rbook - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Firing in US (Score 1) 582

by rbook on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @02:19PM (#39647251) Attached to: Interview With TSA Screener Reveals 'Fatal Flaws'

... and this is where the argument for the free market breaks down. That is massively valuable, but a stupid boss won't see that. Pure free market business can work efficiently only with the assumption that people are well informed and make intelligent decisions.

No, this is where the argument for the free market is PROVED. The TSA is a government agency, not a free-market business. The boss isn't paid to do a good job, which would produce satisfied customers and therefore a profit. The boss is paid to keep the next boss up the chain from being embarrassed.

That's why "Jennifer" was fired. She embarrassed the TSA.

If the TSA were a free-market business, it would have acted on "Jennifer's" info, improved itself, and advertised that fact to potential customers.

In the free market, companies with too many "stupid bosses" go out of business, leaving the better ones around to do their jobs. In the government (including TSA), stupid bosses get promoted.

Comment Re:Firing in US (Score 0) 582

by rbook on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @02:14PM (#39647163) Attached to: Interview With TSA Screener Reveals 'Fatal Flaws'

Because the USA is run by Big Business, who can give unlimited money to candidates for office. You can be fired here for no stated reason at all.

Irrelevant -- the TSA is a government agency, not a business. TSA screeners are government employees. It's very hard in the USA to fire a government employee, unless the employee embarrasses the government agency.

Submission + - Son of CueCat? Purdue Professor Embeds Hyperlinks

Submitted by rbook on Wednesday June 02, 2010 @12:35PM

rbook writes: Remember :CueCat, the "free" (as in beer) bar code scanner that was supposed to change everything by allowing advertisers (or whoever) to put hyperlinks in printed material? Well, the idea is back, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education: 'People who prefer print books over e-books may still want extra digital material to go with them. That's the idea behind Sorin Matei's project, Ubimark, which embeds books with two-dimensional codes that work as hyperlinks when photographed.' Photographing an image and uploading it sounds like more trouble than scanning a bar code to follow a URL, but they figure you can take the photograph with your smartphone and view the web page automatically on the mobile device.

Researchers Debut Barcode Replacement 185

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday July 27, 2009 @11:38AM from the i'm-still-not-used-to-the-square-ones dept.

eldavojohn writes "MIT Researchers have unveiled a new potential replacement for barcodes. Using an LED covered with a tiny mask and a lens, these new bokodes can be processed by a standard mobile phone camera and can encode thousands of times more information than your average barcode. New applications are being dreamed up by the team. Dr. Mohan of MIT said, 'Let's say you're standing in a library with 20 shelves in front of you and thousands of books. You could take a picture and you'd immediately know where the book you're looking for is.'"

Microsoft Tag, Smartphone-Scannable Barcodes 258

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @06:30AM from the cue-cat-lives dept.

dhavleak writes "Microsoft Research has come up with Microsoft Tag: '...just aim your camera phone at a Tag and instantly access mobile content, videos, music, contact information, maps, social networks, promotions, and more. Nothing to type, no browsers to launch!' Device support is fairly extensive (iPhone, WinMo, BlackBerry and more), and tag scanning appears to work quickly and reliably from different distances and angles. Long Zheng has an overview on his site. The Tag is similar to a barcode, but has obvious visual differences — colored vs. black and white, and triangles vs. squares or lines. The technology looks interesting, but will it get the adoption necessary to be successful? What applications do you see for such technology?"

CueCat Patent Granted, Finally 184

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 30, 2008 @01:18PM from the you-lose-even-if-you-win dept.

RobertB-DC writes "Who could forget the :CueCat, the amazing device that would bring 'convergence' between the real world and the online marketing Utopia of the late '90s? Belo, the Dallas-based newspaper and TV conglomerate, spent millions of dollars on the project, only to be ridiculed from the start and eventually becoming a sort of poster kitty for the Dot-Com Bust. Well, the device's inventor and chief cheerleader, J. Jovan Philyaw, didn't forget. His patent application, in progress since 1998, has finally been granted. The story comes from a Dallas alternative weekly, since the local Belo paper is still smarting from its $40-million-dollar black eye."

Slashdot Top Deals