Teeth filed down would not be crippling for life, rodent incisors grow continuously and they have to keep them ground down the same way a parrot has to with its beak. They'd have a couple weeks of difficulty, then they'd be fine.
Playing by the odds, it is not a good idea to chase flushes or straights in Hold'em because most of the time it won't pan out for you.
Not true. In limit hold'em, you want to play for those straights and flushes if the table is "live" -- that is, you usually have 5 or 6 players going into the flop. If you get help, you run with it. If you don't, you fold. In pot-limit and no-limit, it can get very expensive to see the flop, and it's probably not worth playing those... and most people don't. But when everyone is limping in and there are lots of people paying to see the flop, it's still worth it. It's also worth more in late position, because you get to see if everyone else has made their hands, have a draw, or are flat busted. Then again, late position is vulnerable to the check-raise, but that is not enough to offset the power of the button.
As I said at the last tournament when I got the button the first time, "THIS is the best lucky charm at ANY table." Nobody disagreed with me.
It doesn't guarantee anything except that there is a human babysitting the racks of bot servers to take care of the codes. This keeps the numbers down due to the cost of labor, but then so does the cost of servers and connections.
Multiple bots playing at the same table, and communicating "under the table" *are* going to clean out everyone else, since they don't have to fight with each other. Humans already do this though, at the simplest they can do it by conference call.
BTW, for those that don't know, real money online players are allowed to play at multiple tables at once, so the rate of things popping up can't be too high. Anything popping up and slowing down a player slows down up to FOUR tables. Not that I could track four tables, but I can easily play two, and can play three for limited periods of time. I know there are people who can, and do, play at four cash tables at once. In fact it's a recommended strategy in Card Player magazine -- play three low-limit tables at once instead of one medium-limit table to maximize return and minimize variance. Humans are already encouraged to do it, it's not going to seem odd at all to have a bot running four tables at once.
In short, entering codes would slow down play, and that would be a very bad thing for online casinos. It also wouldn't stop bots, it would only slow down the growth of bot networks.
Believe it or not, I've even seen "foldbots" in single-table tournaments! All they do is fold to the first bet, regardless of what they have. The reason for this is that a lot of one-table tournaments devolve into fragfests, with half the table all-in on the first or second hand. Suddenly 5 of 10 people are gone, and someone has over half the chips at the table and picks off the other players one by one. Meanwhile, the foldbot coasts its way into second or third place, which still make money, because it never confronts the big stack. (Typical payout for a $10 + $1 tournament is 50/30/20.)
Players do have a defense for this, and I've been in on it a couple times. Someone announces "we have a foldbot, let's just check everything down till it's blinded out", and we agree to do just that. Once it goes broke, we start playing. Foldbots won't be around for long (far too easy to exploit), but they really do suck the life out of single-table tournaments. Then again, so do fragfests, which came first. Foldbots are just a response.
Amazingly, I see more fragfests in pot limit than I do in no-limit, which on the surface seems to make no sense. But it's hard to get all-in early in a pot limit tournament, so it seems that when the opportunity presents itself, players are far more likely to take it.
>You can play freerolls online, where you can win money for free.
Meatspace freerolls exist too. For example, at Club Caribe, where I've been playing on Sundays, playing three hours at any combination of cash tables gets you freerolled into the Monday night tournament. Naturally you have to be pretty good to tread water for three hours, so it's not really free, but nobody would expect a casino to REALLY do ANYTHING for free.:)
If the bot is truly a good player, it will fall to bluffs now and again, and it will still be worth trying. You're right you don't bluff at limit or against clueless players unless you know their hand busted, but the bot can't be both clueless and good. If it looks for tendencies and tells, it can be fooled.
In a meatspace tournament, imagine you scratch your nose after betting a good hand but don't with a marginal hand. You do this consistently through the lower limits until you think a couple people have caught on, then when you're all in with aces -- DON'T SCRATCH YOUR NOSE.
I'd bet someone calls you.
The computer is going to pick up things much more esoteric than nose-scratching, but if you KNOW you're giving off a signal, you can also choose an opportune time to send a false one.
