Court ruled that when a police officer witnesses "unusual conduct" that leads that officer to reasonably believe "that criminal activity may be afoot", that the suspicious person has a weapon and that the person is presently dangerous to the officer or others, the officer may conduct a "pat-down search" (or "frisk") to determine whether the person is carrying a weapon. To conduct a frisk, officers must be able to point to specific and articulatory facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant their actions. A vague hunch will not do. Such a search must be temporary and questioning must be limited to the purpose of the stop (e.g., officers who stop a person because they have reasonable suspicion to believe that the person was driving a stolen car, cannot, after confirming that it is not stolen, compel the person to answer questions about anything else, such as the possession of contraband).[21]
So, clearly travelers
1) Have no "reasonable expectation of privacy"
2) Should understand that traveling by air constitutes "suspicious" and "unusual" conduct
Personally, I think we should hit 'em where it counts the most: in their pocketbooks. If all travelers simply chose another mode of transportation they would VERY rapidly find themselves with several quite influential allies: the airlines, the "hospitality industry", etc. (and yes, there ARE practical alternatives, at least for "domestic" travel: driving is still possible despite our rapidly deteriorating network of interstate highways and besides that people just don't ask themselves this question enough anymore anyway!)
More like "I'll believe it when I see it" -- someone somewhere (probably the DOJ) will "realize" that just admitting the possibility there's any risk of cancer from their "radiation scanners" opens them up to a zillion liability suits and the iron wall will come back down because denial is their chief weapon. That and fear, of course ('cause it sure ain't surprise...or a ruthless efficiency, etc.!!!)
You know, they weren't club-wielding savages in loincloths back then.
Stone knives and bearskins, son, stone knives and bearskins. And that's the way we liked it, too! None of this mamby-pamby object-oriented whoopsiedoodle; we entered our code changes by tapping out ones and zeros under a microscope (optical, of course, you insensitive clod!) using a cat's whisker. Why, I'd give you a real old-school lesson in how-to-get-it-done-and-done-right-the-first-time-ness, but I've gotta go chase some darned kids outta my yard!!
My best advice is the same advice I give on buying ANYTHING from a new car to an ice cream cone: once you've made your decision and bought something, just enjoy it and quit shopping them. Watching for sales, trying out the display models in stores, comparing prices and features online, even asking your friends what they bought and how much they paid -- all that is for before you buy and continuing to do that after the fact will only lead to frustration (because there's always going to be a lower price or a flashier gizmo in a few days or weeks and unless you're prepared to constantly be in "shopping mode" knowing about it will do you no good at all.)
In true/. spirit I chose to not actually read the article, but just from Tasha26's synopsis I would tend to agree that one should avoid wearing garlic- or onion-based dishes to work.
I mean, did anyone bother to do an environmental impact study before launching something with such worldwide and long-term impact?
Did anyone do a double-blind study to make sure Wikipedia wasn't emitting harmful radiation/gasses/particles/etc?!?!
Was there even a government committee chartered to keep watch to make sure the millions of school children who access it every day weren't harmed?
DIDN'T ANYONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?!?!
Maybe Wikipedia should be shuttered until we can get a "still alive" from at least a majority of the "tens of thousands of editors" who have gone "dead" -- if even a sample of those who don't respond turn out to actually be dead then we should consider the very real possibility that Wikipedia might somehow be at fault. Remember: just because we don't see a correlation doesn't necessarily mean there isn't one.
"[self-righteous pissing and moaning, etc.]...so I've gathered up the passwords to the products we make and have been using them as part of my pitch to the competition."
I'm reminded of what I once heard a lady say on the subject of dating married men: "If he'll do it to them he'll eventually do it to you." In your case: any company who'll hire someone based on what they can illegally/immorally bring to the table will treat them like the crap they are when what they brought to the table is used up.
