http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/unchartered-waters/interview-with-a-digital-migrant-meet-john-hunter/ -- David

The state of Georgia recent change the law to require that if a traffic light camera, that the yellow light be lengthened by 1 second. Suddenly, the traffic light camera guys (and the city governments) were crying about how they weren't even breaking even any more. Very sad.. All of this would be moot if there was a simple addition to traffic lights - a single digit countdown timer to the side of the light that shows second remaining on the yellow... 5+.. 5 .. 4.. 3 .. 2.. 1.. Red But what do I know. I just type on slashdot to improve my typing speed.

The real problem here is one that I see often in all ages of support people. There is a bias towards being blind to the possibility that, in fact, they themselves are doing something wrong. "The computer is broken since I can't make it work" - in this specific case, they were pushing new hardware backwards to support Windows XP (which they really do need to get off of now, for a wide number of security reasons), but were assuming that nothing had changed with the new hardware...

and of course, this assumes that there is no underlying graft going on between the textbook companies and the administrators specifying the books...

how long is it going to be before the state and local governments figure out that commissioning a single book that they own the rights to as a group starts becoming more cost effective? Would it not make sense that there isn't anything particularly new in geometry or algebra that forces the need for a new rewrite of textbooks every 2-3 years? Or to avoid the $100/book charges being made for dead tree editions of textbooks? Would it not make sense to have one definitive book on the subject, and holding the copyright in common for all to use? As the cost continues to rise at rates exceeding inflation on textbook materials, it becomes more and more attractive to own your own curriculum materials so you don't continue to pay for them over and over again. I feel it is just a matter of time before this happens, particularly give the finanical squeeze occuring in state and local governments.

All hard drive errors boil down to how many failed bits occur on the raw, pre ECC corrected media vs. the calcuated post-ECC return. A hard failure is one that exceeds the span of possible corrections. Most hard block failures should be correctable by sparing of the media block in question. If you get too many non-correctable errors, it is indicative that the electronics or the heads have died... which in practice turns out to be a catalysmic failure where the drive totally fails on a subset of reads (i.e. one surface is no longer accessable).I would think a better way to test a drive would be to perform long reads (data + ECC), programmatically calculating ECC and determining the number of bits in error, and then performing sparing of the problematic tracks (if supported by the command set of the drive - SCSI does this, I don't know if ATA drives allow sparing to occur in call cases.) Of course, a simple 'dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1024k' may be just as effective in the long run...

BS. The phone company always had the right to perform 'service monitoring' on the network...what they couldn't do was provide access to the government (at least in the pre-Patriot Act days) to your line to be continuously tapped. The telcos never had to have a warrant to listen to calls.

This reminds of the time where I was at a go-kart track in NW Atlanta with my 11 year old son. Tons of signs "not liable for injury, we maintain no insurance"... He smacked the kart into the end of a concrete lane separator at ~20-25 mph, and his mouth hit the steering wheel of the kart, and his upper lip hit his teeth, resulting in a fair amount of blood. People from the track came to help, and they were looking at him and suggested that we take him to the emergency room. I suggested that they had not strapped him in correctly, or it would have been impossible to occur in the first place, and that I expected them to cover the medical bills. We took him on the hospital, and as it turned out his injuries were minor. The interesting things was that the next day, we heard from the track's insurance company that they would in fact take care of any deductibles or out of pocket expenses.

Arbitration mentions in a contract are a lot like the signs at the go-kart track - they are designed to make people think that they have no legal recourse. To paraphrase a previous poster, judges don't take kindly to those who say they don't have a say in a situation that is placed in front of them. These clauses often get thrown out if a lawyer is involved, from what I have seen.

There was a 60 minutes story regarding farmers that were sued by monsanto for patent infringement when their fields we found to contain monsanto genetically modified plants within them. See http://www.mindfully.org/GE/GE4/Heartbreak-In-The-Heartland21jul02.htm for more details and the link to the 60 minutes video. this is important in a lot of areas because even accidental/ incidental migration of the plants is being considered a patent infringement.

I was staying at the Renaissance in Las Vegas, booked for a week for a HP training class. Checked out after the first night when I realized that Wi-fi was $10/night. Where did I go? The Choice Hotel 2 blocks down the street.. room was quite nice.
How much did that cost the Renaissance? about $500 for the week....
I haven't stayed at a Mariott in years for the same reason.
Wi-fi is a basic assumption in my hotel choices today. I won't even spend the company's money on this.