At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if the bot does the same to you. I'd imagine any bot has to inherit some personality traits from the creator, since poker is not a "solved" game. If the author does it and finds it works, he's probably going to tell the bot to try it now and again too.
The big worry would be bots that remember players better than players do, but this could be changed by cashing out and signing up again every now and then. Much easier than changing your appearance every time you play, at least.
There is an inherent risk in online poker that the player at the other end of the connection has tools that he is using to gain a competative advantage, such as tools for counting cards, figuring odds and so on...
Counting cards? This isn't blackjack. There is no counting of cards, except maybe in stud where you'd say "he has a king up, I'm half as likely to catch one more now". Being able to remember the up cards of folded players is definitely a good thing in stud, but it's not something you need a computer to do.
Likewise with odds. You don't need exact odds tables in your head, just knowing your opponent's probable middle pair (yeah sometimes you can just tell) is a coin toss against your AK is good enough. It doesn't much matter if the split is 47/53 or 43/57, you're going to decide based on factors like relative chip count, the size of the blinds, how much money you've already committed, etc.
I didn't know all the odds when I started and I got fleeced repeatedly. Now I've made a point of studying, and have a pretty good idea what's going on, and if someone was using a printed odds table or even a "coaching" program, I wouldn't care. I WOULD care if the table was more bots than humans, especially if they're owned by the same agent. One player backed by one coach-bot is not a concern to me at all.
Actually no... just as at real world tables, the house takes a fixed AMOUNT from each pot. This means that if the poker bot skins everyone, fewer hands will be played than if the humans pass the money around. It's in the best interests of both itself and the human players that they get SLOWLY bled of all their money.
You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once.
That said, I want one of these bots for training purposes, and I don't have any more problem with playing against them (for real) per se -- as long as I know what I'm up against. I don't even have a problem with house-owned bots. It's a problem when they dominate the table though, especially if they're all working for the house. Too easy to gang up on you, even if they aren't cheating by trading information.
I don't imagine it would take much more than 150 years for the whole process to play out from current society to a fractured group of cultures that have formed their own identity and only have a fleeting rememberance of the previous world, taking things and twisting them into legends and religions.
But we'd still have the Internet to connect them together, since it will survive a nucular war! They'd meet to ROFL and LOL at each other, and all would be well... oh, on second thought, never mind.:)
we live on a somewhat busy street, and I can sleep off hours without car noise waking me. (as long as said kids don't blare their punk music)
Get back at them by blaring punk music they've never heard of, because it's older than them! Make them feel uncool and maybe they'll shut up. If not, at least they'll get a music history lesson.:)
I believe energy emitted in the form of gravitational waves is supposed to come from the angular momentum of the mass. In other words, the shed energy causes it to spin more slowly.
Isopropyl alcohol, as you correctly noted, is not particularly toxic (at least not with occasional exposure, as another reply points out). Drinking it will, however, make you toss your cookies but good. I had a cousin foolishly drink a bunch as a "look at me I want to die" stunt, and the projectile vomiting and dry heaves that resulted just ended up with her unable to talk for about a week. (Trust me, this was a GOOD thing.) This is not something a person looking to get drunk would want, as they're usually fighting nausea to some degree to start with.
Using it as a topical antiseptic relies on the principle that it's not enough to damage you significantly, but it's more than sufficient to kill any (non-viral) microbes it touches. Because you apply it directly as needed, the concentration at the site is going to be very high, while the amount that you intake systemically will be very low. You wouldn't particularly want to drink iodine, saturated salt water, or hydrogen peroxide, but applying one of those to a wound remains a viable way to clean up.
I had a dream that Larry Niven showed up at a friend's wedding (this was a few weeks before the wedding was scheduled to take place, and yes they know each other) with an ice cream cart, and gave ice cream to everyone without explaining why, or who he was. Then he left again. I told my friend about this and she thought it over for a moment and said "you know, that sounds like something he'd do."
She ended up inviting him just to see what would happen (of course nobody told him about the ice cream dream), but he didn't come. Not surprising considering he probably only had two weeks' notice by the time the invitation arrived.
