For those that are wondering why this would scare me, coming from the perspective of search and rescue: Well-trained dogs who get the scent from something that the person they are searching for was physically touching at some point recent to the search, will hit on that person 999 times out of 1000. The prospect of a scent being put into a database to be pulled out by an algorithm leaves the possibility that there could be massive error before a dog ever gets to scent off of the sample. Or they could use a machine, and I for one do not trust a machine to be right 99.9 percent of the time, in a situation like this.

Um, no. Every creature on earth has an unique scent. Scent will actually come out of a human being, or other "game" in cone shaped form. This is why search and rescue units will work a patch of land moving in the expected cone shape (based on what the dog picks up) when trailing a victim in a search. I have done search and rescue and that is the logic they use because it works. The first thing they do when a new volunteer comes on is show them how it works. Tracking, what you were referring to, also uses the same concept but, with the individual scent being left by brushing against the ground itself.

In a nutshell, this scares the hell out of me.

I have seen a few companies here migrating from Access to MySQL with little difficulty. Obviously it is not a drop-in replacement, but the people I have heard of doing it say there is very little reconfiguration (in comparison to a rewrite from Access to OpenOffice).

The problem with this is that it is, as above noted, an anecdote. Therefore, I will reply with one of my own.

I went to the ER one night due to severe, stabbing pain in my right side. The doctor who saw me did not order any tests, told me I was constipated, and discharged me. My wife and I did not agree with this so she called another doctor she knew that was employed by the same hospital, who diagnosed it as likely gall bladder issues and ordered the tests to confirm. Less than 24 hours after going to the ER I was in emergency surgery for removal of a completely nonfunctioning gall bladder. Because the ER doctor was considered grossly negligent, the hospital, which did the surgery by the way, wrote off the entire bill, and after investigation of the ER doctor's past cases let him go.

Actually, 1 is the country code for both the United States and Canada. Dialing a "1" plus the area code was necessary when phone switches did not have enough logic to know that dialing just 555-555-5555 meant that you actually wanted to call your mother in the next state. Now that you can run a phone switch on your desktop computer, a central office switch can make that connection with no problem.

DOD would use the Blackberry for an "unsecure" line. Standard phone etiquette starts with "unsecure line, so and so speaking." Reading the specs on the spectera, it has one important advantage over the Blackberry: It has native access to the SIPRNET. While I have concerns about any wireless technology being as secure as a landline. SIPRNET encryption is pretty solid. Of course only a select few (of which I am not one) would know if it was hacked.

While I understand your statement completely. I would like to remind you that not everyone in their 20s fell victim to that thought process. Again, when one is raised to be accountable by their parents, they will typically hold their children accountable. I have a 5 year old who has demonstrated enough proficiency on a computer to navigate to games and such. We have an older pc that I have set up for her running ubuntu that does not have an active network connection. When she needs something on it that requires network access I will install it myself, or she is sitting right next to me, if it happens to be an online game. As she gets older and matures, these restrictions will be lifted based on maturity level and discussion. I have no doubt that she will try to circumvent them in the mean time. As I happen to be a computer geek, hopefully I am ahead of the power curve on preventative measures. Though, at the same time, attempting to bypass network restrictions will be teaching her at the same time.

Oh well, the joys of being a parent.

Having worked on HP printers for a number of years and seen the serial numbers (the first two characters are country code), only about a quarter of the printers I have worked on came from China. Most came from Japan or Malaysia.