In this day and age everyone needs to take responsibility for the environment, so it is our pleasure to announce Foomatic Industries Green Initiative and it new line of Green* Widgets.
---- * Green products are those made with natural materials** only
** Natural materials are considered those found naturally within our universe consisting of normal matter***
*** Normal matter refers to matter which does not contain dark matter or exotic particles****
**** Please note some of our products may contain exotic particles and forms of matter but these were not explicitly added during the manufacture or created by a man-made process*****.
***** Please note Foomatic industries is only aware of the actions made by Foomatic Industries Employees****** during the manufacture process.
****** Some components of Foomatic Industries products are outsourced to other companies, and Foomatic Industries is not liable for the manufacturing processes or regulation of exotic matter in the creation of those components.
Many universities have a standard written university policy indicating that any inventions or technologies developed at the university, or using university resources or in cooperation with university resources are at least partially owned by the university. Also most administrations ask students starting companies/projects to obtain an agreement from the university waiving future claims with the promise that you do all development outside of their labs/systems/etc.
Now in most cases they don't care, or bother to make any claims to products. But on occasion with highly successful projects they will ask for some sort of settlement years later. I can recall at least two examples we were told of at the University of Illinois. 1) Mark Andreesen's Mosaic was written on NCSA and university computers, and thus the University settled for free site licensing of Mosaic and Netscape products (while at the time they thought it was a good deal) 2) A oil pipline inspection and X-raying 'robot' which ownership was settled for a monetary donation to University programs.
Unfortunately as you go forward it's your burden to show when you had an idea and how it was stolen. So the best advice is really to document where you do your work, when, and who you share it with.
Actually that happens on the short term. The down side is you continuously need to add more iron to sequester the CO2. Some of the Carbon algae sequester does fall to the sea floor and gets buried in the ocean bed (and in the right conditions in a few million years you get oil), but a good percentage gets re-released into the water when the algae dies.
Of course my overall point was that just 2-3years ago we believed we could pump massive amounts of CO2 into water without causing any harm, and many industries were planning to start doing so. However we know know that this would have caused all sorts of issues with the habitat in a relatively short period of time.
So the question is do we really understand the cycle and balance of life and chemistry in all the worlds oceans to take the gamble on conducting Iron seeding. And then we do need to consider the cost of the backup plan if we discover we are wrong a decade or two down the line. Because the energy required to correct a imbalance can be so great it would only cause more problems.
Geo-engineering is something we probably will have to do at some point (we already have massively screwed up the earths water chemistry with CO2, islands of plastic, overloaded natural filtration systems, etc). But good science always has to consider the viewpoint that what we think we know is wrong.
Then of course there is the ph problem with fertilizing the oceans discovered in the past 2-3 years. Forcing the absorption of CO2 into the ocean tends to cause the creation of carbonic acid, which eats calcium. Calcium provides the building blocks and protective shells for many simple microscopic oceanic plant/animal life. It also will eat away at the sells of crustaceans.
Just a small pH change in the ocean can collapse the entire food chain.
Of course you can counter this by adding quicklime to the ocean (which is pretty costly). And you can balance the nutrition loss by adding more nitrogen to the water. Of course that means that you essentially have dumped a bunch of materials you mined (by producing a lot of CO2) into the ocean to re-balance an already balanced ecosystem.
Considering just 5 years ago the prevailing thought was that the ocean could sequester an almost unlimited amount of CO2, its pretty obvious that we don't fully understand how badly tinkering with it could f-things up.
Normally dual displays just expand the size of the viewing area from one camera point. To have stereoscopic support 3D images need to have 2 viewing cameras setup, at a slightly different offset; viewing the same object from different angles.
So a dual monitor desktop still has just one perspective, for 3D you need 2.
Its a lot easier to do this with dual displays, as you only really need to modify the camera config in openGL, or your F/X API of choice (of course this is best done in the software itself or via the driver).