No, you want a near-IR laser that can't be seen by the naked eye, along with a spotting laser you can use to aim it (but you switch off once you're locked in). In case you hadn't noticed, CCDs are still quite susceptible to bleed issues when some pixels are oversaturated, so blowing the hell out of the red will do the job just fine. You don't want to get too far into the IR for a myriad of reasons, but mostly because the cameras are built to filter the longer wavelengths out. The filter can be removed (I've seen it done in theaters -- the live kind, not the movie kind -- so you can see people walking around in the "dark") but it usually isn't.
Also, GPS isn't anywhere near precise enough to target something that's a fraction of an inch wide, as most of these cameras' lenses are. They may all look alike in a given area, making it easier for a computer to optically detect them, but GPS isn't going to hand you targeting info on a silver disk. Even if it did, remember who controls it and can degrade its precision at any time...
1. Attach a laser pointer to a tripod and point it into the camera, while hopefully disguising yourself adequately. 2. Attach a transparency of the goatse guy to the front of the camera, taking care not to interrupt the laser for too long. 3. Remove your tripod-mounted laser and go home.
After this, I can pretty much assure you this will be a less than attractive target for bored security guards (after the charm wears off).
Mal-2
P.S. This should work for red light cameras too, and you won't even need the laser. You just have to be able to get to them and you'll be out of their field of view. They're typically pretty far off the ground (to see over cars more than to protect them) and will require a much larger Goatse, but doing this should present an interesting dilemma to the city when it comes time to write up tickets.:)
The problem with a "loser pays" system is that it provides an incentive for one side to press its case in order not to be the one giving up on it (therefore paying for both sides' lawyers). If you're accused by the corporate megopoly, and they just keep throwing money at their lawyers, you're going to run out of resources to defend yourself. When that happens, not only will you lose the case, but you'll have to pay the very lawyers that dicked you over.
I think I can provide a possible explanation for the drift. Maybe the signal isn't coming from a planet, but from an artificial satellite, possibly even one well inside the habitable zone of the star. Sure it would still indicate someone is/was there who could build such a device, but until now I hadn't heard anyone else try to decouple the little green men "homeworld" from the source of the transmission.
I would imagine it would be possible (if expensive) with today's human technology to put a craft in close solar orbit, have it collect solar energy, and cast radio beacons all over the place. If it's not possible now, it can't be very far off. Perhaps if we focused the Hubble on that patch of sky we'd see a giant Pringles can spinning wildly about.
At least the hotel is, though e-mail and home addresses aren't going to change just because the convention is over. So there isn't going to be much delay between receiving information, and posting it. Certainly not time to do more than the most minimal sanity checking (does address exist, do city and ZIP match?) Why not pollute their database to the point where nobody trusts it, or at least has to waste a lot of time chasing a red herring or doing research? If you can fill up the database with half bogus entries, you've just caused any group using the database to spread their resources twice as far. Some of them could even be honeypots, pointing at law enforcement who are waiting for any sort of harrassment or excessively loud shouting, or maybe even a fart in their general direction.
Sometimes it's much easier to undermine someone's tools than it is to take them away.
Having to share a computer at an office full of people with grungy hands led me to do two things:
1. Demand (and get) a Dvorak keyboard. That cut down the popularity of my station considerably.:)
2. Invent the disposable mouse pad.
"What is this wonderful device?", you might wonder. Well here's how to make one.
1. Take about 25 sheets of letter size paper and stack them neatly. It doesn't matter if they are laser-printed, but you probably don't want inkjet prints. You can do a lot more than 25 if you have a heavy-duty stapler handy, but this assumes you don't.
2. Staple them together as many times as necessary along one edge.
3. When the top page gets dirty, or when the shift changes, tear off the top page and throw it away. When you get down to the last 10 or so sheets, remove the staples, get another 15 sheets of paper, and re-staple. If you spill your drink on it, throw away the wet pages, or the whole thing if necessary.
Think I can get a patent on this?
The lazy can just get a notepad and flip the cover back (or tear it off), but doesn't that violate the whole "do it yourself" ethic?
