Not that every company or owner does this, but what if my goal was to increase profits so I could give my employees better health coverage. What if my goal was to increase profits to be able to have the ability to do gift matching plan for my employee's charitable contributions? What if my plan was to increase profits for the sake of being able to pay my employees what they're worth?
Now some might argue, those aren't profits, you're increasing revenue while increasing expenses. Agreed, but as a business owner, you sorta need to be able to increase your profit margins and prove your profit is real and sustainable before you roll out such programs. To not do so might be considered amoral in that I'm putting my company out of business and putting people out of work or lowering their standard of living to stay afloat.
On a similar theme, lets say I have a negative profit? Is it amoral to want to increase that profit so that I can stay in business, keep paying my taxes (not something I look forward to, but an inevitability of making a profit that benefits society), and keep people employed.
Oh my gosh. The repressed memories. It didn't even register when I read the parent's post, but now after reading yours I remember it all. Rodimus Prime... ugghh. And to the other poster talking about "You got the touch"... its all flowing back too quickly....
This is often my take on software patents. Its kinda like the old mutually assured destruction scenario with respect to nukes. The problems here though is that:
you've got a lot more companies with patents then you have countries with nukes (making it difficult to determine who's your friend and who's your enemy... Apple is my friend, the cute commericials tell me so...)
And I, like many others, are effectively the 3rd world countries in the game. Without "bombs", so we just hope that the big boys don't notice or are forgiving and don't take us out, which is a frustrating prospect potentially stiffling one's creativity
Yeah, but look where GTA started out. It was an above view, mediocre graphics, simple controls type game that tapped into something great... People's desire to do stuff they'd never even really thought about. That and the ability to interact with almost anything in their environment (something that made Syndicate great as well, I fired that up *again* the other day... BTW)
I could have probably coded the original GTA in about 2 months. But it was that idea that made it sell big, not spectactular graphics, massive 3d worlds, etc. This consequently allowed them to make some money and put out GTA 2 (not much different from the original) and I think another version before going all out with GTA3. Remember they didn't start with San Andreas.
I still think that good concepts/ideas can stand in the face of high end 3d, professionally rendered worlds, and all star soundtracks. But getting that killer idea is tough.
Well, I won't get into all the business of what went on, but I did try on numerous occassions to "save" my relationship.
I did do my best to "convey" to her my feelings, but in typical man->woman communications what I said was never what she heard.
And to my own defense, almost everybody who knows both me and her says that I did everything in my power to "fix" the situation and many think I did too much in terms of trying to save the relationship. That "everybody", includes her entire family, mutual friends, etc. And also, this isn't them talking to me directly, it them talking to somebody else, who in turn said, hey you know what her mom/brother/sister/dad said... So its not like somebody telling me one thing but really feeling something else.
I agree, most people don't put enough effort into keeping their relationships alive. Its way to easy these days to get a divorce, etc. All I'm saying, is that once the trust thing errodes, its a difficult road to ever try and rebuild it.
And yes, luckily in my case, no kids. If there were I'd have possibly approached it differently. If I were married, I would have approached it differently. But neither was the case here. In which case, I walked, which by the way, is no easier of a solution than trying to stick it out in my opinion, and I knew that when I made the decision.
So anyway, I have no regrets with my decisions and no care of your opinion of my choices. Just figured I'd point out that, I did try to save it and contrary to the fairy tale goggles that lots of folks wear (including myself prior to this experience), it can't always be talked/worked out. If you have somebody you feel you can do that with, great. And good luck, hopefully it stays that way, cause guess what, I felt I could talk out anything with her prior to our split-up.
Like a lot of instances where cops get killed though, were they actually following police procecdure? I mean, I follow the whole off guard premise, etc. but when you're arrested your usually (from what I recall): 1) still cuffed right up to being dragged into the booking room 2) brought into a locked garage or contained area before they open the doors to the crusier to let you out 3) (this one I can't quite remember) cops check their guns before bringing the suspect into the booking room and uncuffing them.
Those procedures are in place to minimize your chance of having a suspect jumping you, killing you, and/or getting away of which this kid seems to have done all three.