The alternating left-right eye, or polarizing, glasses are a bit harder to do properly. For those you need to synchronize to the frames coming out of the frame buffers (or else its easy to send the right image to the left eye, and vice versa...and also have all sort of sync problems). Most of these never became very popular in the PC world, most of the support for polarized glasses is found in the SGI realm.
Well technically that would be air being Blown out...or more precisely siphoning air up the chimney.
Air ventilated at ground pressure will be siphoned to the low pressure area at the top of the stack. Combine that with humidity and convection from the heat and you have the Chimney Effect, or Stack Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_effect).
You could even boost this by adding solar energy collectors (essentially a good light absorbent material to conduct more heat in the chimney), to create a Solar Chimney (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_chimney).
Now of course if you try this on the interior of an office building you will get the opposite effect happen. The forced air systems usually compensate for the natural pressure and heat difference on the upper floors. This can then increase pressure in the bottom of any open space spanning levels. (when you open the doors in a building at the air is usually blowing out...or why their is usually a draft at the bottom of an open elevator shaft)
Now you might be able to design vents with microscopic holes which would take advantage of waters high surface tension to not let water through but still allow air in. Essentially the same way stain proof fabric works to let water roll off. However these would probably be easily blocked by dust, and impede natural airflow heavily.
Any exposed contacts, expansion slots, removable parts, batteries, etc would still be vulnerable.
You also can have issues with heat dissipation on some objects. So sealing your laptop would probably end up in it overheating.
Then any objects that have mechanical devices (hinges, joints, etc) probably couldn't be sealed as it would hinder them from operating (although that's what watertight gaskets are for).
With cell phones your going to need to use more expensive waterproof (sealed membrane) mics and speakers as normal ones require direct contact with the air (which can let water in).
If personal electronics manufacturers wanted to make cell phones and Mp3 players waterproof they could do so without any problems even without this coating...its not that hard to waterproof plastic shell objects. It just costs more, and lengthens the lifetime...and why would they want to do that.
Now I wonder if this idea has something to do with the fact that the US and China are the leading producers with each produce 20 million metric tons/yr. Meaning that it would become a valuable commodity giving a boost to the economy and local workforce.
BTW the world production is only 130 million metric tons a year (not this so called megaton, whatever that might be)
Basically I think they are looking at the old plans of sequestering CO2 in the ocean (because it was believed as late as the 1990s that the oceans could adapt to lots of CO2 and it would just cause a bit more plankton/algae/etc blooms).
Of course now we know that the oceans can't take much more CO2 as it acidifies the oceans. And of course we now know that increasing the PH dissolves calcium....in other words it eats coral, destroys any animals with shells, and dissolves the simple calcium shells that protect many sea micro-organizers (which are the basis for our entire ecosystem).
So if the oceans are going to become drastically acidic (a change of about 1 point in PH) in the next century, you of course just pour a bunch of quicklime to counteract that....
Of course CaO + H2O releases a good amount of heat, but hey...I'm sure that couldn't be bad for our planet.
Of course you can still tap any POTS line the good old fashion way. Its just a matter of accounting for the voltage drop on the line. Although yes if you are the telco it is just easier to capture everything while it is in digital format on the switch.
Now if you don't use analog, inline (some random place between the CO and customer) tapping can be a bit harder. You basically either have to record the signals on the line and decode it later, or toss a non-terminating CSU/test kit in the line without making too much of a disruption in the signal.
Yeah what makes it so special...a wimpy 4.6 billion year old that sits all by its self all the time, and it doesn't even have enough mass to become a black hole when it grows up. You call your self a star...pitiful! A real star wouldn't bother with sun spots, it would have been able to wipe out a planet's magnetic field and irradiate all life by now.
Jurors...you don't need to convince Jurors, just the District Attorney. If he cuts a deal to not be accused of murder a Jury can't convict him of it. He'll probably get an accessory plea or something.
