I did a six week rotation at Barnes-Jewish (where Wash U does their RadOnc treatments) for my Radiation Therapy degree last December / January and witnessed one of these being done on an Edge machine. It's the most refined version of Varian's linear accelerators that they commonly use for Radiosurgery. It's on-board CT is really high resolution and nice gating capabilities (ability to turn it on only when the target area is in the right position) to allow for pretty precise delivery. I believe an additional EKG component was added to the CT based gating to ensure the radiation delivery was timed with the heart beat. Alternately, they have a ViewRay in the RadOnc department which has real-time MRI capabilities which should be able to do similar guidance.

It depended on the location. Some of them were quite liquid. Some were not. I understand the Pittsburgh location was in the red to the tune of $40k per month prior to its closure. If you already have a lot of debt from expansion costs, that sort of negative cash flow is killer. The St. Louis shop where I was a member was 18 months old and just hitting the black. When you have a big corporate debt, all the locations producing a small profit isn't enough :(

I recently purchased a 2012 GLI with a SatNav package. I wasn't planning on paying the upgrade fee for the SatNav, but it was implemented so well that I decided it was worth it. While it does have a touch screen for the "fiddly bits", i.e. setting up navigation, searching your mp3 player, navigating your phonebook, etc, the screen is mostly used to display information. The climate controls are all nicely laid out buttons that you don't need to use the screen for, but when you make changes to the climate settings additional information is shown on the screen for a few seconds that confirms your changes. While the radio station presets are on the screen (in an easily usable format), the back and forward buttons for tuning (which are also context sensitive for CD and mp3 play) are discrete buttons just above the screen and replicated on the steering wheel. Likewise the volume control is a discrete knob that also doubles as the map zoom control while in nav mode. As an added bonus, information is replicated in a smaller panel inside the driver's gauge area for even less time spent with eyes off the road. In practice I've found that I'm much less likely to miss my turn due to that second info panel, as it is completely under the driver's direct control. All in all, it is one of the best modern car info system that I have seen. The stereo is co-branded with Fender, and per a 2 minute Google search, developed with Panasonic. They did a nice job.

Nope, still condescension. Unless someone has elected you high emperor of hipstertopia. Then its "noblesse oblige" :)

The picture has already been removed from the "offending" blog post on Boing Boing. I don't know the exact timeline, but I would be willing to bet it was pulled within an hour of the story going live on Slashdot. My guess is asking politely would have had a similar effect, as some folks *do* respect the wishes of content creators without requiring invocation the litigation boogeyman.

GPS is only a tool for navigation. It will *probably* help you find a route, but ultimately it is your responsibility as a driver to use what it tells you safety and effectively. If your SatNav tells you to go down a remote mountain logging road during a snowstorm, you should probably not do that. Likewise, the smart traveler should probably decide on his/her route prior to getting in the car so that you don't have any nasty surprises. Even the crappiest SatNav or phone navigation program puts a lot of information at your fingertips, so by all means use them. Just use them with a grain of salt.

Now for my rant. I have a Tom Tom OneXL, and while I initially liked it, the more I use it the more I find in inadequate. Both the unit itself and the maps. While my map update is admittedly more than a year old, it frequently misses "new" roads that have been in place for 5-10 years. This is annoying but understandable. I was sold a product that was incomplete. Nothing new from technology companies :)

But what really bugs me is the TomTom One's poor GUI (map navigation is a nightmare and you can't set the zoom level while in 2-D mode) and terrible route time estimation. I travel a lot (both work and to visit far flung families and friends) and so spend a lot of time in the car. There have been several times when I have let my TomTom talk me into questionable routing that cost me many miles and not a few hours. That is because it has really, really bad route estimation settings that you can't change in the head unit. It normally doubles estimate vs. the actual time for 2 lane/rural travel and will therefore drive you WAY out of you way to use the interstate rather than just drive a more direct route. I don't know how many times more that this will happen before I can no longer restrain the urge to disassemble it into the finest pieces with a hammer and mail it back to TomTom in a shoebox. But I already have the note planned: "Dear TomTom. This is not a warranty issue ..."

Latin is such an awesome language!