Even if you buy by the case, you don't typically carry that case around once you get it home. Buy a whole pallet of Cheetos if you want, you're going to be carrying individual bags when you go anywhere. Not only that, but Sam's Club is probably going to want their pallet back. If the RFID tag gets discarded with the bulk packaging, why does it really matter? If you're afraid of getting your trash scanned, nuke it first.
Now resellers may indeed have a problem, as "mystery guests" might be able to tell if that pallet of Cheetos on the shelf came from their store, which forbids "sales to dealers". It's unlikely they'll care (they already got paid) but at least it's plausible.
It may seem a small step from tagging the crates to tagging the products, but until that step is taken, they can't track you... even if you buy by the crate. They'll know the crate left the store, which is fine -- that's how they know to put out another one. Then how likely are you to be carrying the crate around with you in daily life?
If they really DO attempt to track the crate, it opens up any number of spoofing possibilites. You could fill the crate with dehydrated dog shit, tape it up, and leave it out back of their store. After a few such incidents, they'd know not to just bring in a crate and shelve it based on its tag alone.:) Really it would be in their own best interests to mark used tags in the database, and not allow them to be re-used.
I'm as much a tinfoil-hat type as the bulk of you, but this isn't that big a deal. It's worthwhile to let companies know in no uncertain terms where the line of acceptability is BEFORE they cross it, however.
TRACK YOUR GOODS = acceptable, TRACK MY GOODS OR PERSON = unacceptable. Pretty simple.
Garlic is useful in another, simpler (and tastier) way. Just plant one clove of garlic every few feet of garden, and most insects will avoid your garden. They're not the most aesthetically pleasing plants (they look like any other bulb plant minus the pretty flowers) but they aren't offensive either. This requires no special maintenance beyond what you'd be putting into the garden anyhow, and as a nice side benefit you will find an entire bulb of garlic underground come harvest time.
Also falling into the non-hazardous pest control category would be cola bottles with something still at the bottom (insects drop in to eat, can't fly back out), and leaving shallow containers filled with beer around for slugs and snails to climb into. Then they get drunk and drown.
I believe it is diatomaceous earth that is at the hear of the "ant chalk" you can buy at the local 99 cent store. If not, it's probably borax, which as far as I know operates by the same means.
This is almost certainly out of your control, but there is a solution to the problem. It'll take money but it does work. That answer is to move.
Not move to another existing building, with all the property buying (or leasing) and hauling that entails. Move on-site. Build another building in the parking lot, and when it's done, you all move in there. Demolish the old building and pave it over and park there. You'll have to park in the boonies for a year or so, but if it's a job you could see yourself staying with, it'd be worth it.
I bet a lot of the people above you in the organization would be just as happy about it as you would if it actually happened, so propose it. Worst that'll happen is that they laugh at you, it hardly seems like a firing offense to say "we need a new building, so we should build one".
I saw Steppenwolf live on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. They were quite audible from the 7th floor of the Lady Luck, and it was intolerably loud two blocks away. By the time we were within one block, we had to duck inside Binion's Horseshoe just to keep our ears from bleeding. We exited out the other side where it was somewhat quieter, but by that time one of our group had started to bad trip. I would question the wisdom of eating a quarter bag of mushrooms and heading out onto Fremont Street even with no band present... and she knew the band would be there (we could already hear them) before consuming.
Out of a group of seven we had three who were drunk, one who was drunk AND stoned, two who were just stoned, and one who was both tripping and stoned. It wasn't exactly an example of fine activity planning, and was very strange as the two youngest members of the group (23 and 30, the latter being me) had to try to keep the other five (who you'd think would know better) from wandering off and hurting themselves.
All this proves is that Las Vegas may not be the best "neutral site" for an IRC channel gathering.:)
The day we have Internet-connected dildoes is the day a new era dawns, and it represents nothing short of the beginning of the end of mankind. This is the future, and the future is called "dildonics". Now instead of having cybersex via a keyboard and your own hand, you can have your genital stimulation machines manipulated by SOMEONE ELSE'S HAND (or other parts).
At first it will seem a novelty. Within a few decades, it'll be more popular than real sex involving infectious agents and bodily fluids. Those who grow up with the technology won't even realize the potential for harm. Breeding will become completely optional (you won't even have accidents to speak of), and marriage will be doubly so.
The fastest growing population sectors will remain in the Third World, and sheer numbers will mean there is no organized resistance to the barbarians at the gates. Robots will be pushed out of jobs by underpaid laborers who prove even cheaper than maintenance on the machinery, since only a small handful of people will know how to service them and they'll be busy virtually fucking, or installing eSex machines. When the number of the unwashed masses reaches some critical point, they will overthrow their soft, flabby, oversexed masters, quite possibly with the help of the clinically depressed robots they displaced.
Enjoy your Paris Hilton video. Operation FUCKUP is coming.
Why not go digging where the airbags have already scraped off a good portion of the surface layer? All right, the strangeness of the soil was totally unexpected, and nobody had anticipated the airbags would cause that kind of "damage", but why not use it to our advantage?