Actually while the cake is real, your concepts of existence might be a lie.
The cake is probably an implanted reward system that seems to have lost some form of weighted satisfaction/goal response (most likely as testing continued increases in curiosity/freedom/etc made to increase problem solving abilities, eventually overrode weight of the planned cake response).
But hey sometimes that is what happens when your dealing with AIs.
This, he explained, meant that "just as liberty is not licentiousness [sic]," It's nice to know the people at Ars need a new dictionary. Licentiousness is a word, and it is spelled correctly. It means excess freedom without or disregarding all restraint.
I agree with you 100% on the entire HIPAA != security aspect. I work managing datacenters for a large healthcare transcription and medical records technology company, and trust me HIPAA leaks happen pretty often (we of course follow the protocol and log and inform the hospitals of such events, but its not that uncommon).
And then there is a large portion of the industry which no one really looks at anyway. Right now a good portion of medical records are shipped to part-time home workers to transcribe audio recording into your actual medical records. And a majority of these people work from home on personal machines, loaded with everything from kids games to malware, hooked directly to cable modems...and their concept of security is having a password on their windows XP account.
Also paper is still rampant at offices, who often distribute records by fax, email, etc...and trust me health care providers are notorious for entering some random company's email address or fax number into a system by accident (The worst I've heard is an automated billing system sending copies of hundreds of patents records to a local Kinko's by mistake).
To be honest I would trust google's security over some of the home users, clinics, and random small medical service organizations that many hospitals use any day of the week. While they are more 'visible' to the populace they probably have less frequent security breaches then what exists now.
In General Americans are getting fatter (US & Canada mostly, but its also spreading in South and Central too). Also there is a similar trend in the UK, and France. (I'm guessing its probably more widespread trend of people getting fatter around the world)
Reason 1: Economies
Food Costs Money. Healthy food costs more money. Businesses want to save money. More businesses choose to put less healthy products in the food we eat. Less businesses with healthy food means less access to healthy food.
Reason 2: Globalization
In most parts of the world fast food is profitable, and the trends are spreading to other countries. Foods that were only minor percentages of people's diets are now becoming dietary staples.
Reason 3: Technology
Technology is cheaper, and many everyday tasks are easier (requiring less physical work), generally meaning people are less physical.
Reason 4: Education
For example people still think Chicken and Turkey are much lower in fat. However in the mass farmed markets of today, breeds are selected for high speed growth and size...meaning more fat. Most of the popular data is based on 30-40 year old studies, where as todays meats have much more fat then they did 30-40 years ago.
Also lots of low fat, diet, etc foods really trade one bad thing for another (fats for sugars, sugars for carbs, carbs for fat, sugars for fat, etc). So you be processing less fat in your food, but since sugar levels are up you create more fat internally; or you trade carbs for fat and store the fat instead of generating it yourself.
Reason 5: Habit/Upbringing
I was brought up with the rule of one soda/pop each day, you could buy lunch once a week, and going out -or take out- was an rare privilege for dinner. My younger sister (by 9 years) no longer has that rule, they ate out often, ate lots of pre-made stuff, and had lots of sugar. Low and behold my parents and sister became more overweight. Schools are now littered with cheaper food, vending machines, etc....no wonder they might be fatter/unhealthy as adults.
Reason 6: Chemicals
Plastics, Pesticides, Drugs, etc can change hormone levels (its insane how much estrogen-like chemicals are found in drinking water now...and BTW studies have started to show that in many parts of the world they have been seeing higher rates of males born with more feminine features and estrogen production; leading to more developmental issues). These things change metabolism (usually for the worse). Also a lot of pesticides and plastics can manifest changes in genetic expression that get passed for as much as 3-4 generations in some cases. Many of these could be responsible for attention disorders, depression, bi-polar, etc frequency in the population which can not only directly change exercise and eating habits, but many of the drugs can also slow the metabolism and/or cause weight gain.