This is so true. My relationship to my long-time girlfriend turned fiancee, fell to pieces last year. She did lots of stuff to violate my trust in her, etc. so I got suspicious about other stuff, like her cheating on me, etc. Evenutually those thoughts consumed me, I started doing electronic monitoring, following her, checking cell phone records, etc and turned up empty (and I don't think I'm underestimating her tech savvy to avoid these things, she was never too sharp on just how much information one could gather from various places). At the same time though, I felt that I in turn had violated her trust by doing that. After a while we both conceeded that stuff was shot and called it off.
So case in point, the relationship was screwed regardless. If she was cheating it was done. In this case she wasn't but the trust eroded on both ends and it was done anyway. Had we ended it when it first popped up, we would have saved ourselves a bit of time, and several thousand dollars (i.e. wedding deposits that don't get returned).
I'm a java guy who's recently been required to start doing some C# in order to keep my job. I must say, that overall, C# is a decent language. Hands down, if I have to ever write real Windows-only apps again, I'll use it.
I found that as a language its much less restrictive than Java. Java's API's are pretty rigid, well defined, C# seems to be a bit more relaxed.
Now for me, thats the thing I like better about Java in that it forces you into a particular coding style/way of doing things. I've had the debate numerous times with Perl folk who like things a bit more relaxed. To each their own I guess.
Thing is that when I go to maintain somebody elses Java code, its pretty consistent with the way I develop code, just because Java kinda forces you into a particular style/way of doing things. Flip over to Perl, and I've had numerous occassions where I've had to learn the previous developer's style at times to follow their code with ease.
So my gut feel on the C# language is its a bit more relaxed (not as much as something like Perl), so I'm thinking I may run into this heartache if I ever have to maintain somebody elses C# code.
Just one other note on why I like that rigidity in code as opposed to flexibility. I find that the more flexible languages lend themselves to allow developers to cut corners and/or take easy routes to do things. Again from personal experience, as software scales up beyond its original scope, I find that its easier to move a Java program forward into bigger and better things than stuff I've seen in other languages. Mostly because the solid foundation was built and effectively enforced by the language from the start, whereas in other languages you sometimes have to solidify stuff up a litle bit more before moving on.
Anyway, this is all mystical voodoo software developement stuff thats hard to codify, but thats my experience. And as I was saying its personal preference. Doesn't meen you have to agree. Doesn't meen that I'm right. (or that I'm wrong)
I had a linear algebra teacher who did the same exact thing. I'd dread his exams before hand because you knew it was going to be stuff that you couldn't really study for. All you could do is understand the concepts best you could and go in and engage the gray matter.
At the same time it was the most fulfilling experience cause when you got done with that exam you felt like you effectively doubled your knowledge on the subject, saw new ways to apply the concepts, and/or just knew you had the stuff down cold.
Everybody hated him as a teacher, I never took another math class without him, unless it was a subject he just didn't teach.
That was the only professor I ever found who had a knack for writing exams like that, I wish more could even though they do stress you out a bit.
I dunno, something about this article got me thinking about all the near misses we supposedly have with asteroids and what not. I mean, how cool would it be to have a gigantic friggin star hurled at the solar system taking out planets galore and what not.
This was always another one of my favorites about SBC, I used to work for them. They are notorious for crying pauper, that profits are down, gotta tighten the belts and yet every year they make hundreds of millions of dollars profit.
Nothing pisses you off more when they say you can't have a bonus or salary increase because some obscure group in the telco didn't hit their numbers so they punish everyone and yet they still clear that much money. (no I'm not bitter, but I am blissful that I don't work their anymore)
That being said, SBC has enormous potential to be wildly more profitable than that. The problem is they are too big, dumb and bloated to do what needs to be done to literally triple their income in my opinion. Instead they just keep the old telco monopoly mentality, blow money like drunken sailors, and still clear out with a lot of cash.
I worked for SNET for a bit. That was always the running joke. They'd make some outlandish plan for some promo or some feature and it was always, released everywhere, except CT.
SBC is dumb, I'm so glad I don't work for them anymore.
Similar story over here on a Thinkpad T42. Suse 9.2 found and configured like 95% of my hardware correctly right out of the box (including power management and suspend type features).
Only thing that didn't really work is 3D acceleration of my ATI card, mostly due to ATI not having a version of their driver that worked with the latest version of X.Org. However, after the big news Monday, I have to now go and try to get that working.
Anyway, just wanted to second the notion that Suse 9.2 absolutely rocks.
I've got the originals for the VCR in widescreen format. Na-ne-na-ne-na-na.
