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In article <2586878A.26444@paris.ics.uci.edu> truesdel@ics.uci.edu (Scott Truesdell) writes:
>There has been a lot of fear expressed about loosing data to airport
>x-ray machines. I must have put hard disks, RAM disks, floppies, tape
>cartridges, everything under the Sun (er, I mean Mac) through the
>normal security x-ray conveyors dozens of times and never missed a
>byte. I did the "hand inspection" thing a couple of times and it was
>such a pain to set everything up and turn it on! I just x-ray
>everything now and simply don't experience problems. In fact, I've
>never heard ONE story, even second hand, about someone loosing data to
>airport x-rays. I think it is just a concept that concerned people mull
>around inside their heads and get worried about.


There is a lot of fear in general about floppy safety in many types of
security systems.

For example, I worked  in  Olin  Library on Cornell   Univerity Campus
while I was an undergrad.  We were in the process of installing a book
security system (you know  the type;  put in   a little mag strip  and
anyone walking  through the sensors  without desensitizing   the strip
sets  off an alarm).   We used to  play the trick of  putting  a fresh
strip in someone's bag; loads of fun.

Anyway, nearly everyone who had  a floppy (especially the faculty with
those monster  8" flopy drives for  their Teraks) would insist that it
be passed around  the sensor.  3M  produced the system and  provided a
pamphlet that shows that the system is not harmful to floppies, but no
one  believed it.   In fact, one   person almost got  punched out  for
refusing to pass the disk  case around (under  instructions  from  the
Circ. Dept. Mgr).

As an experiment  we  took 25 random sized   floppy disks through  the
system 50 times and then  tried them all and  none had experienced any
damage. 


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	     Jeffrey A. Hallett, PET Software Engineering
      GE Medical Systems, W641, PO Box 414, Milwaukee, WI  53201
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