"Causality error" in that they've mistaken the (observed) effect as a "cause". The fact is, the "global recession" has merely revealed a decline in workers' "ethics" that was already there and which had been forming for at least the past several decades. Despite what the talking heads (in both media and the government) are saying, this "economic downturn" is nowhere near as bad as the "Great Depression"; this according to the many "oldsters" I am in frequent conversation with -- my own parents included -- who actually lived through the period rather than merely learning about it from the history books -- and their recollections do not include such a widespread deterioration in the "morals" (their word -- read "ethics") of the population (and yes there were notable exceptions, some accounts of which are a little scary even to modern ears, but by and large people -- at least in this part of the country -- still left their doors unlocked at night; I triple-locked my doors almost religiously during even the much lauded "economic boom time" of just a few years ago!!)
Poverty does not cause crime any more than crime causes poverty (including but not by any means limited to the "victims" of Mr. Madoff -- their poverty was caused by a mixture of greed and stupidity.)
"...never match speeds with someone in the lane next to you...
That is annoying (especially on the relatively narrow "two-lane-divided-highway" -vs- the typical interstate), but I'll gladly take that over the guy who plays
"I'll just drive along here in your blind spot until you forget about me"
EVERY car has one to several blind spots (the bigger the vehicle the bigger the blind spot(s), etc.) and at least if the bonehead is right beside you you've got a snowball's chance of noticing him when you go to change lanes for the guy riding your bumper.
btw, I've maintained that Slashdot's approaching the "tipping point" towards AI for years now, and yet another proof is in the captcha for this post: "evasion"....spooky!
...Most people don't even know that they do such things at some airports
Speaking just from my experience almost six years ago at the Shanghai International Airport, it's pretty hard to miss: first they ask you to sign a card stating that you have not taken a bunch of fever reducer, then they set up the thermal scanner on one end of the sprawling airport and the check-in desk at the other, and give you ten minutes to run (and I do mean run -- my travelling party looked like we were trying to re-enact a certain rent-a-car commercial from bygone days) from one end of the place to the other and back againwith all your luggage (because the luggage check is the next thing you get to do after that -- we were all amazed that a dozen sweaty Americans (it was November and they just, culturally, seem to have a different idea of what a "comfortable" temperature is) running around like maniacs didn't set off some kind of alarm. Looking back, the "thermal imaging camera" didn't bear any labels attesting to that -- it could just as well have belonged to the Chinese equivalent of "Candid Camera", and if so I'm sure they got a good laugh...
Aha!! Finally, a voice that echos my own feeling on DST: the only good thing about it is that day we "get an extra hour of sleep"
Well, years ago, I decided if I ever ran for public office the chief plank of my platform would be the eradication of DST, but instead of replacing it with "do nothing", I decided it'd be better to replace it with "Do more (LOTS more) of just the good part" -- specifically, that "fall back" part (the part where the benefits really do outweigh the inconvenience.) I'd propose that we not just turn the clocks back one hour once a year, but that we turn the clocks back one hour on the 1st and 15th of the month. Every month. We'd just dispense with the "spring forward" part (the part everybody hates anyway; the all inconvenience and no payback part.)
With 24 hours in a day, and 12 months in a year, at the end of one full year we'd be right back where we started on the clock, but we'd have gained an entire day over the course of the past year (though since it was spread evenly across the year instead of given to us in one day, like a "leap day", we'd get the true benefit of it in extra rest instead of being tempted to blow it partying. Plus, if we timed the starting point right, you could easily have all the wintertime after-work daylight you wanted!!) Imagine all that boosted productivity the Monday after the time change, twenty-four times each and every year!!
Hey, I figure if we're gonna screw with the clocks we might as well maximize our returns (and it's really no crazier than what we do now. That or it's 24 times crazier.)
Just dump the entire contents of the data files in ASCII format into an e-mail message, at the top type "Send this message to five friends before sundown and something lucky will happen to you before morning -- refuse to send it and bad luck will be yours before noon tomorrow!" and send it off to half a million random addresses. In 25 years, just sign up for the email address Aardvark@slashdot.org* and it will come back to you!!!