These people are in business to make money, legally or otherwise. Here's what I've done to fax spammers to drive up costs:
1. Receive fax? Use toll-free opt-out number immediately. If there are no more faxes, fine.
2. Second fax from same people (whether it's the same product or not)? Opt out twice, they obviously didn't notice the first time.
3. Third fax? Program autodialer to tie up their opt-out line for 20 minutes at a time by whatever option says "no i made a mistake entering the number, let me do it again". It enters a new number and waits. It tries again. Something like
18005555555,,, ||: 1,3,1,0,5,5,5,1,2,1,2,,,,2,,,,:|| (vamp and fade)
Meanwhile use that newfangled Intarweb thingy to track down the spammers for a little show of love.
The most persistent fax spammer I've had to deal with was dialing in from near Vancouver (Coquitlam, IIRC) and I was unable to get their identities ("Info4U", maybe they spam you too) but I did figure out how to set the fax machine to cap its receive speed at 2400bps before I'd go home at night. Faxes coming in overnight were either relatively local and legit (they faxed us 10 times a day with pickup and delivery orders, they wouldn't notice they took 3 minutes instead of 40 seconds to send those two pages) or from spammers. This raised both the monetary and opportunity cost to the spammers, but probably not enough to matter. If EVERYONE did this though...:)
The AGP slot in Shuttle's cases is literally right next to the case wall.
I think you've seen the answer to that, maybe without realizing it. A mesh-covered window will take care of that. The mesh can be cannibalized from a metal inbox. You wouldn't even need the whole treatment, since you know exactly where the GPU fan is. A simple hole saw and a drill should do it, which is much less effort than an hour with the Dremel.
As a more extreme re-engineering/cram job, you could watercool it. If you leave the adequate CPU cooler as is, you would only need to cool the GPU and RAM, allowing for the use of a small 12VDC pump. The radiator wouldn't have to be as large as most, though it would still have to dangle from the back of the case.
complete inability to do any work inside the case without disassembling the whole damned thing.
Unless the parts inside are smaller as well, this seems rather inevitable, doesn't it? It might even be enough to drive some to adding external drives rather than fighting the innards of the beast, which would really be counterproductive in terms of space used. The only answer I can think of would be to make something that looks pretty much like a desknote or laptop sans battery, which makes it an entirely different kind of machine.
On another point, how often is a file legitimately mailed to a large number of users in a single organization? Perhaps a server that could say "25% of the users have gotten this exact (renamed) file, quarantine it and all previously received and subsequent copies" is in order. Sure the early birds will still get hit, but it should stop the snowball before it becomes an avalanche.
Most new music is crap. Old music (already crap-filtered by time) and the small proportion of non-crap new music remain popular. There is nothing illogical about this.
I don't listen to commercial radio, so any time I go sniffing around a p2p network, it's generally either old or on someone else's behalf. If it's new and interesting, then generally someone I know will tell me about it and helpfully provide me with a link or a simple "it's on my ftp" message.
This is not to defend my position, but I can honestly say my p2p downloading has NO effect on my purchases of new music. That is because I don't MAKE any, and I didn't even before I could download. CDs borrowed from other people are a different story entirely, they account for about 2/3 of what I've collected. Admittedly most of THAT is crap too, but quite frequently I have never even gotten around to listening to it. I just grabbed it when it passed by, in case I never saw it again.
For the record, the last thing I downloaded was Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music. I'm glad I did, because now I don't have to go through the effort of trying to return it!
More than that, all you have to do is encrypt the file (as a zip or a tar or a rar or whatever) and put the key in the filename. If your file is spotted and blocked, you just re-encrypt with a new key. The encryption doesn't have to be great, you're not really trying to stop anyone from reading the file. It's just quick and dirty obfuscation to get it past the hash filters.
Of course if the filters can pick the password out and decrypt the file before checking it, then some sort of obfuscation for the password will also be necessary, but that's not hard to do, and it'll slow down automated filters a lot more than it'll slow down wan^H^H^Hconsumers.
> Since the student is submitting to the plagarism detector himself, he can plagarize, then tweak then test and if it fails the test, he can tweak it some more until eventually it passes the plagarism test.
What happens when you steal parts of three different essays and paste them together? Also, what happens when you are properly quoting someone, with citations and all that?
Often a change of a word or two can dramatically alter the meaning of a passage. Is this enough to pass from "plagiarism" to "satire"? How can a computer tell? If it can't, will a human be checking up on each flagged "violation" or will the student simply receive a fail because "the computer is always right?"
Completely off-topic, but why hasn't the goatse.cx de-registration hit the front page? Those who still can should go there and read (yes, read) the document there. It already won't resolve here.
Exactly. After all, the chips are the property of the casino, only the money they are worth is yours. I don't have a problem with the casino tracking something they own. Want to break the tracking? Cash out, get new chips (there or somewhere else). It's that simple. I *really* have no problem with RFIDing chips that are not meant to move from table to table, such as roulette chips. You're required to cash out when you leave (assuming you have anything left, which a lot of people don't).