Of course there are probably another 50-100 reasons too that you can find by picking up any science or medical journal these days.
At the University Of Illinois they were sent to an inventory warehouse where they were required to sit for X amount of time (A couple of months in case someone else made requests for similar equipment/replacements). The equipment was then de-inventoried, and sold by the Ton/Lot to certified data recyclers with contacts for data deletion, policies for destroying found materials (like CDs in drives or cases, random paperwork found in the pallets of equipment, etc).
A great deal of stuff used to go to an company in Urbana that also got mounds of stuff from Southern, Northern, and UIC (A long time ago, Back when I was in school, I bought some cheap early Pentiums to experiment on for projects at about $1 per pound).
The downside is that A) they are sold in large lots and the schools wouldn't sell individual components B) you would have to have a data destruction contract with the school. So its probably easier to buy them back from the recycler companies.
Of course that didn't stop us from occasionally setting things in our trunk instead of wrapping them up on the pallets from time to time. Or having departments get lazy and toss things with inventory stickers in a dumpster.
One of the oldest tricks is to remember that the warehouse guys check the S/N and tag # on the chassis, whats actually inside the chassis doesn't matter much to them;)
Might this have something to do with the fact that China just had a large earthquake and in usual fashion they are trying to control the news of it. They essentially want to make such events seem very minor, and make it look to foreign eyes that they recover from such disasters in almost no time at all.
And no it's probably not to just cover this one earthquake's damage, but really to cover news of future floods, quakes, fires, etc from outside eyes.
The issue is that in smaller conductor fabrication sizes the little wiggles do make a difference. The flaws in fabrication causes small variances in current and electrons to 'leak', this makes fabricating a 45nm chip so much harder then a 90nm chip. So by straightening the conductors you can make that 45nm chip easier to produce reliably, and also push the boundaries to make even smaller chips.
Slashdot Mirror
Office of Naval Research started developing Retinal Projection in 1991
http://www.cs.nps.navy.mil/people/faculty/capps/4473/projects/fiambolis/vrd/vrd_full.html
In this day and age everyone needs to take responsibility for the environment, so it is our pleasure to announce Foomatic Industries Green Initiative and it new line of Green* Widgets.
----
* Green products are those made with natural materials** only
** Natural materials are considered those found naturally within our universe consisting of normal matter***
*** Normal matter refers to matter which does not contain dark matter or exotic particles****
**** Please note some of our products may contain exotic particles and forms of matter but these were not explicitly added during the manufacture or created by a man-made process*****.
***** Please note Foomatic industries is only aware of the actions made by Foomatic Industries Employees****** during the manufacture process.
****** Some components of Foomatic Industries products are outsourced to other companies, and Foomatic Industries is not liable for the manufacturing processes or regulation of exotic matter in the creation of those components.
Many universities have a standard written university policy indicating that any inventions or technologies developed at the university, or using university resources or in cooperation with university resources are at least partially owned by the university. Also most administrations ask students starting companies/projects to obtain an agreement from the university waiving future claims with the promise that you do all development outside of their labs/systems/etc.
Now in most cases they don't care, or bother to make any claims to products. But on occasion with highly successful projects they will ask for some sort of settlement years later. I can recall at least two examples we were told of at the University of Illinois. 1) Mark Andreesen's Mosaic was written on NCSA and university computers, and thus the University settled for free site licensing of Mosaic and Netscape products (while at the time they thought it was a good deal) 2) A oil pipline inspection and X-raying 'robot' which ownership was settled for a monetary donation to University programs.
Unfortunately as you go forward it's your burden to show when you had an idea and how it was stolen. So the best advice is really to document where you do your work, when, and who you share it with.
Actually that happens on the short term. The down side is you continuously need to add more iron to sequester the CO2. Some of the Carbon algae sequester does fall to the sea floor and gets buried in the ocean bed (and in the right conditions in a few million years you get oil), but a good percentage gets re-released into the water when the algae dies.