*YMMV, but the folks at say it's better than zebra@slashdot.org.
In the early nineties thru the mid nought-ies I worked for Siemens at their North America electronics manufacturing facility. Through a stunning piece of managerial naïvety, we inherited a particularly inappropriate defect data collection hardware/software package already in use in Germany at at least one plant (over the course of several absolutely brutal years we ended up rewriting first the back-end, then the middle-tier and, just before the plant was sold to some modern-day Saxons for prompt pillaging and burning, the front-end...but I digress.) This software had originally been written with the express inability to trace a defect (or a more disturbing pattern of defects) back to a particular individual but could only indicate the line or workgroup that included the individual responsible (we were always told that "German law precluded tracing mistakes to a particular individual", that they preferred to "train/retrain as a group when they saw the need arise, and allow peer-pressure to solve the problem of getting 'the message' to the errant individual." Most ironic that, given such a "legal environment", a German company would come up with a system with such abilities. (of course, we are talking about Siemens here; anyone who has any experience with the company knows that the most honest part of their brochures/ads is that it's for a Siemens product -- and then sometimes even that must be taken with a grain of salt.)
btw, has anyone else noticed that "SIEMENS" is an anagram for "NEMESIS"?
"...The show's entire voice cast and most of its main writers have returned to help revive the series, which FOX cancelled in 2003.'"
Should have been
"...The show's entire voice cast and most of its main writers have returned to help revive the series, which FOX stupidly cancelled in 2003.'"
There, I fixed it for you.
Yeah, but look on the bright side: when a car crash occurs on today's highways (on the ground) they frequently cause the roadway/traffic to be blocked and often even more cars pile into the wreck. In the future, when a crash occurs on the skyway, gravity will neatly and cleanly remove the crashed vehicles from the traffic lanes (fully automated, with no human intervention required!)
...because the very fact that you chose to make such an idiotic statement in a public forum whose members think so highly of, and are so vocal about, their freedoms leads me to believe that I wouldn't have to worry about your vote cancelling-out mine.
Wasn't the CD-ROM bubble artificially propped up by AOL for a number of years?
Only as far as the manufacturers of the media itself were concerned. Ironically, it's possible they could have prevented the actual bubble burst if only they'd been distributing blank CD-ROMs...
Slashdot Mirror
After using a Dell laptop for work for several years, when my wife needed a laptop for school we shopped the Dell selection first and were very pleased in-store with the Studio line: 17" display, "full size" keyboard (as a developer with large hands it's not really "full size", but close enough...), good battery life, and the keypad is placed exactly where your right hand expects it to be (not a little higher, or a little lower, than the "home" row, but just right!) I inherited it as my "work" machine when she injured her knee and needed something lighter to lug around campus, and we got her a Dell notebook -- her chief complaint was the loss of the keypad! The lone (but not trivial) drawback is that there's no real "break" key on the keyboard, and for some apps Ctrl-C just doesn't cut it. As such, when working with certain apps I plug-in an external USB keyboard just to have access to a Break key. Other than that, and the ~$800 price, it's a dream machine. Oh, one more thing I just discovered quite by accident: last weekend I either hit the wrong button on the RedBox or it just screwed up and gave me a blue-ray disk instead of the standard DVD our living room player wants/needs. After trying unsuccessfully to get it to play in the living room, I tried popping it into he Studio laptop (this was before I realized it was blue-ray, or I wouldn't have even tried it...) and...surprise!! Played it just fine. Who knew?!
Nearly all good advice so far, both those who offer encouragement to take it seriously and those who insist you must enjoy the "alternate" routine.
