The embarrassing shortcomings in textbooks is that they're usually sloppily written by a professor at the school that's pushing the book, usually severely edited by the publisher to be somewhat readable, and generally are just that professor's own experiences with the subject vomitted onto paper. I've learned far more by reading O'Reilly and original source texts like Bjorne Stroustrup's C++ books than from reading text books.
Re:If you've ever wondered why your PHB...
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
Better yet, get the mp3's to wifi enabled comp, transmit the digital stream of music as it's being played to a receiver on another computer. (Just write a software app to grab the 1's and 0's from the media app as they flow through your audio card) Voila, free mp3 copies of your music. As I'm learning in both of my classes right now, NO software is immune from prying eyes unless there's DRM'd hardware of course, which hasn't been invented (or at least implemented, yet) so no matter what scheme they come up with, it's bound to fail. At least in the short term.
I can understand you're reasoning, but remember that software is an intangible product so to speak. Anotherwords, all it costs to produce further software or improve upon existing software is time and effort, both of which do not REQUIRE payment to do. So although I can see Microsoft, CA, and the BSA wanting regulation so that they don't have to expend more money to produce closed source software, I think the proverbial cat is outta the bag and cannot be stuffed back in. Just look at the rest of the world. Us USians seem to be the only country completely stuck on MS Windows as a "best practice" business concept right now.
I think this is just a lot of blowing smoke up the gov's ass and won't amount to much in the end. (Or at its worst the US will impose software regulation and stagnate software development in this country while the rest of the world innovates and competes more successfully for "software dollars")
My wife has recently been quite frustrated with Microsoft Word because the lawyer she works for uses an antiquated version of WordPerfect, and the two apps don't work well together at all. Since she'll soon be an attorney, she was looking into what types of document producing software she should purchase in the future when she buys a new laptop. She mentioned to me that she had read on a lawyer related website or magazine or something that many lawyers actually prefer WordPerfect to MS Word.
This is interesting, because if you think about it, what does a small law firm need most? A good word processing application (no "Office suite") and security from prying eyes for that client/attorney priveledge. Hmmm... Linux can be much more secure than Windows, and with the addition of a lawyer's favorite document processing application, WordPerfect, we may just see a new niche for Linux...
I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I can't yet use OpenOffice's spreadsheet app, Calc, all that much. For one, it doesn't hold more than 32k rows, and for two it doesn't have a very good "PivotTable/PivotChart" tool right now. I use Excel a lot to get aggregated data from millions of rows down to a more manageable 10's of thousands. From there I can begin analyzing seasonality trends, control charts, histograms of that data, etc. No database I know of has this kind of stuff built right in so that it's easy to manipulate like it is in Excel.
If OpenOffice could make their spreadsheet app as stellar in it's power and formattability (I know, not a real word) as its Writer app, then I'd ditch MS Office in an instant.
I've been preaching this for a while now on/. and I know I should be doing it on OpenOffice.org too, but I don't have that kind of time. Beef up that DataPilot, damnit!!!
That is the same retarded logic used in banning non-lethal, although permanent injury causing weapons like laser dazzler's and other high-tech weaponry. If you're sending your sons and daughters into combat, which would you rather have: a son or daughter back home safe, albeit blind or potentially crippled for life, or one in a body bag?
And now you people complain about UAV's doing a soldier's dirty work for them? Why the fixation on sending real, live people into combat when the future wars can be waged over material possessions like the number of drones your country has?
The Palestinians send in bombs using innocent 11 and 14 yr olds - that's much worse than sending in a mechanical device to take out known terrorists that send those kids to their death in the first place.
Hey everyone, go read the actual City & Guilds article linked to from the ZDNet article.
