This line of thinking -- giving trains a lot of advance warning about potential problems -- is currently being addressed by fixed wayside sensors. Mostly it is of the "there is another train ahead of you, stop!" variety, but some progress has been made on the "there is something other than a train ahead of you, stop!" front. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV#Separation for one example

It would be interesting to see how well a drone aircraft/mini-train can work in formation with a high speed train, but because the strategy is based on something moving just as fast as its parent many of the problems aren't actually solved, just shifted/reduced in degree ("well the high speed express train stopped, but the drone still took out the family of four at the level crosssing")

This. I'm about to burn through yet another lunch break to deal with Sovereign Bank about a debit card chargeback against GoDaddy. I submitted the dispute to them on July 22. After multiple calls to several different people, the only thing I have learned so far is the chargeback department got my chargeback. No money back in my account. No word on when this may happen. No one answers the chargeback department's direct line.

The money in this case is small. But I am very worried about what might happen if the amount was larger. To be fair, Sovereign has been prompt in handling my previous chargebacks (when someone stole my debit card number), but the way this case was handled erases any brownie points they earned previously.

In Massachusetts, there most definitely is. After the TJX breach, there was a big push to get businesses that hold personal information to take appropriate precautions. This culminated in M.G.L. Chapter 93H and corresponding regulations, which among other things makes data breaches actionable if the business did squat all to prevent it.

Lately, our Attorney General has been doing everything she can to keep herself in the news, and I would not be surprised if she files suit against Sony post haste.

More accurately, all bills are valid until the Federal Reserve shreds them.

The more interesting point in a bill's life is when it is deemed no longer fit for further circulation. This happens when a bill lands at a bank and doesn't meet the fitness requirements spelled out at http://www.frbservices.org/files/operations/pdf/FRB_Fitness_guidelines.pdf . Aside from declaring worn bills to be unfit, the fitness requirements also cast all older bills ($20s, $10s, and $5s before the first series of redesigns) into the unfit-for-further-circulation pile.

This strategy isn't perfect. There are many old $20s, $10s and $5s that never made it to a bank. But it is good enough considering it was successful in making those old bills a small fraction of what is currently circulating. Hopefully, the older bills are more likely to be scrutinized as they come through.

I am amazed at the responses here on /. This is completely not about this moron's use of vulgarity. Of course he's an idiot, that's a given. More important is the fact that a paper gave what was supposed to be an anonymous poll with an obviously baiting question, and then used that information to track this guy down and ruin his life. In this case it was about some obscenities, but what's to say this couldn't have been about say, late-term abortion, or gay rights? Would you want someone tracking you down and exposing you over that information? Those topics are AT LEAST as enraging today as a couple of obscenities. The school employee was an idiot, but the guy at the newspaper is the one who should be arrested.

Comments are a form of redundancy, usually only figuratively, but sometimes for real.

I once was hired to rewrite some old code from the late 60's or early 70's from OCR'd screen dumps. The mainframe system it ran on had been taken off-line, and wasn't being brought back since the company gave early retirement to anyone who knew anything about it. There was a mix of COBOL, FORTRAN, SAS, JCL, etc. I was rewriting in C (mostly just the numerical stuff that had been written in FORTRAN). No one at the company understood what the code actually "did", but they wanted to duplicate the reports that it produced, exactly. I eventually did enough research to completely understand everything except for a single routine. It was all based on table lookups; tables that were generated based on mathematics derived by a researcher in Canada that were "unpublished." I could find several Bell Systems Journal articles that referenced this paper, but could not find the paper or the math anywhere. My sister in law, a research librarian, even located the author for me and I wrote to him, but he never replied. I knew there were problems with the data in the tables, from the obvious OCR errors like ones replaced with L's, zeros with D's, etc. I wanted to regenerate the tables myself (tables were being used for speed) in order to ensure they were accurate. Eventually, I had to bite the bullet and just use what I had. Fortunately, besides referencing the journal articles containing the original math the tables were generated from, the comment contained a complete commented out copy of a prior version of the function. Before it was moved to IBM hardware in the mid-70s, the original code ran on a CYBER something, and the FORTRAN compiler indexed and initialized multi-dimensional arrays in a different order. I wrote a Perl script to flip the entries in these arrays around to the "new" order, and compare table entries, marking any discrepancies. From the list of discrepancies, it was easy to determine what the OCR error patterns were, allowing me to derive the original table. I still felt uncomfortable, and eventually got the customer to get me a hard copy of the original screen dump used for the OCR process. I was able to verify my results from that.

The ultimate test was ensuring that input from the same data produced output that exactly matched the original output for the same data. This lead to finding and having to work around a bug in AIX's math libraries, but I eventually got there.

In doing that project, the original author's copious comments were *indispensable*.

Take your million and watch as all Google search results point to your competitors

The problem with this idea is that the actors in play don't lend themselves to a very compelling narrative. I mean, suppose I've got a data line that I've previously pulled low, and now I'm allowing it to float high - but I want to make sure it's actually floated high so I can be sure there's not somebody else pulling it low...

What is the data line's motivation for floating high? Apart from a current-driver driving the line high, I mean... Will the reader actually be able to relate to this conflict between two different slaves trying to assert different states on the data line? And, if we do make a narrative about this conflict, won't we have to explore the individual slaves' motivations for the conflict? Won't we need some depth of background information about the source of the address collision? Wouldn't the narrative demand proper explanation of the first slave's feelings upon learning he's lost arbitration, and condemned to forever remain in the shadow of the second slave? And what about the narrative of the second slave, who doesn't even know there was a conflict, because he's won it? These don't sound like very appealing characters to me...

Ever hear of Silverchair? They were only 15 when they recorded their debut album, which would make them 40 when copyright expires. Because my stomach isn't that strong, I won't even mention Hansen or Chris Cross (oops...I just did!) :D

Still, you're probably right...35 years is a lot of time to gather a nest egg.

What you can do is to write a bill, charging a reasonable rate like $60 per started hour including your journey time (if it is not at your home), and at the end give them a 100% rebate. Make sure that they see the real cost. Then take them to the nearest Apple Store. Show the bill to the salesperson and ask "what can we get for three times this amount". Obviously make sure that your bill is high enough to get them a nice suitable Mac.