I'm currently working as a bank courier for my "day job". I drive 80 to 120 miles a day, 5 days a week. I'm driving a 1991 Celica GT, and getting 24 mpg, which is not too bad for city driving in an old car. But the most important point is that I paid the princely sum of $800 for the car, and about $300 more in maintenance (tires, brakes, alternator, the usual stuff), in over a year and a half. When (not if) the engine gives out, I'll be looking for another sub-$1000 car to replace it. Even with the lesser efficiency, you just can't beat cars like this from a TCO perspective. I can nurse these $600 to $1000 cars for a year or two, and when they become unreasonable to maintain or have a serious breakdown, I dump them.
There's even the possibility I may be able to sell this car, still running, when I decide to get another. That would be a first, since I usually get end-of-life vehicles, or in the one case I had a reasonably solid car, I ended up crashing it. (I suppose that was technically still running, since it could still move under its own power, but since it went straight to the scrapyard I file it under "salvage".)
Another thought is -- would I really want to put all these miles on a relatively new, relatively expensive car? So what if I drive the $800 car into the ground, I'll make a lot more than that and get another one. So it looks like I won't be getting a hybrid or electric vehicle until they appear on the used market for a couple grand or less, by which point they're going to need battery replacement. Not an attractive option.
Why are so many productions shot in my neck of the woods? Most people think of San Pedro as the ass end of Los Angeles, but there are some familiarlandmarks that appear in Usual Suspects. I don't have good shots of the cargo docks, but those feature quite prominently as well.
I see signs up for cast members of various productions, nailed to telephone poles, on a more or less daily basis. Sometimes there are production trailers camped out at the park at the end of our street. Today's signs just off the 110 freeway just said "ORANGE". Is there somewhere I can look up what productions are listed by such odd abbreviations?
Slashdot Mirror
Teeth filed down would not be crippling for life, rodent incisors grow continuously and they have to keep them ground down the same way a parrot has to with its beak. They'd have a couple weeks of difficulty, then they'd be fine.
Mal-2
Everybody knows stickers increase horsepower! 5 HP just for a "Type R", for example. :)
Mal-2
Playing by the odds, it is not a good idea to chase flushes or straights in Hold'em because most of the time it won't pan out for you.
Not true. In limit hold'em, you want to play for those straights and flushes if the table is "live" -- that is, you usually have 5 or 6 players going into the flop. If you get help, you run with it. If you don't, you fold. In pot-limit and no-limit, it can get very expensive to see the flop, and it's probably not worth playing those... and most people don't. But when everyone is limping in and there are lots of people paying to see the flop, it's still worth it. It's also worth more in late position, because you get to see if everyone else has made their hands, have a draw, or are flat busted. Then again, late position is vulnerable to the check-raise, but that is not enough to offset the power of the button.
As I said at the last tournament when I got the button the first time, "THIS is the best lucky charm at ANY table." Nobody disagreed with me.
Mal-2
It doesn't guarantee anything except that there is a human babysitting the racks of bot servers to take care of the codes. This keeps the numbers down due to the cost of labor, but then so does the cost of servers and connections.
Multiple bots playing at the same table, and communicating "under the table" *are* going to clean out everyone else, since they don't have to fight with each other. Humans already do this though, at the simplest they can do it by conference call.
BTW, for those that don't know, real money online players are allowed to play at multiple tables at once, so the rate of things popping up can't be too high. Anything popping up and slowing down a player slows down up to FOUR tables. Not that I could track four tables, but I can easily play two, and can play three for limited periods of time. I know there are people who can, and do, play at four cash tables at once. In fact it's a recommended strategy in Card Player magazine -- play three low-limit tables at once instead of one medium-limit table to maximize return and minimize variance. Humans are already encouraged to do it, it's not going to seem odd at all to have a bot running four tables at once.
In short, entering codes would slow down play, and that would be a very bad thing for online casinos. It also wouldn't stop bots, it would only slow down the growth of bot networks.
Believe it or not, I've even seen "foldbots" in single-table tournaments! All they do is fold to the first bet, regardless of what they have. The reason for this is that a lot of one-table tournaments devolve into fragfests, with half the table all-in on the first or second hand. Suddenly 5 of 10 people are gone, and someone has over half the chips at the table and picks off the other players one by one. Meanwhile, the foldbot coasts its way into second or third place, which still make money, because it never confronts the big stack. (Typical payout for a $10 + $1 tournament is 50/30/20.)