Do you even have to do ANY research to publish articles for your given media outlet? ZDNet changed some numbers to say things like "1 in 4" and "1 in 7" instead of the actual percentages given by City & Guilds, and that's it. Now I understand that presenting statistics to the general public usually requires "dumbing it down" to the lowest common denomenator, but that's not what I'm on my high horse about. Why is it that these little 500 word articles always get shipped around to every media outlet a dozen times? Isn't it obvious that we're simply spoon fed the "information for the day" over and over again without any real substance, conflicting opinions, or facts presented for our own review?
Anyone know of a Creative Commons copyrighted news website where the information is presented transparently and openly versus sold to anyone who wants the latest "scoop?"
So what? We could add and subtract things like numbers of crickets in the backyard and number of cars on blocks all day, but ultimately what you see is that YES, Americans ARE better off now than ever before! In the 60's: get breast cancer, you're almost certainly gonna die from it. Now? Get breast cancer and it can probably be cured (or at least the longevity of your life can be extended substantially in comparison to the 60's). Not to mention the fact that American's disposable income is higher, life expectancy longer, and spending power higher than in our entire history as a nation.
Granted, who's to say that our quality of life is better or worse: that's a highly subjective measure. And yes, I worry about tech jobs moving overseas to make the rich even richer, but c'mon, do you "have enough" of everything in your life right now? No? Than you're no different than the rest of us who constantly struggle with wanting more than we have right now. It's a universal trait, and the rich have it just as much as you or I do. And I'm a middle-class American, which makes me a lot richer than probably 95% of the rest of the world.
From looking at the picture of the Linea LX PDA up close, it is apparent to me that Linux will not be taken seriously in the PDA or desktop markets until a graphical design artist actually takes the time to do some user polling and UAT to determine which graphical icons look and work the best for the end-user. I mean seriously, they have a 'Contacts' icon with an @ symbol, and an 'Email' icon with a paper envelope and stamp symbol. Not only that, the 'Text Editor' and 'Sketch' icons appear to have been switched at birth. For the average Joe, this just isn't intuitive and simply leads to more cursing and hitting the 'back button' than is reasonably acceptable.
If you had actually RTFA, you would have seen that these 10! ballots were 10 out of 60 ballots they had looked at, out of the 1% of precincts that they actually audited as a matter of their normal, pre-existing processes to verify votes. Now 1% of 468,000 is 4,680 ballots to count, which amounts to a better than 2% error rate when evaluating those 4,680 ballots. That means that the problem would have to occur potentially only 1% of the time for them to miss it, and that's pretty unlikely when they're reviewing almost 5,000 ballots.
So michael, your statistically unsound, competely biased "journalism" is noted, and I'm seriously considering blocking any future stories posted by you. Your yellow journalism is really pathetic and transparent. Just stop. You can hate Seth Finkelstein all you want, but I think he's right: you suck.
Unfortunately people having the odd assault rifle lying around does not a successful armed revolution make - not in this day and age anyway.
Perhaps not, but simply hearing the sound of a shotgun being cocked or an assualt rifle's bolt action and then the impending doom of 12-guage shells exploding or multiple bullets whizzing by an intruder's ears are enough reason for me to want one in my home. I'm no Arnold Schwarzenager (sp?) that could stop an intruder with my bare hands from harming myself or my wife. Not to mention the fact that it's my own damn responsibility if someone like my own child (I don't have any yet, btw) harms themselves with such powerful tools of crime deterrence that I have chosen to keep in my posession.
Do you honestly think we have nukes in the U.S. arsenal for research and simply 'cause they're "cool"? NO! We have them for deterrence against idiots like Saddam and friends who wish to do us harm. Saddam should be pretty damn glad we didn't haul off and nuke him right after 9-11. He sure fit the profile of a maniacal dictator wishing to do thousands of innocents harm (and especially Americans), 'cause he already proved he could, and would in his own country with his own citizens!
