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Comment by koonsolo | Hacker News Reader

My dad used to work as a technician for a company selling expensive hospital equipment. He says there are countless times when he or with another colleage would go in any hospital and roll out such a device. Nobody asks any questions.

At my university there were some actual thefts like this. Someone stole a beamer from a high ceiling in the middle of the day. And another time someone stole a heavy (=unliftable) new server.

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You probably mean a projector (beamer is a German word, not English).

Unrelated, but TIL why the LaTeX package for making presentations is called "beamer". I guess the author is German.

Yes he is. Both TikZ and Beamer are maintained by Till Tantau of University of Bremen.

Yes, you are correct (I speak Dutch, not German, but they are very close).

In Dutch we use a lot of English words: Computer, keyboard, ... . So when I hear an English sounding 'beamer', I think it's English :).

We basically use 'projector' for anything from slide to video projector. But it seems the digital age introduce a new word 'beamer' in our language (and German), that didn't happen in English.

Beamer is pronounced just like bimmer, which to most in the US (or at least my part of it) is just a nickname for BMW cars. That said, beamer as the word for projector has that German feel of being “obvious” to it, and is neat.

In Dutch it is pronounced beamer like "Beam[er] me up scotty".

yes

In the UK beam-er is how we pronounce our nickname for BMW cars.

May have worked. I have worked in hospitals in US and there's no way you could walk in without someone (officially, the nurse in charge) asking you who you are. I was actually expelled from hospitals even though I did have a nametag and an approval to work there.

Interesting. Are these bigger city hospitals? I've visited people in several hospitals and you just walk in. Unless you actually go up to a counter to ask for help, you're free to roam. Sure, some areas are off limits. You can't go into the ER patient area without someone opening the door, and I'm sure the surgery section is off limits. But you can walk to a patient's room, the maternity ward, the cafeteria, etc. In fact, our local hospital has a pretty decent cafeteria. It's nothing fancy, but it's relatively cheap (cash only) and decent food. There are definitely people that just go there for lunch.

I’m referring to stuff zone. Most hospitals would obviously have public access areas.

At the hospital where my wife gave birth, they gave wristbands with some sort of sensor in them to spouses, partners, etc. The only way (for civilians, I assume) in to the maternity ward would open for you if you had one. It wouldn't if you didn't.

There were some other precautions they told us about to prevent someone coming in and snatching a newborn but it's been too many years to remember them.

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