However:
The one bit of advice I can think of that nobody else has hit upon was to warn you about that big metal box full of food just steps away from your new workspace. Sure, "at work" there's probably a vending machine or cafeteria nearby, or at least a coffee shop or fast-food joint right around the corner, but there you have to buy a pack of crackers or an ice cream sandwich or whatever. "At home" you have all your favorite foods, conveniently located right beside you, and you already own each and every delicious morsel! It's already yours, you bought it and brought it home for the express purpose of eating it, and if you aren't careful you can easily add a brand new "freshman 15" every few weeks or so.
Trust me, I speak from experience.
"Sovereign Immunity" is nothing more than the government denying responsibility for some action it takes. Usually this works to everyone's advantage (government would grind to a halt under the crushing weight of lawsuits over mangled front-end-alignments by potholes in the nation's roadways, for instance) but when a double-standard set up by government allows one arm of the government to act in a manner that willfully disregards the rights and/or safety of the people in general (let alone the government's own employees) while simultaneously requiring (through another arm of that same government) those same activities to be strictly monitored and regulated when performed by private industry, then we should all cry "Foul!" (and no, I'm not calling for the deregulation of private industry, btw -- I simply think it would be nice for us to all play by the same rules. Congress included!)
Definition of "search"
In Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), the Supreme Court ruled that a search occurs only when 1) a person expects privacy in the thing searched and 2) society believes that expectation is reasonable. In Katz, the Supreme Court ruled that a search had occurred when the government wiretapped a telephone booth.[20] The Court's reasoning was that 1) the defendant expected that his phonebooth conversation would not be broadcast to the wider world and 2) society believes that expectation is reasonable. This is a threshold question in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, since the Fourth Amendment only protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. If no search or seizure has occurred, the court ends its analysis.
Stop and frisk
Under Terry v. Ohio 392 U.S. 1 (1968), law enforcement officers are permitted to conduct a limited warrantless search on a level of suspicion less than probable cause under certain circumstances. In Terry, the Supreme Court ruled that when a police officer witnesses "unusual conduct" that leads that officer to reasonably believe "that criminal activity may be afoot", that the suspicious person has a weapon and that the person is presently dangerous to the officer or others, the officer may conduct a "pat-down search" (or "frisk") to determine whether the person is carrying a weapon. To conduct a frisk, officers must be able to point to specific and articulatory facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant their actions. A vague hunch will not do. Such a search must be temporary and questioning must be limited to the purpose of the stop (e.g., officers who stop a person because they have reasonable suspicion to believe that the person was driving a stolen car, cannot, after confirming that it is not stolen, compel the person to answer questions about anything else, such as the possession of contraband).[21]
So, clearly travelers
Personally, I think we should hit 'em where it counts the most: in their pocketbooks. If all travelers simply chose another mode of transportation they would VERY rapidly find themselves with several quite influential allies: the airlines, the "hospitality industry", etc. (and yes, there ARE practical alternatives, at least for "domestic" travel: driving is still possible despite our rapidly deteriorating network of interstate highways and besides that people just don't ask themselves this question enough anymore anyway!)
More like "I'll believe it when I see it" -- someone somewhere (probably the DOJ) will "realize" that just admitting the possibility there's any risk of cancer from their "radiation scanners" opens them up to a zillion liability suits and the iron wall will come back down because denial is their chief weapon. That and fear, of course ('cause it sure ain't surprise...or a ruthless efficiency, etc.!!!)
We can't even be sure that the probes won't hit a glass dome.
Maybe they already did a long time ago and the "Voyager Anomaly" is just a floating-point-error in the Matrix...
RIAA doesn't own the copyright to any music.
Just the souls of many unfortunate artists.
You know, they weren't club-wielding savages in loincloths back then.
Stone knives and bearskins, son, stone knives and bearskins. And that's the way we liked it, too! None of this mamby-pamby object-oriented whoopsiedoodle; we entered our code changes by tapping out ones and zeros under a microscope (optical, of course, you insensitive clod!) using a cat's whisker. Why, I'd give you a real old-school lesson in how-to-get-it-done-and-done-right-the-first-time-ness, but I've gotta go chase some darned kids outta my yard!!