All you greenpeacers and ultra-liberal "we don't need guns anymore" types should read up on your history and national statistics once in a while. We have a lot more traffic accident, alcohol/drug related deaths each year than accidental, or even intentional, gun woundings and deaths combined. Perhaps we should outlaw alcohol and/or the automobile? What do you think?
isixsigma.com - May or may not help you in your quest for statistics knowledge, but it's a business resource for those of us budding stats dude's working on getting managers to accept statistical variability in their processes. What my coworkers and I have been lacking is a good "sample size calculator" that works in reverse - i.e. you plug in what percent error you want and the sample size, tell the calculator what you want the confidence interval to be, and out pops the needed population size to achieve such results.
I think this study has some signifigance, and I'll illustrate to you all why:
I attended a university with a lot of foreign students in the mid-90's. I play soccer. I played soccer at this university on the intramural teams. My team was comprised primarily of Americans. Because of the large population of foreign nationals at our school, there were teams made up almost entirely of the following nationalities: south african, mideastern/middle african, korean, japanese/chinese, mexican, south american, etc. I have played soccer since I was 5, and I can tell you for certain that each of these teams had a distinct playing style. The south africans were all about speed, but weren't as concerned about ball control - pass and run, the mideasterners had AWESOME ball control and passed ok, but didn't have a lot of speed (or didn't concentrate on that aspect - some of them were fast when they wanted to be), my team was of course a little more individualistic and generic in our play style, mexicans were very physical (not hacks, but in your face physical), and the differences continued.
Despite how much you think we're all exactly the same, our cultures and societies we grow up in do influence our lives a great deal, and do tend to show up in sports. While CS isn't the most grueling sport to play, it is none-the-less a team "sport" activity, and I think the differences in nationality do affect a team's playing style, strengths, and weaknesses. Just watch the World Cup sometime - you'll see what I'm talking about pretty quickly.
I wholeheartedly agree. Slashdot is about as far from 'journalism' as you can get. Yellow journalism, yes, but real journalism? No.
Between Taco's daily dup's and michael's incescant ranting like a child without his candy bar, this site is important only because of the readership. Our "editors" cannot spellcheck, grammar check, or even do a minor amount of research to save their lives it seems.
Yes, I am ranting about an offtopic subject right now, but it's my freedom to do so. And yes, I will get modded 'offtopic' pretty quickly, but judging from the amount of comments on this thread, it needs to be said again and again so that newcomers have the chance to see Slashdot for what it is and is not.
We should all just be exceedingly thankful that we no longer have to endure Katz articles anymore!;)
Have you even played a Civ game in your life!?! Where is "The Republic", "Anarchy", "Despotism", or any other modded political structures in your list?!
You may not be a lawyer, but I think you hit the nail on the head with that proverbial hammer.
Despite popular/. group think opinion, the courts DO consider as many angles as possible when reaching decisions, and let's face it, SCO winning would have nationwide, massive, forever-altering rammifications to the business world, government, and consumer. The courts just aren't going to cave on this one.
Well, it's really called GnuPG, but you're right, it is the standard that basically states: "the sender's signing key validates against the original key you trusted by signing it with your own key." I've started signing all of my emails in Thunderbird using the help of the Enigmail plugin and encrypting any files I attach in my emails with the help of WinPT. I know this post looks like a giant plug for these "products," but since they're all free, open source software which I have no affiliation with, it's simply me trying to get the word out that there IS a manner in which to get your emails to your friends in a trusted, reliable manner, and hopefully convert a few of your friends and family to using the same method in the future. We wouldn't have to worry about address spoofing if email gpg signing was a defacto standard of every email client! Plus it would be a lot safer and difficult to circumvent (ultimately) than Yet Another Format for email.