Of course my overall point was that just 2-3years ago we believed we could pump massive amounts of CO2 into water without causing any harm, and many industries were planning to start doing so. However we know know that this would have caused all sorts of issues with the habitat in a relatively short period of time.
So the question is do we really understand the cycle and balance of life and chemistry in all the worlds oceans to take the gamble on conducting Iron seeding. And then we do need to consider the cost of the backup plan if we discover we are wrong a decade or two down the line. Because the energy required to correct a imbalance can be so great it would only cause more problems.
Geo-engineering is something we probably will have to do at some point (we already have massively screwed up the earths water chemistry with CO2, islands of plastic, overloaded natural filtration systems, etc). But good science always has to consider the viewpoint that what we think we know is wrong.
Then of course there is the ph problem with fertilizing the oceans discovered in the past 2-3 years. Forcing the absorption of CO2 into the ocean tends to cause the creation of carbonic acid, which eats calcium. Calcium provides the building blocks and protective shells for many simple microscopic oceanic plant/animal life. It also will eat away at the sells of crustaceans.
Just a small pH change in the ocean can collapse the entire food chain.
Of course you can counter this by adding quicklime to the ocean (which is pretty costly). And you can balance the nutrition loss by adding more nitrogen to the water. Of course that means that you essentially have dumped a bunch of materials you mined (by producing a lot of CO2) into the ocean to re-balance an already balanced ecosystem.
Considering just 5 years ago the prevailing thought was that the ocean could sequester an almost unlimited amount of CO2, its pretty obvious that we don't fully understand how badly tinkering with it could f-things up.
Normally dual displays just expand the size of the viewing area from one camera point. To have stereoscopic support 3D images need to have 2 viewing cameras setup, at a slightly different offset; viewing the same object from different angles.
So a dual monitor desktop still has just one perspective, for 3D you need 2.
Its a lot easier to do this with dual displays, as you only really need to modify the camera config in openGL, or your F/X API of choice (of course this is best done in the software itself or via the driver).
The alternating left-right eye, or polarizing, glasses are a bit harder to do properly. For those you need to synchronize to the frames coming out of the frame buffers (or else its easy to send the right image to the left eye, and vice versa...and also have all sort of sync problems). Most of these never became very popular in the PC world, most of the support for polarized glasses is found in the SGI realm.
Well technically that would be air being Blown out...or more precisely siphoning air up the chimney.
Air ventilated at ground pressure will be siphoned to the low pressure area at the top of the stack. Combine that with humidity and convection from the heat and you have the Chimney Effect, or Stack Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_effect).
You could even boost this by adding solar energy collectors (essentially a good light absorbent material to conduct more heat in the chimney), to create a Solar Chimney (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_chimney).
Now of course if you try this on the interior of an office building you will get the opposite effect happen. The forced air systems usually compensate for the natural pressure and heat difference on the upper floors. This can then increase pressure in the bottom of any open space spanning levels. (when you open the doors in a building at the air is usually blowing out...or why their is usually a draft at the bottom of an open elevator shaft)
Now you might be able to design vents with microscopic holes which would take advantage of waters high surface tension to not let water through but still allow air in. Essentially the same way stain proof fabric works to let water roll off. However these would probably be easily blocked by dust, and impede natural airflow heavily.
Any exposed contacts, expansion slots, removable parts, batteries, etc would still be vulnerable.
You also can have issues with heat dissipation on some objects. So sealing your laptop would probably end up in it overheating.
Then any objects that have mechanical devices (hinges, joints, etc) probably couldn't be sealed as it would hinder them from operating (although that's what watertight gaskets are for).
With cell phones your going to need to use more expensive waterproof (sealed membrane) mics and speakers as normal ones require direct contact with the air (which can let water in).