Players do have a defense for this, and I've been in on it a couple times. Someone announces "we have a foldbot, let's just check everything down till it's blinded out", and we agree to do just that. Once it goes broke, we start playing. Foldbots won't be around for long (far too easy to exploit), but they really do suck the life out of single-table tournaments. Then again, so do fragfests, which came first. Foldbots are just a response.
Amazingly, I see more fragfests in pot limit than I do in no-limit, which on the surface seems to make no sense. But it's hard to get all-in early in a pot limit tournament, so it seems that when the opportunity presents itself, players are far more likely to take it.
Mal-2
>You can play freerolls online, where you can win money for free.
:)
Meatspace freerolls exist too. For example, at Club Caribe, where I've been playing on Sundays, playing three hours at any combination of cash tables gets you freerolled into the Monday night tournament. Naturally you have to be pretty good to tread water for three hours, so it's not really free, but nobody would expect a casino to REALLY do ANYTHING for free.
Mal-2
If the bot is truly a good player, it will fall to bluffs now and again, and it will still be worth trying. You're right you don't bluff at limit or against clueless players unless you know their hand busted, but the bot can't be both clueless and good. If it looks for tendencies and tells, it can be fooled.
In a meatspace tournament, imagine you scratch your nose after betting a good hand but don't with a marginal hand. You do this consistently through the lower limits until you think a couple people have caught on, then when you're all in with aces -- DON'T SCRATCH YOUR NOSE.
I'd bet someone calls you.
The computer is going to pick up things much more esoteric than nose-scratching, but if you KNOW you're giving off a signal, you can also choose an opportune time to send a false one.
At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if the bot does the same to you. I'd imagine any bot has to inherit some personality traits from the creator, since poker is not a "solved" game. If the author does it and finds it works, he's probably going to tell the bot to try it now and again too.
The big worry would be bots that remember players better than players do, but this could be changed by cashing out and signing up again every now and then. Much easier than changing your appearance every time you play, at least.
Mal-2
There is an inherent risk in online poker that the player at the other end of the connection has tools that he is using to gain a competative advantage, such as tools for counting cards, figuring odds and so on...
Counting cards? This isn't blackjack. There is no counting of cards, except maybe in stud where you'd say "he has a king up, I'm half as likely to catch one more now". Being able to remember the up cards of folded players is definitely a good thing in stud, but it's not something you need a computer to do.
Likewise with odds. You don't need exact odds tables in your head, just knowing your opponent's probable middle pair (yeah sometimes you can just tell) is a coin toss against your AK is good enough. It doesn't much matter if the split is 47/53 or 43/57, you're going to decide based on factors like relative chip count, the size of the blinds, how much money you've already committed, etc.
I didn't know all the odds when I started and I got fleeced repeatedly. Now I've made a point of studying, and have a pretty good idea what's going on, and if someone was using a printed odds table or even a "coaching" program, I wouldn't care. I WOULD care if the table was more bots than humans, especially if they're owned by the same agent. One player backed by one coach-bot is not a concern to me at all.
Mal-2
Actually no... just as at real world tables, the house takes a fixed AMOUNT from each pot. This means that if the poker bot skins everyone, fewer hands will be played than if the humans pass the money around. It's in the best interests of both itself and the human players that they get SLOWLY bled of all their money.
You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once.
That said, I want one of these bots for training purposes, and I don't have any more problem with playing against them (for real) per se -- as long as I know what I'm up against. I don't even have a problem with house-owned bots. It's a problem when they dominate the table though, especially if they're all working for the house. Too easy to gang up on you, even if they aren't cheating by trading information.
Mal-2
I don't imagine it would take much more than 150 years for the whole process to play out from current society to a fractured group of cultures that have formed their own identity and only have a fleeting rememberance of the previous world, taking things and twisting them into legends and religions.
:)
But we'd still have the Internet to connect them together, since it will survive a nucular war! They'd meet to ROFL and LOL at each other, and all would be well... oh, on second thought, never mind.
