My wife teaches Journalism at a low income high school in Dallas. A few days before school started she was worried about scheduling and so were her coworkers since an online system they're suppose to be using had no schedules in it. Her first day was met with 60 kids in one of her Journalism class, only 5 had orginially signed up. This is a very poor school ripe with gangs which have to be kept apart but with the scheduling farked all the kids were all mixed together. She was in tears on the phone with me worried that if a fight broke out she wouldn't be able to get out of her room since she has to cross the entire class to get from her desk to the door. Her school won't let her carry a concealed weopen, I want her to carry my pistol but I'm afraid if she gets caught with it there would be criminal charges filed.

The second day she submitted about 200 schedule changes to the counselors and had managed to get her class size down to 40. Any known bad kids she just told to leave her class, they just leave school and never come back (the first week or so is the worst then the trouble makers just stop showing up).

Today she showed 1/2 her students a video and tried to teach the other half, I'm guessing she'll do the same tomorrow but switch halves.

As of right now next Monday is declared a "do over first day of school" and the schedules are promised to be fixed. No one believes it though.

The issue is you need someone to do a sanity check and make sure no one mistakenly filled a hopper meant for Children's Tylenol with, say, Oxycontin. In the case of drugs coming to the pharmacy, our pharmacists physically examine each pill before it goes into the vial when they're counting them out. This is the drug wholesaler sanity check.

I work as a software engineer for a mid sized pharmacy chain. These things are pretty common wherever there's a large, consistent, patient population. Nursing homes use them as well as hospices, it's like an automated prescription filling robot where the rx is verified by a pharmacist at the very last step.

Most mail delivery pharmacies use them too, the concept is called "central fill" where pharmacies transmit rx's electronic to a central facility that has a few very high volume filling robots. The pharmacists there verify like 60 to 70 rx's per hour. You'd think pharmacists hate an assembly line job but they're actually the most sought after jobs. No sick, pissed off patients to deal with.

What an effective way to distribute a message, hack one of the worlds most popular image hosting sites and replace all the images with your manifesto! Every site with an image linked back to imageshack would be displaying your message. Instant.global.audience. I'm not justifying what they did and I'm all for the feds handing out a beat down, afterall, the law is the law but man, what a good idea.

"Plenty people think they look beautiful, myself included."

indeed. I live in Dallas and make the drive to Marfa ( far SW Texas) once every 6 moths or so to visit. One of my favorite parts of the drive is seeing the windmills as you get West of Abilene.

If they don't have a definition for "beta" then why was it there in the first place?

this is called "sloppy focus" it's available on windows but you have to download and install the feature. It's the one of the first things i put on new windows installations.

It's Bolivia that has all the Lithium. They are already freaking out about corporations raping their country for profit. IIRC Bolivia has started working on putting policy in place to keep from getting screwed over by large mining firms.

"Like many other producers of crude oil, Bolivia finds itself in a frustrating situation regarding its processing and the refining of its raw materials. It finds company in the history of the incumbent automobile fuel source, petroleum. There is a great deal that the Bolivians could learn from the Saudis regarding what they should do with its lithium reserves and how to extract them. To achieve this, Bolivia will want to strive to find the answer to a number of questions with which the Saudis have dealt over the years, and continues to deal with, such as how wealth will be distributed if the commodity is nationalized, how to maintain a balance between maximum production and environmental stability, and what will stabilize the economy once the commodity is exhausted."

http://www.coha.org/2009/02/lucky-bolivia-and-the-future-of-lithium-in-the-world-economy/

I'm not sure that is a blessing or a curse. Burning down your house isn't worth having a longer lasting laptop;

I know what you mean but you could also say burning down your house isn't worth having a stove. You just need to know that the battery can be dangerous and you should handle it accordingly.

I worked on some of the technology back in college in the late 90's. I was part of a lab that participated in an international competition that was designed to further autonomous aerial vehicle tech. One year after the competition we were invited to a military symposium and got to see the real stuff. I remember something like the predator was there but called something else. There were a handful of other aerial vehicles but i guess the predator thing won out in the end.

A couple of semesters ago I went back to school to finish my CS degree and started working in the same old lab from the 90's. Sensors and things had vastly improved and the bulk of the work was now being done on computer vision instead of autonomous flying. The aerospace engineer ace in the lab was planning to work for General Atomics, i'm guessing on the predator, after he finished up his degree. I worked on a target recognition and tracking system using the OpenCV library up until I formally graduated.

It's really interesting stuff and I considered entering the field but I already have about 9 years in the healthcare industry and I can't bring myself to stop capitalizing on all my specialized healthcare knowledge.

Why not let authors of the software charge just like the smart phone apps? Sounds like a revenue source for Novell and a revenue source for software writers. There can be a mix of free and not-free software in the "store" just like Apple's.

To answer my own question it sounds like Novell wants to leverage the "app store" hype and just put a front end on apt.

I would say that when it comes to interoperability and standards compliance ( like a protocol ) then the GPL makes a lot of sense. With the GPL a business can't take the protocol, modify it, and then use market share to push their closed and modified version as the standard.

My best guess for making money off open source is still support. If you provide pay-only features then you've got to be better than the very best programmer in the open source community. You'll always be in an arms race trying to introduce new features that customers will pay for faster then the community implements these same features in the open source version.

With support you can provide a service that the open source community can't match which is basically a legally binding contract. Individuals would never buy the support and just head to the community for issues but a business will use the support contract as a hedge on the risk of using open source. The community has no contract and no obligation.

Now making enough to live on is a whole other matter.

I've been hearing a lot about gold hoarding on some financial sites. The boardies at marketwatch.com are especially into it but they're pretty nutty anyway. The most common advice I hear is to make sure whoever you're buying from can actually deliver the gold. Some gold sellers are selling paper gold which will be just as worthless in a major event. Gold in hand is what you want not the "promise to deliver gold".

there's a YouTube clip of 3 or 4 buzzards circling the shuttle at lift off. You can guess what happens next. It looks like they get stunned before they're even struck, probably from all the noise. They flutter down to the engines and that's that.

I'd like to see some work done on the balancing act of how much to do in code and how much to do in SQL. My coworker can put SQL statements together that if printed on an 8.5x11 would fill the whole sheet if not run over. Me, on the other hand, I tend to break up huge sql statements into a set of smaller ones and then use code to do some of the work that could possible have been done in SQL. I don't have the time to find out what works best on my own but I do have the time to read about it.

btw, how come tech books don't come on tape/cd?