That being said, I really wanted to get them on DVD, but sadly I won't get my wish this time around it seems. So I implore slashdot reader's and geeks everywhere to do the only thing you can do if you are truely passionate about this... Vote with your dollar. You don't need to purchase the new movies, you don't need to watch them, you don't need to see episode 3, etc. If enough people don't buy (which isn't going to happen) it would make a noticeable impact.
Personally, I do feel strongly enough to not buy the DVD trilogy, and will plead with family not to buy it for me. Extreme? Perhaps, but since the whole damn thing is pretty much f'd at this point I don't really care any more.
Maybe once the 3rd, 7th, 8th, and 9th movies come out he'll put out a 100-disc box set containing DVD's for every possible configuration/version of the series you'd ever want to see, and extra gazillion hours of extra footage of how hard it was to make this shot, or that shot, and a special 4 hour disc which just pays homage to how great Lucas is....
I (like many others) have been saying for years that its a matter of right tool for the right job. Also, I'm very competent in Java, C/C++ and Perl. I also, typically develop exclusively for UNIX and stick to the UNIX philosophy of building small, highly configurable/reusable programs wherever I can.
The truth is though, not all applications can be distilled down into simple pipe/filter utility-type solutions. In these cases I typically like objects. If you understand OO programming, and I have found few who can both claim they understand and actually do (its about a 1:5 ratio from my experience) you can build very complex/robust systems very quickly. The tradeoff, memory. In this case I usually use java. Yes, its restrictive, and you can't do everything you can in a different language like Smalltalk or C++, but for most things it is capable. Its also cross-platform, if you know what you're doing, and there are hundreds of "standardized" API's for doing lots of stuff. Not to mention, because of those API's, you can actually get cross-platform database connectivity, web applications, and in theory but not really yet, enterprise services.
If it comes to writing simple utilities, throw away code, anything that I feel falls into less than 100-200 lines of Perl code, I'll use Perl typically. My experience with Perl is that it doesn't scale, from a software management perspective, as nicely to large complex systems. Its usefulness though, is that you can do some pretty powerful stuff, without having to get bogged down in datatypes, complex exception handling, complex string manipulation and other language-isms that you have to deal with when you use a more strict language like C, C++, or Java. I also like the fact that anything I can write in C I can typically write just as easy in Perl, so for some of that systems programming type stuff that Java doesn't do so well, its nice to use Perl and not have to get into the guts of a C program
As for C/C++, I avoid them whenever I can:). Only when doing embedded programming do I get into C and C++ is typically on a supporting existing code type basis.
Again though, it comes down to right tool for the job. I've had this argument time and time again with PHP, Perl, and Python programmers and it always seems to come down to size/scope of the problems they are trying to solve. Most people who love these tools have written what I view as smaller applications. They have never had to write an e-commerce system that ties together multiple enterprise datasources, call into SOAP/CORBA etc services on another box, etc. Or the other thing I experience is that if they have, they end up reinventing some API/technology/feature that was already present in Java or that had they implemented their solution in Java would have made their life much easier.
Anyway, this has been my experience, and this is the toolset I use to solve the problems that arise in my world. Everybody is different, use the right tool.
Lets not forget about the changes to the end of Jedi. Personally, I liked the original tribal song, not the latin symphony that apparently replaced it.
All, in all the new scenes were a waste of time. Its sad that Lucas is such an arrogant that he refuses to put the originals out on DVD. I was actually hoping he'd do something similar that my T2 DVD does, watch the original, or watch the expanded version...
Oh well, I'm on the fence on whether I'll get these or not. I'm actually pretty sick of the whole Star Wars brand at this point which is sad, cause I was one of the die-hards originally. (guess I wasn't die-hard enough)
I knew somebody had to bring this up. Somebody should mod the parent up.
This was my exact thoughts. Its one track thinking, "well now they can't take your credit cards and or money because there's no money to take because of the chip". At that point (chip == money/credit cards). Have the chip, or the value stored on the chip, you effectively have the money. And if I were a robber, I'm going to take the smash (or slice in this case) and grab approach and worry about deciphering/using the chip later.
An to those who say, well the chip might have smarts to not work in a dead hand and/or you can report it as stolen, I'll still lose my hand, because many criminals are dumb and wouldn't understand that concept until after my hand is missing.
Build a system that recognizes winning players, since this is after all what the casino's are concerned with. If you see a table where some dude keeps hitting big and winning, send up a flag and shut the table down.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me play devil's advocate. Profits are amoral?