Well, techinically, you DO have to have authorization to do "public performances", but think of it in terms of the super-bowl, time-shifted:
Let's say you and a bunch of friends are all super busy on Super-Bowl Sunday and want to wait a few hours to watch the game later the next day (let's say you all have Mon. off). So you program your TIVO or VCR to record the game, and then invite your friends over to watch the game. Technically, you're breaking the law. But seriously, the NFL is NEVER going to try and sue you for doing so. It wouldn't be worth their time, or money to do so. Not to mention the PR nightmare they would endure for suing a few friends for watching their game AFTER it was already over. Like everyone else has been saying, if it's a semi-organized, (and especially if it's a University 'sponsored' or recognized event using University resources) just write the dang companies and tell them your plan and all is well. They won't make you sign thirty-two pages of legal documents, they'll just be happy to have the customer feeback that their games are getting played at LAN parties.
My wife tried that with the kitchen counter one time with our first cat. [she loves to jump up on the counter (the cat, not my wife) and scout around for bits of tomato-based product] It didn't work too well. We came home that day to find our cat with tape wrapped all the way around her head - it's a good thing she didn't manage to tape her own mouth and nose shut! She was pretty pissed at my wife for putting the tape on the counter...
That sounds nice and all, but what if that little punk at the register at your local supermarket couldn't give a crap about you, and decides to "accidentally" lose that receipt when it comes time to balance at the end of the night? All of the sudden, he has you debit card number, your name, and knows EXACTLY which bank to go to to drain your account. Happened to me once, although I never have found out who stole my number or how it got stolen. Wiped out my bank account and caused a year's worth of agony and annoyances to be sure though!
A close friend of mine spent a year in New Mexico at NMMI. He more or less hated it.
It doesn't surprise me that such a "well though out" plan to curb drunk driving like this one was suggested in New Mexico. My friend always complained about all of the freaks who were WAAAYYY too into Area51, all the people that believed in Aliens, the fact that there actually was an "alien museum," etc. If I were you, take my friend's advice and stay AWAY from New Mexico! LOL!
Slashdot Mirror
If we allow people to carry umbrella's, then the lightning has already won.
Vote now! Outlaw umbrella's!
...because UT2005 is gonna need all 50GB on those disks!
The embarrassing shortcomings in textbooks is that they're usually sloppily written by a professor at the school that's pushing the book, usually severely edited by the publisher to be somewhat readable, and generally are just that professor's own experiences with the subject vomitted onto paper. I've learned far more by reading O'Reilly and original source texts like Bjorne Stroustrup's C++ books than from reading text books.
Pointy Haired Boss - of Dilbert cartoon fame.
Better yet, get the mp3's to wifi enabled comp, transmit the digital stream of music as it's being played to a receiver on another computer. (Just write a software app to grab the 1's and 0's from the media app as they flow through your audio card) Voila, free mp3 copies of your music. As I'm learning in both of my classes right now, NO software is immune from prying eyes unless there's DRM'd hardware of course, which hasn't been invented (or at least implemented, yet) so no matter what scheme they come up with, it's bound to fail. At least in the short term.
I can understand you're reasoning, but remember that software is an intangible product so to speak. Anotherwords, all it costs to produce further software or improve upon existing software is time and effort, both of which do not REQUIRE payment to do. So although I can see Microsoft, CA, and the BSA wanting regulation so that they don't have to expend more money to produce closed source software, I think the proverbial cat is outta the bag and cannot be stuffed back in. Just look at the rest of the world. Us USians seem to be the only country completely stuck on MS Windows as a "best practice" business concept right now.
I think this is just a lot of blowing smoke up the gov's ass and won't amount to much in the end. (Or at its worst the US will impose software regulation and stagnate software development in this country while the rest of the world innovates and competes more successfully for "software dollars")
My wife has recently been quite frustrated with Microsoft Word because the lawyer she works for uses an antiquated version of WordPerfect, and the two apps don't work well together at all. Since she'll soon be an attorney, she was looking into what types of document producing software she should purchase in the future when she buys a new laptop. She mentioned to me that she had read on a lawyer related website or magazine or something that many lawyers actually prefer WordPerfect to MS Word.
