The plastic must also be flat and smooth for the reading to be accurate, and the object must be brought to the machine (which is not very portable) for analysis, which takes yet more time.

ECONOMIST: Recycling

The ambulance was transporting a girl who was reliant on a life-support machine, when a heavy object was thrown at it.

BBC: CCTV: Ambulance in emergency call attacked in Bristol

There is a mad race today to equip our credit cards and our cell phones to act as credit devices, allowing us to merely wave our credit or debit card or smart phone at a vending machine to have it deduct the price of the object from our bank account or add it to our credit card account.

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Former colleagues, assistants and journalists who ran afoul of the Armstrong machine, complained of being blackballed, ostracized and the object of lawsuits designed to shut them up.

CNN: January 17, 2013 -- Updated 2223 GMT (0623 HKT)

One Romanian was seen placing a grey object on the cashpoint, then taking a card from his wallet, putting it into the machine and operating the buttons.

BBC: NEWS | UK | England | Devon | Card fraudsters face deportation

Mr Stilman said he planned to create software that first identified an object, then determined potential things that could be done with it, before turning it into "a simple machine" that could be used to complete an action.

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Like Marcel Duchamp, who had just started to explore the heretical concept of turning a mass-produced, commercial object into a work of art "Readymades, " he called them Epstein believed that the machine he had bought with such boldness had its own validity as a sculpture.

WSJ: Masterpiece: Jacob Epstein's Prophesy