Not that every company or owner does this, but what if my goal was to increase profits so I could give my employees better health coverage. What if my goal was to increase profits to be able to have the ability to do gift matching plan for my employee's charitable contributions? What if my plan was to increase profits for the sake of being able to pay my employees what they're worth?
Now some might argue, those aren't profits, you're increasing revenue while increasing expenses. Agreed, but as a business owner, you sorta need to be able to increase your profit margins and prove your profit is real and sustainable before you roll out such programs. To not do so might be considered amoral in that I'm putting my company out of business and putting people out of work or lowering their standard of living to stay afloat.
On a similar theme, lets say I have a negative profit? Is it amoral to want to increase that profit so that I can stay in business, keep paying my taxes (not something I look forward to, but an inevitability of making a profit that benefits society), and keep people employed.
Nah, that was Leisure Suit Larry.
Oh my gosh. The repressed memories. It didn't even register when I read the parent's post, but now after reading yours I remember it all. Rodimus Prime... ugghh. And to the other poster talking about "You got the touch"... its all flowing back too quickly....
*curls up in fetal postion*
And last I checked, none of the original trilogy were released on DVD. So techinically, he is correct.
Jedi kill all the time, but sometimes they stab....
No I think he meant homes (pronouciation HO MEEZ) as in:
"Me and all my ho-mes are going to White Castle."
Yeah, but look where GTA started out. It was an above view, mediocre graphics, simple controls type game that tapped into something great... People's desire to do stuff they'd never even really thought about. That and the ability to interact with almost anything in their environment (something that made Syndicate great as well, I fired that up *again* the other day... BTW)
I could have probably coded the original GTA in about 2 months. But it was that idea that made it sell big, not spectactular graphics, massive 3d worlds, etc. This consequently allowed them to make some money and put out GTA 2 (not much different from the original) and I think another version before going all out with GTA3. Remember they didn't start with San Andreas.
I still think that good concepts/ideas can stand in the face of high end 3d, professionally rendered worlds, and all star soundtracks. But getting that killer idea is tough.
Well, I won't get into all the business of what went on, but I did try on numerous occassions to "save" my relationship.
I did do my best to "convey" to her my feelings, but in typical man->woman communications what I said was never what she heard.
And to my own defense, almost everybody who knows both me and her says that I did everything in my power to "fix" the situation and many think I did too much in terms of trying to save the relationship. That "everybody", includes her entire family, mutual friends, etc. And also, this isn't them talking to me directly, it them talking to somebody else, who in turn said, hey you know what her mom/brother/sister/dad said... So its not like somebody telling me one thing but really feeling something else.
I agree, most people don't put enough effort into keeping their relationships alive. Its way to easy these days to get a divorce, etc. All I'm saying, is that once the trust thing errodes, its a difficult road to ever try and rebuild it.
And yes, luckily in my case, no kids. If there were I'd have possibly approached it differently. If I were married, I would have approached it differently. But neither was the case here. In which case, I walked, which by the way, is no easier of a solution than trying to stick it out in my opinion, and I knew that when I made the decision.
So anyway, I have no regrets with my decisions and no care of your opinion of my choices. Just figured I'd point out that, I did try to save it and contrary to the fairy tale goggles that lots of folks wear (including myself prior to this experience), it can't always be talked/worked out. If you have somebody you feel you can do that with, great. And good luck, hopefully it stays that way, cause guess what, I felt I could talk out anything with her prior to our split-up.
Like a lot of instances where cops get killed though, were they actually following police procecdure? I mean, I follow the whole off guard premise, etc. but when you're arrested your usually (from what I recall):
1) still cuffed right up to being dragged into the booking room
2) brought into a locked garage or contained area before they open the doors to the crusier to let you out
3) (this one I can't quite remember) cops check their guns before bringing the suspect into the booking room and uncuffing them.
Those procedures are in place to minimize your chance of having a suspect jumping you, killing you, and/or getting away of which this kid seems to have done all three.
This is so true. My relationship to my long-time girlfriend turned fiancee, fell to pieces last year. She did lots of stuff to violate my trust in her, etc. so I got suspicious about other stuff, like her cheating on me, etc. Evenutually those thoughts consumed me, I started doing electronic monitoring, following her, checking cell phone records, etc and turned up empty (and I don't think I'm underestimating her tech savvy to avoid these things, she was never too sharp on just how much information one could gather from various places). At the same time though, I felt that I in turn had violated her trust by doing that. After a while we both conceeded that stuff was shot and called it off.