This is interesting, because if you think about it, what does a small law firm need most? A good word processing application (no "Office suite") and security from prying eyes for that client/attorney priveledge. Hmmm... Linux can be much more secure than Windows, and with the addition of a lawyer's favorite document processing application, WordPerfect, we may just see a new niche for Linux...
I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I can't yet use OpenOffice's spreadsheet app, Calc, all that much. For one, it doesn't hold more than 32k rows, and for two it doesn't have a very good "PivotTable/PivotChart" tool right now. I use Excel a lot to get aggregated data from millions of rows down to a more manageable 10's of thousands. From there I can begin analyzing seasonality trends, control charts, histograms of that data, etc. No database I know of has this kind of stuff built right in so that it's easy to manipulate like it is in Excel.
/. and I know I should be doing it on OpenOffice.org too, but I don't have that kind of time. Beef up that DataPilot, damnit!!!
If OpenOffice could make their spreadsheet app as stellar in it's power and formattability (I know, not a real word) as its Writer app, then I'd ditch MS Office in an instant.
I've been preaching this for a while now on
That is the same retarded logic used in banning non-lethal, although permanent injury causing weapons like laser dazzler's and other high-tech weaponry. If you're sending your sons and daughters into combat, which would you rather have: a son or daughter back home safe, albeit blind or potentially crippled for life, or one in a body bag?
And now you people complain about UAV's doing a soldier's dirty work for them? Why the fixation on sending real, live people into combat when the future wars can be waged over material possessions like the number of drones your country has?
The Palestinians send in bombs using innocent 11 and 14 yr olds - that's much worse than sending in a mechanical device to take out known terrorists that send those kids to their death in the first place.
Let's stick to the facts people.
Hey everyone, go read the actual City & Guilds article linked to from the ZDNet article.
Do you even have to do ANY research to publish articles for your given media outlet? ZDNet changed some numbers to say things like "1 in 4" and "1 in 7" instead of the actual percentages given by City & Guilds, and that's it. Now I understand that presenting statistics to the general public usually requires "dumbing it down" to the lowest common denomenator, but that's not what I'm on my high horse about. Why is it that these little 500 word articles always get shipped around to every media outlet a dozen times? Isn't it obvious that we're simply spoon fed the "information for the day" over and over again without any real substance, conflicting opinions, or facts presented for our own review?
Anyone know of a Creative Commons copyrighted news website where the information is presented transparently and openly versus sold to anyone who wants the latest "scoop?"
So what? We could add and subtract things like numbers of crickets in the backyard and number of cars on blocks all day, but ultimately what you see is that YES, Americans ARE better off now than ever before! In the 60's: get breast cancer, you're almost certainly gonna die from it. Now? Get breast cancer and it can probably be cured (or at least the longevity of your life can be extended substantially in comparison to the 60's). Not to mention the fact that American's disposable income is higher, life expectancy longer, and spending power higher than in our entire history as a nation.
Granted, who's to say that our quality of life is better or worse: that's a highly subjective measure. And yes, I worry about tech jobs moving overseas to make the rich even richer, but c'mon, do you "have enough" of everything in your life right now? No? Than you're no different than the rest of us who constantly struggle with wanting more than we have right now. It's a universal trait, and the rich have it just as much as you or I do. And I'm a middle-class American, which makes me a lot richer than probably 95% of the rest of the world.
From looking at the picture of the Linea LX PDA up close, it is apparent to me that Linux will not be taken seriously in the PDA or desktop markets until a graphical design artist actually takes the time to do some user polling and UAT to determine which graphical icons look and work the best for the end-user. I mean seriously, they have a 'Contacts' icon with an @ symbol, and an 'Email' icon with a paper envelope and stamp symbol. Not only that, the 'Text Editor' and 'Sketch' icons appear to have been switched at birth. For the average Joe, this just isn't intuitive and simply leads to more cursing and hitting the 'back button' than is reasonably acceptable.