If personal electronics manufacturers wanted to make cell phones and Mp3 players waterproof they could do so without any problems even without this coating...its not that hard to waterproof plastic shell objects. It just costs more, and lengthens the lifetime...and why would they want to do that.
Now I wonder if this idea has something to do with the fact that the US and China are the leading producers with each produce 20 million metric tons/yr. Meaning that it would become a valuable commodity giving a boost to the economy and local workforce.
BTW the world production is only 130 million metric tons a year (not this so called megaton, whatever that might be)
Basically I think they are looking at the old plans of sequestering CO2 in the ocean (because it was believed as late as the 1990s that the oceans could adapt to lots of CO2 and it would just cause a bit more plankton/algae/etc blooms).
Of course now we know that the oceans can't take much more CO2 as it acidifies the oceans. And of course we now know that increasing the PH dissolves calcium....in other words it eats coral, destroys any animals with shells, and dissolves the simple calcium shells that protect many sea micro-organizers (which are the basis for our entire ecosystem).
So if the oceans are going to become drastically acidic (a change of about 1 point in PH) in the next century, you of course just pour a bunch of quicklime to counteract that....
Of course CaO + H2O releases a good amount of heat, but hey...I'm sure that couldn't be bad for our planet.
Of course you can still tap any POTS line the good old fashion way. Its just a matter of accounting for the voltage drop on the line. Although yes if you are the telco it is just easier to capture everything while it is in digital format on the switch. Now if you don't use analog, inline (some random place between the CO and customer) tapping can be a bit harder. You basically either have to record the signals on the line and decode it later, or toss a non-terminating CSU/test kit in the line without making too much of a disruption in the signal.
Yeah what makes it so special...a wimpy 4.6 billion year old that sits all by its self all the time, and it doesn't even have enough mass to become a black hole when it grows up. You call your self a star...pitiful! A real star wouldn't bother with sun spots, it would have been able to wipe out a planet's magnetic field and irradiate all life by now.
I bet Jupiter is just laughing at all of this right about now.
Jurors...you don't need to convince Jurors, just the District Attorney. If he cuts a deal to not be accused of murder a Jury can't convict him of it. He'll probably get an accessory plea or something.
Actually while the cake is real, your concepts of existence might be a lie.
The cake is probably an implanted reward system that seems to have lost some form of weighted satisfaction/goal response (most likely as testing continued increases in curiosity/freedom/etc made to increase problem solving abilities, eventually overrode weight of the planned cake response).
But hey sometimes that is what happens when your dealing with AIs.
-
Want your cake? Apply Today!
milieu :P
I agree with you 100% on the entire HIPAA != security aspect. I work managing datacenters for a large healthcare transcription and medical records technology company, and trust me HIPAA leaks happen pretty often (we of course follow the protocol and log and inform the hospitals of such events, but its not that uncommon).
And then there is a large portion of the industry which no one really looks at anyway. Right now a good portion of medical records are shipped to part-time home workers to transcribe audio recording into your actual medical records. And a majority of these people work from home on personal machines, loaded with everything from kids games to malware, hooked directly to cable modems...and their concept of security is having a password on their windows XP account.
Also paper is still rampant at offices, who often distribute records by fax, email, etc...and trust me health care providers are notorious for entering some random company's email address or fax number into a system by accident (The worst I've heard is an automated billing system sending copies of hundreds of patents records to a local Kinko's by mistake).
To be honest I would trust google's security over some of the home users, clinics, and random small medical service organizations that many hospitals use any day of the week. While they are more 'visible' to the populace they probably have less frequent security breaches then what exists now.
In General Americans are getting fatter (US & Canada mostly, but its also spreading in South and Central too). Also there is a similar trend in the UK, and France. (I'm guessing its probably more widespread trend of people getting fatter around the world)
Reason 1: Economies
Food Costs Money. Healthy food costs more money. Businesses want to save money. More businesses choose to put less healthy products in the food we eat. Less businesses with healthy food means less access to healthy food.