My best advice is the same advice I give on buying ANYTHING from a new car to an ice cream cone: once you've made your decision and bought something, just enjoy it and quit shopping them. Watching for sales, trying out the display models in stores, comparing prices and features online, even asking your friends what they bought and how much they paid -- all that is for before you buy and continuing to do that after the fact will only lead to frustration (because there's always going to be a lower price or a flashier gizmo in a few days or weeks and unless you're prepared to constantly be in "shopping mode" knowing about it will do you no good at all.)
In true /. spirit I chose to not actually read the article, but just from Tasha26's synopsis I would tend to agree that one should avoid wearing garlic- or onion-based dishes to work.
...that a million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days, eh?
I mean, did anyone bother to do an environmental impact study before launching something with such worldwide and long-term impact?
Did anyone do a double-blind study to make sure Wikipedia wasn't emitting harmful radiation/gasses/particles/etc?!?!
Was there even a government committee chartered to keep watch to make sure the millions of school children who access it every day weren't harmed?
DIDN'T ANYONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?!?!
Maybe Wikipedia should be shuttered until we can get a "still alive" from at least a majority of the "tens of thousands of editors" who have gone "dead" -- if even a sample of those who don't respond turn out to actually be dead then we should consider the very real possibility that Wikipedia might somehow be at fault. Remember: just because we don't see a correlation doesn't necessarily mean there isn't one.
I'm reminded of what I once heard a lady say on the subject of dating married men: "If he'll do it to them he'll eventually do it to you." In your case: any company who'll hire someone based on what they can illegally/immorally bring to the table will treat them like the crap they are when what they brought to the table is used up.
"Causality error" in that they've mistaken the (observed) effect as a "cause". The fact is, the "global recession" has merely revealed a decline in workers' "ethics" that was already there and which had been forming for at least the past several decades. Despite what the talking heads (in both media and the government) are saying, this "economic downturn" is nowhere near as bad as the "Great Depression"; this according to the many "oldsters" I am in frequent conversation with -- my own parents included -- who actually lived through the period rather than merely learning about it from the history books -- and their recollections do not include such a widespread deterioration in the "morals" (their word -- read "ethics") of the population (and yes there were notable exceptions, some accounts of which are a little scary even to modern ears, but by and large people -- at least in this part of the country -- still left their doors unlocked at night; I triple-locked my doors almost religiously during even the much lauded "economic boom time" of just a few years ago!!) Poverty does not cause crime any more than crime causes poverty (including but not by any means limited to the "victims" of Mr. Madoff -- their poverty was caused by a mixture of greed and stupidity.)
That is annoying (especially on the relatively narrow "two-lane-divided-highway" -vs- the typical interstate), but I'll gladly take that over the guy who plays
"I'll just drive along here in your blind spot until you forget about me"
EVERY car has one to several blind spots (the bigger the vehicle the bigger the blind spot(s), etc.) and at least if the bonehead is right beside you you've got a snowball's chance of noticing him when you go to change lanes for the guy riding your bumper.
btw, I've maintained that Slashdot's approaching the "tipping point" towards AI for years now, and yet another proof is in the captcha for this post: "evasion" ....spooky!
Quite right! Two reasons to fear the British government:
Hmph, as if the lizard people didn't target the thermal scanner operators' union for infiltration first!!
Speaking just from my experience almost six years ago at the Shanghai International Airport, it's pretty hard to miss: first they ask you to sign a card stating that you have not taken a bunch of fever reducer, then they set up the thermal scanner on one end of the sprawling airport and the check-in desk at the other, and give you ten minutes to run (and I do mean run -- my travelling party looked like we were trying to re-enact a certain rent-a-car commercial from bygone days) from one end of the place to the other and back again with all your luggage (because the luggage check is the next thing you get to do after that -- we were all amazed that a dozen sweaty Americans (it was November and they just, culturally, seem to have a different idea of what a "comfortable" temperature is) running around like maniacs didn't set off some kind of alarm. Looking back, the "thermal imaging camera" didn't bear any labels attesting to that -- it could just as well have belonged to the Chinese equivalent of "Candid Camera", and if so I'm sure they got a good laugh...