If you had actually RTFA, you would have seen that these 10! ballots were 10 out of 60 ballots they had looked at, out of the 1% of precincts that they actually audited as a matter of their normal, pre-existing processes to verify votes. Now 1% of 468,000 is 4,680 ballots to count, which amounts to a better than 2% error rate when evaluating those 4,680 ballots. That means that the problem would have to occur potentially only 1% of the time for them to miss it, and that's pretty unlikely when they're reviewing almost 5,000 ballots.
So michael, your statistically unsound, competely biased "journalism" is noted, and I'm seriously considering blocking any future stories posted by you. Your yellow journalism is really pathetic and transparent. Just stop. You can hate Seth Finkelstein all you want, but I think he's right: you suck.
Unfortunately people having the odd assault rifle lying around does not a successful armed revolution make - not in this day and age anyway.
Perhaps not, but simply hearing the sound of a shotgun being cocked or an assualt rifle's bolt action and then the impending doom of 12-guage shells exploding or multiple bullets whizzing by an intruder's ears are enough reason for me to want one in my home. I'm no Arnold Schwarzenager (sp?) that could stop an intruder with my bare hands from harming myself or my wife. Not to mention the fact that it's my own damn responsibility if someone like my own child (I don't have any yet, btw) harms themselves with such powerful tools of crime deterrence that I have chosen to keep in my posession.
Do you honestly think we have nukes in the U.S. arsenal for research and simply 'cause they're "cool"? NO! We have them for deterrence against idiots like Saddam and friends who wish to do us harm. Saddam should be pretty damn glad we didn't haul off and nuke him right after 9-11. He sure fit the profile of a maniacal dictator wishing to do thousands of innocents harm (and especially Americans), 'cause he already proved he could, and would in his own country with his own citizens!
All you greenpeacers and ultra-liberal "we don't need guns anymore" types should read up on your history and national statistics once in a while. We have a lot more traffic accident, alcohol/drug related deaths each year than accidental, or even intentional, gun woundings and deaths combined. Perhaps we should outlaw alcohol and/or the automobile? What do you think?
isixsigma.com - May or may not help you in your quest for statistics knowledge, but it's a business resource for those of us budding stats dude's working on getting managers to accept statistical variability in their processes. What my coworkers and I have been lacking is a good "sample size calculator" that works in reverse - i.e. you plug in what percent error you want and the sample size, tell the calculator what you want the confidence interval to be, and out pops the needed population size to achieve such results.
I think this study has some signifigance, and I'll illustrate to you all why:
I attended a university with a lot of foreign students in the mid-90's. I play soccer. I played soccer at this university on the intramural teams. My team was comprised primarily of Americans. Because of the large population of foreign nationals at our school, there were teams made up almost entirely of the following nationalities: south african, mideastern/middle african, korean, japanese/chinese, mexican, south american, etc. I have played soccer since I was 5, and I can tell you for certain that each of these teams had a distinct playing style. The south africans were all about speed, but weren't as concerned about ball control - pass and run, the mideasterners had AWESOME ball control and passed ok, but didn't have a lot of speed (or didn't concentrate on that aspect - some of them were fast when they wanted to be), my team was of course a little more individualistic and generic in our play style, mexicans were very physical (not hacks, but in your face physical), and the differences continued.
Despite how much you think we're all exactly the same, our cultures and societies we grow up in do influence our lives a great deal, and do tend to show up in sports. While CS isn't the most grueling sport to play, it is none-the-less a team "sport" activity, and I think the differences in nationality do affect a team's playing style, strengths, and weaknesses. Just watch the World Cup sometime - you'll see what I'm talking about pretty quickly.
I wholeheartedly agree. Slashdot is about as far from 'journalism' as you can get. Yellow journalism, yes, but real journalism? No.
;)
Between Taco's daily dup's and michael's incescant ranting like a child without his candy bar, this site is important only because of the readership. Our "editors" cannot spellcheck, grammar check, or even do a minor amount of research to save their lives it seems.
