There are 28,740 roms in the zip file (all individually zipped, too). There's a large number of roms that are just regional versions of the same game -- US, Japanese, etc...
They're not all functional in MAME yet, and a lot of the (relatively) newer games require separate data files for sprites/videos/sounds. But yes, this is still a huge collection of classic games.
You'll find that over half those ROMs are not arcade games at all, but rather slot machines and video poker... and almost none of them are emulated. This huge explosion in the romset happened a few years ago, and personally, I feel shows the project might be getting off-course. I'd rather have playable emulation of the 3D games that came out 15 years ago!
I don't really agree with calling an RC helicopter a drone. It sounds way more malicious that way. But then again, "Local man found to be bad at flying RC helicopter" isn't nearly as attention-grabbing.
Not to defend the costs or the state of the system, but the justification for the prices of medications in hospitals usually includes the time of the nurses, pharmacists, and techs that make the whole administration process happen safely.
Also, hospitals will bill whatever amount they can get reimbursed. Most insurance companies have contracts with hospitals where they only get a fraction of the billed amount. The rest is written off by the hospital. Uninsured patients can usually work out payment plans for lower amounts as well. That said, healthcare in the US is still pretty damn expensive.
Ah, yes. M: the language of indirection, post-conditional goto's, period indented block levels, and strict left-to-right order of operations (2+8*10=100). It doesn't require writing code as unreadable as this, but it sure doesn't discourage it.
MUMPS has a hierarchical data model. What the genius' at Intersystems call n-dimensional (arrays of arrays, or nested arrays). The reason MUMPS is still used is because the implementers still have hierarchy on the brain and believe that kind of work is best done in MUMPS.
I think they're wrong.
Either way, I can't think of a way to compile generic Java (or equiv) to generic MUMPS. The data models just don't line up.
The HL7 view of the data, which is just a tree graph, can be well supported in languages like Java. I wrote a code generator that compiled HL7 specs to Java code. It was awesome. Because it catches coding errors at compile time. Versus using a dynamic programming language. Or even worse, something like a declarative schema thingie, like all the ETL tools I've seen. (Think Hibernate style ORM for HL7.)
But having done that, I also think that's wrong.
We spent a lot of time reading HL7 (eg lab results), decomposing it for storage into a RDBMS, creating wicked joins to recreate the original hierarchical data, and then send it along (to a data feed or web page report).
I now think medical data should mostly be stored as documents and indexed using something like Lucene. Completely skipping SQL. Using an HL7 code generator & parser like the one I wrote, it's trivial to pull out the bits you care about. And when you have to mimic the single source of truth (eg what medications is the patient taking today?) you can tackle that with a map/reduce strategy.
That idea is a freebie for you, the world, or nobody. I'm not doing any healthcare work any more, so no longer have a dog in that fight.
I've found that it's easy to let your life become unfocused after leaving college. Up until graduation, you always had built-in goals on which to focus: pass that test, find scholarships/jobs, graduate, etc...
After graduating and finding a job, I was suddenly without any pressing objectives in my life. What's next? Retirement? That's way too far off (probably). I was working and living my life day-to-day, not unhappy, but sort of drifting without direction.
As cliché as it sounds, trying to answer the question "where do I want to be in 1, 5, 10 years" honestly helped. I thought about it for a while and came up with some vague ideas. Every once in a while, I do a mental progress check and that helps me see past the daily routine to something greater.
For the most of my life having those external "goais" and having to meet them was extremelly painful and frustrating for me.
You would not believe how happy the lack of "objectives" made me. I can just work, have my salary and not be bothered. It's like as you was under cripppling pain for all of your life and then suddently it is relieved forever.
Strange, I found exactly the opposite. I went to industry for a while because I was tired of goal-seeking and working hard all the damn time, but actually being there made me feel pressured as all hell.
What I really should have done was exploit my white male upper-middle class American privilege and travel for a while. After how much I burned myself out finishing undergrad the way I did, my parents were actually quite willing to fund it.
But no, I felt the need to get a job and try to "build an adult life". I had said, "I want my 9-5". I use the scare-quotes because I discovered that short of being married, with a house, with kids or dogs, there's basically no such thing, and any attempt to treat a real job as a 9-5 for funding your social life will inevitably collapse.
Now that I'm "back" in academia on the research-school side (which is, ironically, the stage I was already at by the end of undergrad, mostly), I'm actually a good deal happier. I was also pretty happy with my second industrial job because I got to live where I wanted and work from home, but I actually really like research and feel far more comfortable working hard in pursuit of an achievable goal (publish stuff, write thesis, accumulate credit-points, graduate) rather than just to maintain a hard-working image.
Big Life Lesson: you need to find a lifestyle and environment suited to you, and you also need to take responsibility for how you run your own life. I could easily get sucked back into pathological workaholism like many graduate students, even though I felt crushed by having to keep busy for eight straight hours in an industrial job. The right work environment is one that makes me feel want to put in effort, but I also have to cut myself off and go have fun at some point.
This is one of the biggest things for me post-graduation. My life has recently been so consumed by achieving one big goal. Once it's accomplished, I just kind of wonder..."what's next?" I mean, I have a big interview at a top tech company on Monday and I've got a standing offer at my current job where I can be comfortable, but it's such a big transition to not have some large, looming goal to work toward.
I had a similar experience and judging by other comments it seems pretty common. School is really good for this because it provides both goals and immediate deadlines. You want to graduate and to do that you have to do this assignment for Thursday and that lab for Monday. In engineering school it's particularly bad since you only have to decide on 5 or 10 electives throughout the degree, and there's usually common easy ones a lot of people know about and take. I still struggle with anything that doesn't have a drop-dead date - and it feels like less things in Real Life™ have one than in school. But recognizing the problem is a part of the battle.
[1] http://www.benheck.com/bill-paxton-pinball-making-of/