Aha!! Finally, a voice that echos my own feeling on DST: the only good thing about it is that day we "get an extra hour of sleep"
Well, years ago, I decided if I ever ran for public office the chief plank of my platform would be the eradication of DST, but instead of replacing it with "do nothing", I decided it'd be better to replace it with "Do more (LOTS more) of just the good part" -- specifically, that "fall back" part (the part where the benefits really do outweigh the inconvenience.) I'd propose that we not just turn the clocks back one hour once a year, but that we turn the clocks back one hour on the 1st and 15th of the month. Every month. We'd just dispense with the "spring forward" part (the part everybody hates anyway; the all inconvenience and no payback part.)
With 24 hours in a day, and 12 months in a year, at the end of one full year we'd be right back where we started on the clock, but we'd have gained an entire day over the course of the past year (though since it was spread evenly across the year instead of given to us in one day, like a "leap day", we'd get the true benefit of it in extra rest instead of being tempted to blow it partying. Plus, if we timed the starting point right, you could easily have all the wintertime after-work daylight you wanted!!) Imagine all that boosted productivity the Monday after the time change, twenty-four times each and every year!!
Hey, I figure if we're gonna screw with the clocks we might as well maximize our returns (and it's really no crazier than what we do now. That or it's 24 times crazier.)
Just dump the entire contents of the data files in ASCII format into an e-mail message, at the top type "Send this message to five friends before sundown and something lucky will happen to you before morning -- refuse to send it and bad luck will be yours before noon tomorrow!" and send it off to half a million random addresses. In 25 years, just sign up for the email address Aardvark@slashdot.org * and it will come back to you!!!
*YMMV, but the folks at say it's better than zebra@slashdot.org.
In the early nineties thru the mid nought-ies I worked for Siemens at their North America electronics manufacturing facility. Through a stunning piece of managerial naïvety, we inherited a particularly inappropriate defect data collection hardware/software package already in use in Germany at at least one plant (over the course of several absolutely brutal years we ended up rewriting first the back-end, then the middle-tier and, just before the plant was sold to some modern-day Saxons for prompt pillaging and burning, the front-end...but I digress.) This software had originally been written with the express inability to trace a defect (or a more disturbing pattern of defects) back to a particular individual but could only indicate the line or workgroup that included the individual responsible (we were always told that "German law precluded tracing mistakes to a particular individual", that they preferred to "train/retrain as a group when they saw the need arise, and allow peer-pressure to solve the problem of getting 'the message' to the errant individual." Most ironic that, given such a "legal environment", a German company would come up with a system with such abilities. (of course, we are talking about Siemens here; anyone who has any experience with the company knows that the most honest part of their brochures/ads is that it's for a Siemens product -- and then sometimes even that must be taken with a grain of salt.)
btw, has anyone else noticed that "SIEMENS" is an anagram for "NEMESIS"?
Yeah, but look on the bright side: when a car crash occurs on today's highways (on the ground) they frequently cause the roadway/traffic to be blocked and often even more cars pile into the wreck. In the future, when a crash occurs on the skyway, gravity will neatly and cleanly remove the crashed vehicles from the traffic lanes (fully automated, with no human intervention required!)
...because the very fact that you chose to make such an idiotic statement in a public forum whose members think so highly of, and are so vocal about, their freedoms leads me to believe that I wouldn't have to worry about your vote cancelling-out mine.
Only as far as the manufacturers of the media itself were concerned. Ironically, it's possible they could have prevented the actual bubble burst if only they'd been distributing blank CD-ROMs...