So case in point, the relationship was screwed regardless. If she was cheating it was done. In this case she wasn't but the trust eroded on both ends and it was done anyway. Had we ended it when it first popped up, we would have saved ourselves a bit of time, and several thousand dollars (i.e. wedding deposits that don't get returned).
I'm a java guy who's recently been required to start doing some C# in order to keep my job. I must say, that overall, C# is a decent language. Hands down, if I have to ever write real Windows-only apps again, I'll use it.
I found that as a language its much less restrictive than Java. Java's API's are pretty rigid, well defined, C# seems to be a bit more relaxed.
Now for me, thats the thing I like better about Java in that it forces you into a particular coding style/way of doing things. I've had the debate numerous times with Perl folk who like things a bit more relaxed. To each their own I guess.
Thing is that when I go to maintain somebody elses Java code, its pretty consistent with the way I develop code, just because Java kinda forces you into a particular style/way of doing things. Flip over to Perl, and I've had numerous occassions where I've had to learn the previous developer's style at times to follow their code with ease.
So my gut feel on the C# language is its a bit more relaxed (not as much as something like Perl), so I'm thinking I may run into this heartache if I ever have to maintain somebody elses C# code.
Just one other note on why I like that rigidity in code as opposed to flexibility. I find that the more flexible languages lend themselves to allow developers to cut corners and/or take easy routes to do things. Again from personal experience, as software scales up beyond its original scope, I find that its easier to move a Java program forward into bigger and better things than stuff I've seen in other languages. Mostly because the solid foundation was built and effectively enforced by the language from the start, whereas in other languages you sometimes have to solidify stuff up a litle bit more before moving on.
Anyway, this is all mystical voodoo software developement stuff thats hard to codify, but thats my experience. And as I was saying its personal preference. Doesn't meen you have to agree. Doesn't meen that I'm right. (or that I'm wrong)
My buck and a quarter...
I had a linear algebra teacher who did the same exact thing. I'd dread his exams before hand because you knew it was going to be stuff that you couldn't really study for. All you could do is understand the concepts best you could and go in and engage the gray matter.
At the same time it was the most fulfilling experience cause when you got done with that exam you felt like you effectively doubled your knowledge on the subject, saw new ways to apply the concepts, and/or just knew you had the stuff down cold.
Everybody hated him as a teacher, I never took another math class without him, unless it was a subject he just didn't teach.
That was the only professor I ever found who had a knack for writing exams like that, I wish more could even though they do stress you out a bit.
I dunno, something about this article got me thinking about all the near misses we supposedly have with asteroids and what not. I mean, how cool would it be to have a gigantic friggin star hurled at the solar system taking out planets galore and what not.
Granted we'd all be dead, but what a way to go...
This was always another one of my favorites about SBC, I used to work for them. They are notorious for crying pauper, that profits are down, gotta tighten the belts and yet every year they make hundreds of millions of dollars profit.
Nothing pisses you off more when they say you can't have a bonus or salary increase because some obscure group in the telco didn't hit their numbers so they punish everyone and yet they still clear that much money. (no I'm not bitter, but I am blissful that I don't work their anymore)
That being said, SBC has enormous potential to be wildly more profitable than that. The problem is they are too big, dumb and bloated to do what needs to be done to literally triple their income in my opinion. Instead they just keep the old telco monopoly mentality, blow money like drunken sailors, and still clear out with a lot of cash.
I worked for SNET for a bit. That was always the running joke. They'd make some outlandish plan for some promo or some feature and it was always, released everywhere, except CT.
SBC is dumb, I'm so glad I don't work for them anymore.
Similar story over here on a Thinkpad T42. Suse 9.2 found and configured like 95% of my hardware correctly right out of the box (including power management and suspend type features).
Only thing that didn't really work is 3D acceleration of my ATI card, mostly due to ATI not having a version of their driver that worked with the latest version of X.Org. However, after the big news Monday, I have to now go and try to get that working.
Anyway, just wanted to second the notion that Suse 9.2 absolutely rocks.
I've got the originals for the VCR in widescreen format. Na-ne-na-ne-na-na.