Mal-2
we live on a somewhat busy street, and I can sleep off hours without car noise waking me. (as long as said kids don't blare their punk music)
:)
Get back at them by blaring punk music they've never heard of, because it's older than them! Make them feel uncool and maybe they'll shut up. If not, at least they'll get a music history lesson.
Mal-2
Forget the MMORPG, I want GTA: Springfield!
Mal-2
I believe energy emitted in the form of gravitational waves is supposed to come from the angular momentum of the mass. In other words, the shed energy causes it to spin more slowly.
Mal-2
Isopropyl alcohol, as you correctly noted, is not particularly toxic (at least not with occasional exposure, as another reply points out). Drinking it will, however, make you toss your cookies but good. I had a cousin foolishly drink a bunch as a "look at me I want to die" stunt, and the projectile vomiting and dry heaves that resulted just ended up with her unable to talk for about a week. (Trust me, this was a GOOD thing.) This is not something a person looking to get drunk would want, as they're usually fighting nausea to some degree to start with.
Using it as a topical antiseptic relies on the principle that it's not enough to damage you significantly, but it's more than sufficient to kill any (non-viral) microbes it touches. Because you apply it directly as needed, the concentration at the site is going to be very high, while the amount that you intake systemically will be very low. You wouldn't particularly want to drink iodine, saturated salt water, or hydrogen peroxide, but applying one of those to a wound remains a viable way to clean up.
Mal-2
I had a dream that Larry Niven showed up at a friend's wedding (this was a few weeks before the wedding was scheduled to take place, and yes they know each other) with an ice cream cart, and gave ice cream to everyone without explaining why, or who he was. Then he left again. I told my friend about this and she thought it over for a moment and said "you know, that sounds like something he'd do."
She ended up inviting him just to see what would happen (of course nobody told him about the ice cream dream), but he didn't come. Not surprising considering he probably only had two weeks' notice by the time the invitation arrived.
Mal-2
No, you want a near-IR laser that can't be seen by the naked eye, along with a spotting laser you can use to aim it (but you switch off once you're locked in). In case you hadn't noticed, CCDs are still quite susceptible to bleed issues when some pixels are oversaturated, so blowing the hell out of the red will do the job just fine. You don't want to get too far into the IR for a myriad of reasons, but mostly because the cameras are built to filter the longer wavelengths out. The filter can be removed (I've seen it done in theaters -- the live kind, not the movie kind -- so you can see people walking around in the "dark") but it usually isn't.
Also, GPS isn't anywhere near precise enough to target something that's a fraction of an inch wide, as most of these cameras' lenses are. They may all look alike in a given area, making it easier for a computer to optically detect them, but GPS isn't going to hand you targeting info on a silver disk. Even if it did, remember who controls it and can degrade its precision at any time...
Mal-2
1. Attach a laser pointer to a tripod and point it into the camera, while hopefully disguising yourself adequately.
:)
2. Attach a transparency of the goatse guy to the front of the camera, taking care not to interrupt the laser for too long.
3. Remove your tripod-mounted laser and go home.
After this, I can pretty much assure you this will be a less than attractive target for bored security guards (after the charm wears off).
Mal-2
P.S. This should work for red light cameras too, and you won't even need the laser. You just have to be able to get to them and you'll be out of their field of view. They're typically pretty far off the ground (to see over cars more than to protect them) and will require a much larger Goatse, but doing this should present an interesting dilemma to the city when it comes time to write up tickets.
Are you sure you want to hear DVDA in sparkling 5.1 digital sound anyhow?
:)
Then again, maybe it really IS that important to you, if you've already gone blind from previous viewings.
Mal-2
The problem with a "loser pays" system is that it provides an incentive for one side to press its case in order not to be the one giving up on it (therefore paying for both sides' lawyers). If you're accused by the corporate megopoly, and they just keep throwing money at their lawyers, you're going to run out of resources to defend yourself. When that happens, not only will you lose the case, but you'll have to pay the very lawyers that dicked you over.
Sound like an improvement? Not to me.
