In America, pernicious, thin-skinned, militant P.C. is widespread. Seinfeld no longer plays American colleges because of it and Bill Mahar opines often as well.
In too many "retail" universities, there needs to be more fracturing of groupthink and expanding of thought and expression, not bikeshedding on edge-case, perceived "offense" to shout down a well-meaning and -intentioned joke.
Anything printed on most (but not all) color printer can be traced back to the printer on which it was printed (serial number) and often date stamp as well.
The EURion pattern, with the circles, isn't exactly "microprinting" -- you can see it quite clearly without magnification on a lot of currencies. But there is also the later Digimarc system, and we don't know exactly how it works. Maybe somebody will reverse engineer the detection software.
Edit: as I noted on the list of printers page, we think that newer printers are also doing something that we can't see, possibly based on perturbing dithering algorithms so that the dithering is different from printer to printer in a distinctive way. So when we didn't see yellow dots from newer printers, that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't printing tracking codes. The reasons for thinking that tracking codes became more pervasive in newer printer models rather than being phased out are suggestions in documents obtained via FOIA, and rumors from people who worked in the industry.
Reverse engineer, apologies. The idea is to gain understanding, not simply to get a disassembly (that's an automated process and a 1:1 correspondence between binary and assembly code remains).
The harder part is to figure out what it all does.
Investments in companies mostly make money evaporate as a standard practice.
Large-scale investors gravitate towards big risk/big reward ventures which require significant capital because it's saves having to make a zillion angel-scale deals. Plus, it seems sexier with extra-awesome brownie points to go after something which may be r/evolutionary.
PS: Color was a snausage clusterfuck of dbag, hubris behaviors that ruined the team (and the venture). Hopefully, that elicited a corrective learning experience.
B&A is a boring-sounding organization which is the primary income sheet profit-center, which rakes in slightly more than tuition; SMC is balance sheet (aka investment) management.
Stanford is unlike most other universities in the fact that there is no pretense of firewalling business opportunity development from academic research. I think this pushes away some pure-research, money-is-evil people and attracts more entrepreneurial folks.
People whom get outside and actually examined "suspicious behavior" may be shocked to find normal, harmless people and that it was their own hobgoblins of their minds criminalizing people based on nothing more than their own fears, ignorance and prejudices, probably from watching too much TV and Hollywood movies rather than experiencing the real world.
Nextdoor should create a feedback system to incorporate this effect and help people calibrate. It could also bring in base-rate crime info to help make more accurate assessments of suspicious reports.
Wow, this is incredibly stupid: conflating http and https with minor errors. It should show half a lock icon and half of a page icon, diagonally-split to indicate mixed/unsecured content. Globbing the two together creates false comfort and hides problems.
The two current biggest issues with thermoplastic 3D printers are:
- electricity usage: heating a baseplate, feed head and mechanical effort of moving a massive apparatus bazillion^3 times.
- speed (or lack thereof) of moving one or two heads those bz^3 times to get anything made
We're still in the "horse-and-buggy"-days of distributed manufacturing, so one approach or another will eventually find something scalable, Edison-style. More inventions and approaches are definitely a good-thing.
I did read the article. I'm just confused about what the GGP comment about thermoplastic printers was about for an article that isn't about thermoplastic printers.
I strongly disagree with the idea that computer programs should be designed so that no "help" is required. It only works in the simplest of applications.
In my opinion, a bigger issue is that most "help" dialogs are so badly written that they are pretty much useless. They are too often written by a developer who doesn't have a clear understanding of the typical use cases. When was the last time you found anything useful behind the F1 key?
I see the effects of this in freshmen and newbie developers who don't ever look at the manuals or documentation because they are used to it being non-existent or unhelpful. I hate to be saying RTFM, but I have to because reading the docs is a useful skill, unlike memorizing how a certain tool works.
In too many "retail" universities, there needs to be more fracturing of groupthink and expanding of thought and expression, not bikeshedding on edge-case, perceived "offense" to shout down a well-meaning and -intentioned joke.