That being said, I really wanted to get them on DVD, but sadly I won't get my wish this time around it seems. So I implore slashdot reader's and geeks everywhere to do the only thing you can do if you are truely passionate about this... Vote with your dollar. You don't need to purchase the new movies, you don't need to watch them, you don't need to see episode 3, etc. If enough people don't buy (which isn't going to happen) it would make a noticeable impact.
Personally, I do feel strongly enough to not buy the DVD trilogy, and will plead with family not to buy it for me. Extreme? Perhaps, but since the whole damn thing is pretty much f'd at this point I don't really care any more.
Maybe once the 3rd, 7th, 8th, and 9th movies come out he'll put out a 100-disc box set containing DVD's for every possible configuration/version of the series you'd ever want to see, and extra gazillion hours of extra footage of how hard it was to make this shot, or that shot, and a special 4 hour disc which just pays homage to how great Lucas is....
The truth is though, not all applications can be distilled down into simple pipe/filter utility-type solutions. In these cases I typically like objects. If you understand OO programming, and I have found few who can both claim they understand and actually do (its about a 1:5 ratio from my experience) you can build very complex/robust systems very quickly. The tradeoff, memory. In this case I usually use java. Yes, its restrictive, and you can't do everything you can in a different language like Smalltalk or C++, but for most things it is capable. Its also cross-platform, if you know what you're doing, and there are hundreds of "standardized" API's for doing lots of stuff. Not to mention, because of those API's, you can actually get cross-platform database connectivity, web applications, and in theory but not really yet, enterprise services.
If it comes to writing simple utilities, throw away code, anything that I feel falls into less than 100-200 lines of Perl code, I'll use Perl typically. My experience with Perl is that it doesn't scale, from a software management perspective, as nicely to large complex systems. Its usefulness though, is that you can do some pretty powerful stuff, without having to get bogged down in datatypes, complex exception handling, complex string manipulation and other language-isms that you have to deal with when you use a more strict language like C, C++, or Java. I also like the fact that anything I can write in C I can typically write just as easy in Perl, so for some of that systems programming type stuff that Java doesn't do so well, its nice to use Perl and not have to get into the guts of a C program
As for C/C++, I avoid them whenever I can :). Only when doing embedded programming do I get into C and C++ is typically on a supporting existing code type basis.
Again though, it comes down to right tool for the job. I've had this argument time and time again with PHP, Perl, and Python programmers and it always seems to come down to size/scope of the problems they are trying to solve. Most people who love these tools have written what I view as smaller applications. They have never had to write an e-commerce system that ties together multiple enterprise datasources, call into SOAP/CORBA etc services on another box, etc. Or the other thing I experience is that if they have, they end up reinventing some API/technology/feature that was already present in Java or that had they implemented their solution in Java would have made their life much easier.
Anyway, this has been my experience, and this is the toolset I use to solve the problems that arise in my world. Everybody is different, use the right tool.
who would win in a wrestling match between lemmy and god?
lemmy?
BZZT.
god?
Wrong. Trick question Lemme is GOD!!!!
love that movie...
Lets not forget about the changes to the end of Jedi. Personally, I liked the original tribal song, not the latin symphony that apparently replaced it.
All, in all the new scenes were a waste of time. Its sad that Lucas is such an arrogant that he refuses to put the originals out on DVD. I was actually hoping he'd do something similar that my T2 DVD does, watch the original, or watch the expanded version...
Oh well, I'm on the fence on whether I'll get these or not. I'm actually pretty sick of the whole Star Wars brand at this point which is sad, cause I was one of the die-hards originally. (guess I wasn't die-hard enough)
Either that or mustard gas... Oh shit, I've just gone from green to red.
This was my exact thoughts. Its one track thinking, "well now they can't take your credit cards and or money because there's no money to take because of the chip". At that point (chip == money/credit cards). Have the chip, or the value stored on the chip, you effectively have the money. And if I were a robber, I'm going to take the smash (or slice in this case) and grab approach and worry about deciphering/using the chip later.
An to those who say, well the chip might have smarts to not work in a dead hand and/or you can report it as stolen, I'll still lose my hand, because many criminals are dumb and wouldn't understand that concept until after my hand is missing.
well fine, somebody give me directions to the library and where I can get said candlestick and I'll take care of it...
Build a system that recognizes winning players, since this is after all what the casino's are concerned with. If you see a table where some dude keeps hitting big and winning, send up a flag and shut the table down.