Mal-2
I think I can provide a possible explanation for the drift. Maybe the signal isn't coming from a planet, but from an artificial satellite, possibly even one well inside the habitable zone of the star. Sure it would still indicate someone is/was there who could build such a device, but until now I hadn't heard anyone else try to decouple the little green men "homeworld" from the source of the transmission.
I would imagine it would be possible (if expensive) with today's human technology to put a craft in close solar orbit, have it collect solar energy, and cast radio beacons all over the place. If it's not possible now, it can't be very far off. Perhaps if we focused the Hubble on that patch of sky we'd see a giant Pringles can spinning wildly about.
Mal-2
At least the hotel is, though e-mail and home addresses aren't going to change just because the convention is over. So there isn't going to be much delay between receiving information, and posting it. Certainly not time to do more than the most minimal sanity checking (does address exist, do city and ZIP match?) Why not pollute their database to the point where nobody trusts it, or at least has to waste a lot of time chasing a red herring or doing research? If you can fill up the database with half bogus entries, you've just caused any group using the database to spread their resources twice as far. Some of them could even be honeypots, pointing at law enforcement who are waiting for any sort of harrassment or excessively loud shouting, or maybe even a fart in their general direction.
Sometimes it's much easier to undermine someone's tools than it is to take them away.
Mal-2
I thought the correct thing to do when you lose your "really good paper" is to get really stoned and do Apple "switch" commercials.
Mal-2
Having to share a computer at an office full of people with grungy hands led me to do two things:
:)
1. Demand (and get) a Dvorak keyboard. That cut down the popularity of my station considerably.
2. Invent the disposable mouse pad.
"What is this wonderful device?", you might wonder. Well here's how to make one.
1. Take about 25 sheets of letter size paper and stack them neatly. It doesn't matter if they are laser-printed, but you probably don't want inkjet prints. You can do a lot more than 25 if you have a heavy-duty stapler handy, but this assumes you don't.
2. Staple them together as many times as necessary along one edge.
3. When the top page gets dirty, or when the shift changes, tear off the top page and throw it away. When you get down to the last 10 or so sheets, remove the staples, get another 15 sheets of paper, and re-staple. If you spill your drink on it, throw away the wet pages, or the whole thing if necessary.
Think I can get a patent on this?
The lazy can just get a notepad and flip the cover back (or tear it off), but doesn't that violate the whole "do it yourself" ethic?
Mal-2
I'm currently working as a bank courier for my "day job". I drive 80 to 120 miles a day, 5 days a week. I'm driving a 1991 Celica GT, and getting 24 mpg, which is not too bad for city driving in an old car. But the most important point is that I paid the princely sum of $800 for the car, and about $300 more in maintenance (tires, brakes, alternator, the usual stuff), in over a year and a half. When (not if) the engine gives out, I'll be looking for another sub-$1000 car to replace it. Even with the lesser efficiency, you just can't beat cars like this from a TCO perspective. I can nurse these $600 to $1000 cars for a year or two, and when they become unreasonable to maintain or have a serious breakdown, I dump them.
There's even the possibility I may be able to sell this car, still running, when I decide to get another. That would be a first, since I usually get end-of-life vehicles, or in the one case I had a reasonably solid car, I ended up crashing it. (I suppose that was technically still running, since it could still move under its own power, but since it went straight to the scrapyard I file it under "salvage".)
Another thought is -- would I really want to put all these miles on a relatively new, relatively expensive car? So what if I drive the $800 car into the ground, I'll make a lot more than that and get another one. So it looks like I won't be getting a hybrid or electric vehicle until they appear on the used market for a couple grand or less, by which point they're going to need battery replacement. Not an attractive option.
Mal-2
No, more likely via Lindon Utah.
I say we take off and nukethe site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Mal-2
Why are so many productions shot in my neck of the woods? Most people think of San Pedro as the ass end of Los Angeles, but there are some familiar landmarks that appear in Usual Suspects. I don't have good shots of the cargo docks, but those feature quite prominently as well.
I see signs up for cast members of various productions, nailed to telephone poles, on a more or less daily basis. Sometimes there are production trailers camped out at the park at the end of our street. Today's signs just off the 110 freeway just said "ORANGE". Is there somewhere I can look up what productions are listed by such odd abbreviations?
Mal-2