That's why I was so angry with them - if you do a naive calculation of the average cost for an article per magazine per issue per year, you come up with roughly 3€ per article. Which means that it would have been more than a 1000% markup in my case.

I could've understood a 100% markup because I'm not a subscriber - but this? That's racketeering in my book.

By the way, I also contacted them to ask them about the logic behind that huge markup and the 24-hour access restriction. They actually answered. Just the latter question, though, with some kind of hogwash about the difficulties of providing long-term access and its costs. Yeah, that extra table enabling a many-to-many-relationship in the database, that must probably really take up some space!

I recently wanted to get access to a single article from a magazine for teachers because I wanted to do something different this time and the name of the article promised an interesting viewpoint.

However, my school did not subscribe to that magazine and it was an issue from 2004 to boot. So I went to Wiley's website and they offered me the option to buy a time-restricted access to that six(6)-page article. Yeah, you read that right: Shell out money and if you don't download the article as a PDF (which they offer, by the way) you lose access again. Doesn't really make sense but, hey...

Anyway, put that article into the "cart" and proceeded to the checkout. 40€. For a single article. From a magazine which costs 90€ per year if you subscribe to it as a private person (4 issues a year, 7-8 articles per issue). Where the articles are written by teachers for other teachers.

So I drove the 20 minutes to my local university after my school day had ended and photocopied the pages for 0.18€.

Screw those guys.

That's an easy mistake for a beginner to do:

1) Simply forget that array indices for most languages begin at zero(0) rather than one(1).
2) Make an error when establishing the termination condition, Like: "i <= array.length" rather than "i < array.length", again, due to forgetting that array indices begin at zero and end at n-1.

"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

Excel marks parameters by drawing coloured borders around the selected range of cells.

I'm not quite sure how one could make it even more obvious without punching the user in the face.

Unless, of course, you expect a strong AI to reside inside Excel which is able to distinguish between what the user wanted and what he actually did.

It's probably due to scaling problems. Every type of Laser scales differently with regard to the power of the beam. Then there's the cooling and power supply.

Not to mention that the frequency doesn't really matter when you're pumping Kilowatts of energy towards the target - you want to melt the target, after all. And IR can do that just as well as UV.

There are actually materials which filter out laser light. Had to wear such glasses myself when working with a higher power green laser.

However, the filtering aspect obviously only works in a narrow part of the spectrum.

#3 for us would have been: Resident felt need to dig a foxhole.

Two words: Not really.

Unless you can show me the 3D printer which will withstand upwards of 1500 C. And, no, gluing the stuff together is not a good idea.

Quantity != quality.

I dare say that a x-ray film lab has a slightly higher quality control than a mere "tourist photo" lab.

I mean, finger prints on an x-ray negative? Absolute no-go.

Okay, how exactly do you propose a dust speck to be a significant barrier to x-rays? Unless your dust is made out of metal filings, that is.

And if you have processing errors on your x-ray films on a regular basis then that would be another sign of ineptitude.

Merely saying that it is "licensed" doesn't make it so.

It's not about ownership. It's about having the right to see whether your data is now secure after having made the previous discovery that your data was indeed not secure.

Since his personal info is in this system, it is indeed his "window".