Reason 2: Globalization
In most parts of the world fast food is profitable, and the trends are spreading to other countries. Foods that were only minor percentages of people's diets are now becoming dietary staples.
Reason 3: Technology
Technology is cheaper, and many everyday tasks are easier (requiring less physical work), generally meaning people are less physical.
Reason 4: Education
For example people still think Chicken and Turkey are much lower in fat. However in the mass farmed markets of today, breeds are selected for high speed growth and size...meaning more fat. Most of the popular data is based on 30-40 year old studies, where as todays meats have much more fat then they did 30-40 years ago.
Also lots of low fat, diet, etc foods really trade one bad thing for another (fats for sugars, sugars for carbs, carbs for fat, sugars for fat, etc). So you be processing less fat in your food, but since sugar levels are up you create more fat internally; or you trade carbs for fat and store the fat instead of generating it yourself.
Reason 5: Habit/Upbringing
I was brought up with the rule of one soda/pop each day, you could buy lunch once a week, and going out -or take out- was an rare privilege for dinner. My younger sister (by 9 years) no longer has that rule, they ate out often, ate lots of pre-made stuff, and had lots of sugar. Low and behold my parents and sister became more overweight. Schools are now littered with cheaper food, vending machines, etc....no wonder they might be fatter/unhealthy as adults.
Reason 6: Chemicals
Plastics, Pesticides, Drugs, etc can change hormone levels (its insane how much estrogen-like chemicals are found in drinking water now...and BTW studies have started to show that in many parts of the world they have been seeing higher rates of males born with more feminine features and estrogen production; leading to more developmental issues). These things change metabolism (usually for the worse). Also a lot of pesticides and plastics can manifest changes in genetic expression that get passed for as much as 3-4 generations in some cases. Many of these could be responsible for attention disorders, depression, bi-polar, etc frequency in the population which can not only directly change exercise and eating habits, but many of the drugs can also slow the metabolism and/or cause weight gain.
Of course there are probably another 50-100 reasons too that you can find by picking up any science or medical journal these days.
BTW there is an official Illinois Recycling Association
At the University Of Illinois they were sent to an inventory warehouse where they were required to sit for X amount of time (A couple of months in case someone else made requests for similar equipment/replacements). The equipment was then de-inventoried, and sold by the Ton/Lot to certified data recyclers with contacts for data deletion, policies for destroying found materials (like CDs in drives or cases, random paperwork found in the pallets of equipment, etc).
;)
A great deal of stuff used to go to an company in Urbana that also got mounds of stuff from Southern, Northern, and UIC (A long time ago, Back when I was in school, I bought some cheap early Pentiums to experiment on for projects at about $1 per pound).
The downside is that A) they are sold in large lots and the schools wouldn't sell individual components B) you would have to have a data destruction contract with the school. So its probably easier to buy them back from the recycler companies.
Of course that didn't stop us from occasionally setting things in our trunk instead of wrapping them up on the pallets from time to time. Or having departments get lazy and toss things with inventory stickers in a dumpster.
One of the oldest tricks is to remember that the warehouse guys check the S/N and tag # on the chassis, whats actually inside the chassis doesn't matter much to them
Djibouti invasion!
Might this have something to do with the fact that China just had a large earthquake and in usual fashion they are trying to control the news of it. They essentially want to make such events seem very minor, and make it look to foreign eyes that they recover from such disasters in almost no time at all.
And no it's probably not to just cover this one earthquake's damage, but really to cover news of future floods, quakes, fires, etc from outside eyes.
The issue is that in smaller conductor fabrication sizes the little wiggles do make a difference. The flaws in fabrication causes small variances in current and electrons to 'leak', this makes fabricating a 45nm chip so much harder then a 90nm chip. So by straightening the conductors you can make that 45nm chip easier to produce reliably, and also push the boundaries to make even smaller chips.