Dude! That's almost exactly what I have in my wardrobe bar one thing; a pair of 'open' shoes such as thongs/sandals/jandles/flip flops/insert your name for them here...

Maybe you out to check the quality of money in countries other than your own. Maybe you should also check the quality of laser printing at 2400x2400 dpi, or what constitutes a financial instrument.

No one is 'tracking' anything. Billions of pages are printed each day with micro dots, and its only when the law requires that they be 'identified' that they are, and there is a slew of privacy regulations that need to be adhered to.

Didn't this microdot beat up consiracy theory article also get a run a couple of years ago?

Sorry, you have it the wrong way around. By implementing these tracking features, the companies mentioned avoid disclosing 'real' access to the Government by making it simple and easy to comply with court ordered requests for identifying information, such as the time, date and serial number of the device used to create document X. We are only obliged to hand over that much. Imagine NOT being able to give it over easily and then having to allow spooks in to go though your sales history and shipping details for a period deemed neccesary by the courts! Which do you think is the better option?

You can either;

a) try to make it impossible to copy or otherwise produce (paper) money and other financial instruments such as postage stamps or bonds, which is both technically difficult to implement and probably trivial to circumvent, or
b) not bother trying to block what you know (some) people are going to do and provide a mechanism to aid a criminal investigation while protecting that mechanisms data payload with a secondary level of encryption in its own right.

We've been doing option b) for at least 15 years.

Full Disclosure: I work for Xerox.

And tracking location? Puh-lease, when was the last time you bought a printer that had a GPS device installed?!

This isn't the first "cyber heist" in South Africa, just the first one to make the news.

Seriously, though, criminals realised long ago that you can steal more electronically than you can carry in a 'traditional' heist. Just look at the Russian's and their level of organised e-crime!

I voted for 4Mb/s, because at 2km from the exchange that is about the best it can do.

I wish we had fibre, or cable, or something other than crappy old copper. I'd take the 100/40Mb option if the NBN were laid past my house tomorrow.

Especially those of us that deal primarily in accounts, deal with budgets, and worry about statistics.

I think what it really does highlight is that there is always at least one moron in the public administration system that no one can fire, thus they keep getting promoted so they become 'someone else's problem'. Eventually they become everyone's problem.

Then again maybe it's just not the one moron in public administration...

For all the people in the Windows vs Mac argument, don't forget that :-

- A PC runs Windows or *nix, and via hackintosh, can run OSX in certain configurations with mixed results (and no official support)
- A Mac runs OSX, Windows & *nix (and OSX is 9/10 *nix anyway.)

As an IT person that needs to support everything, I can only say that my best upgrade was switching to a Mac and having the ability to natively run either OSX, Windows or Linux. Personally I run OSX 95% of the time with VMs (I use Fusion) handling most test environments, and can boot to Windows as and when required, usually for the odd bit of gaming. Linux runs fine in VMs and doing so makes it easy to deploy my builds to the increasingly popular VM type server environments like ESXi.

With the state of computers these days, a Core i7 with 8GB of RAM is relatively inexpensive and much more than any normal person could ever need. For IT pro's, it is a sound investment to upgrade and when you look at what you get in the 15" MBP with ATI mobile 6750 GPU, it's pretty hard to find fault in the offer from Apple, even if you do pay Apple tax for the privilege (shame about the overpriced RAM from Apple, thankfully OWC have a buyback). I'm just annoyed I left it too late and got one with Lion and not Snow Leopard, and can't roll back because the peanuts on the Apple Support Desk have been spoon fed some crap about Snow Leopard not being 'compatible' with my model, and won't supply the Snow Leopard restore DVD!

It doesn't matter what you want to put on your thesis, you university owns the copyrights to it.

I'd suggest you contact your Uni and put the same question to them, rather than 6 million /. Subscribers.