Yes, I am ranting about an offtopic subject right now, but it's my freedom to do so. And yes, I will get modded 'offtopic' pretty quickly, but judging from the amount of comments on this thread, it needs to be said again and again so that newcomers have the chance to see Slashdot for what it is and is not.
We should all just be exceedingly thankful that we no longer have to endure Katz articles anymore!
Have you even played a Civ game in your life!?! Where is "The Republic", "Anarchy", "Despotism", or any other modded political structures in your list?!
You may not be a lawyer, but I think you hit the nail on the head with that proverbial hammer.
/. group think opinion, the courts DO consider as many angles as possible when reaching decisions, and let's face it, SCO winning would have nationwide, massive, forever-altering rammifications to the business world, government, and consumer. The courts just aren't going to cave on this one.
Despite popular
Well, it's really called GnuPG, but you're right, it is the standard that basically states: "the sender's signing key validates against the original key you trusted by signing it with your own key." I've started signing all of my emails in Thunderbird using the help of the Enigmail plugin and encrypting any files I attach in my emails with the help of WinPT. I know this post looks like a giant plug for these "products," but since they're all free, open source software which I have no affiliation with, it's simply me trying to get the word out that there IS a manner in which to get your emails to your friends in a trusted, reliable manner, and hopefully convert a few of your friends and family to using the same method in the future. We wouldn't have to worry about address spoofing if email gpg signing was a defacto standard of every email client! Plus it would be a lot safer and difficult to circumvent (ultimately) than Yet Another Format for email.
Well, techinically, you DO have to have authorization to do "public performances", but think of it in terms of the super-bowl, time-shifted:
Let's say you and a bunch of friends are all super busy on Super-Bowl Sunday and want to wait a few hours to watch the game later the next day (let's say you all have Mon. off). So you program your TIVO or VCR to record the game, and then invite your friends over to watch the game. Technically, you're breaking the law. But seriously, the NFL is NEVER going to try and sue you for doing so. It wouldn't be worth their time, or money to do so. Not to mention the PR nightmare they would endure for suing a few friends for watching their game AFTER it was already over. Like everyone else has been saying, if it's a semi-organized, (and especially if it's a University 'sponsored' or recognized event using University resources) just write the dang companies and tell them your plan and all is well. They won't make you sign thirty-two pages of legal documents, they'll just be happy to have the customer feeback that their games are getting played at LAN parties.
My wife tried that with the kitchen counter one time with our first cat. [she loves to jump up on the counter (the cat, not my wife) and scout around for bits of tomato-based product] It didn't work too well. We came home that day to find our cat with tape wrapped all the way around her head - it's a good thing she didn't manage to tape her own mouth and nose shut! She was pretty pissed at my wife for putting the tape on the counter...
Bitter apple doesn't seem to work on my cats, but they have each other to play with so they don't chew cords too much.
Now my puppy: he HATES bitter apple! Of course, he chews on EVERYTHING, so coating everything in gallons of bitter apple for me is also not an option.
That sounds nice and all, but what if that little punk at the register at your local supermarket couldn't give a crap about you, and decides to "accidentally" lose that receipt when it comes time to balance at the end of the night? All of the sudden, he has you debit card number, your name, and knows EXACTLY which bank to go to to drain your account. Happened to me once, although I never have found out who stole my number or how it got stolen. Wiped out my bank account and caused a year's worth of agony and annoyances to be sure though!
A close friend of mine spent a year in New Mexico at NMMI. He more or less hated it.
It doesn't surprise me that such a "well though out" plan to curb drunk driving like this one was suggested in New Mexico. My friend always complained about all of the freaks who were WAAAYYY too into Area51, all the people that believed in Aliens, the fact that there actually was an "alien museum," etc. If I were you, take my friend's advice and stay AWAY from New Mexico! LOL!