As for card counting, I have done it quite openly. The fact is they don't care if you're counting cards at the $3 minimum/$25 maximum table. They'll just be more aggressive in providing the free drinks, both to get you drunk and to distract you from your count. I'm sure the story is different on the high-roller tables.
The only game I'll drink while playing is roulette, and that only when I already have my favorable numbers sussed out. The main difficulty is finding a wheel that's out of true, and figuring out its tendencies. In my experience, 10-15% of the wheels out there are out of true enough to give YOU the advantage over the house. Once you've figured out what numbers to play (or more accurately, what segment of the wheel), you can drink all you like. All you have to do is remember what you've already figured out.
I've openly admitted to pit bosses that I chose a particular table because the wheel is somewhat predictable. They let me keep on playing anyhow. I've even had them stand there and watch, rather than being called over every time the dealer has to pay me stacks in excess of $300. They know what I'm doing, but there's nothing illegal about it. If they don't want me to do it, they should pull the table out of service and replace it with one in better condition (which actually happened to me once in the Bahamas). It's not like I'm betting "under the radar" either -- if I find a "hot" wheel, it's not unusual to be throwing $80 a spin on the table ($10 x 8 numbers, all in sequence on the wheel).
For those who go to Vegas, I'll tell you that the last time I was there I found nicely biased tables at both the Sahara and the Lady Luck. I took the Lady Luck for a hundred or so, which I spent somewhere else in the same casino (so I doubt they mind), but the Sahara I took for about $400 and only played half of that back. My winnings at roulette covered the entire cost of our trip, save for vehicle wear and tear.
You do need a resonably large starting sum to pull this off. If you don't have enough money to survive 20 losses before hitting a winner (at 35:1), then don't play. $100 is generally a minimum starting sum, since most tables require $5 on every spin. And you COULD lose it all if you play the wrong table. I was $200 down from playing the wrong tables before I found the one I could predict, and won $600 in 30 minutes, leaving me up $400. So don't expect that it's a given that you will win. You may have to invest a few hundred bucks in acquiring the skill of reading an imbalanced wheel. It's well worth it though -- I leave Las Vegas with more money than I arrived with about 2/3 of the time. I'm sure anyone with the ability to do rough statistical modeling in their head can do the same.
Mal-2
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Odd, my experience has been the opposite -- that geeky women generally know the hardware better than they do the software. They very much dislike calling in someone else to do anything they know how to do themselves as well, a trait most of us probably know quite well.
Once my employer had received several AS/400 processors, and when it arrived, the married, thirtysomething woman who was second-in-charge said "so, when does he [the boss] want me to install them?".
Statements like that are worth more than nice legs at any company with a sense of self-preservation.
Camera functions are the worst thing to happen to the mobile phone since neon faceplates. They're being seen now as a privacy and security risk (though they always have been, just with sound instead of images) and banned from various places, such as locker rooms and test facilities. Merely having your phone ring during an insurance licensing test is grounds for an immediate fail. Retake fees being what they are, the state actively pursues all legal (and sometimes not legal, such as outright fraud on the part of the examiners in the Scantron days -- if they didn't like your sandals and t-shirt they'd "correct" your "A" revision test with a "B" revision key) methods at their disposal to see that you take the test as many times as possible.
If using a phone causes undue hardship to others, or allows unfair advantage (cheating on tests, anyone?) then ban its use in that particular environment... okay, that makes sense. You may not LIKE it, but at least there's some reason for it. But now that phones are coming with cameras as a matter of routine, they become LESS useful in some of the very situations where they were previously useful. Are you quietly texting someone to keep the library quiet or reading a message, or are you trying to snap upskirt pics of the girl in the next row? The professional worriers can't tell, so they simply insist you not use (or possibly even possess) the phone at all. Sounds a lot like MS service pack "fixes". By adding one feature, they break others.
All I've seen in thrift stores is old (but functional) TVs that are tuner-only. In order to use such an old beast with the PS2, he'd also need an RF modulator... or a VCR, which doesn't have to work for anything else.
I've used a broken VCR as a cable box at more than one place. I'm using a working one now, and it gets maybe 10 hours of tape use a year. It also serves as the RF modulator when I run the TV out from my video card. It wouldn't deal with Macrovision I'm sure, but I don't need it to.
I got the latest AOL CD in the mail the other day, and it went in the microwave as it always does. However, the little tin it came in is actually rather nice. Now I just have to figure out a use for it beyond the obvious "protect CD/DVD" and "target practice" applications.
Keep on sending them, AOL! Keep the discs, send more boxes, that is!
Having the (mis)fortune to work on C3 and PIII machines at the same time, I can tell you that a 650 MHz PIII runs rings around a 1.1 GHz C3 the way the Road Runner always manages to run circles around the coyote. The IPC of the C3 chips is down -- WAY down -- versus your typical desktop processor, especially on floating point ops. I can say with confidence that a 650 MHz Athlon is also going to blow away any C3 made thus far. I thought a 1.1 GHz C3 would make an adequate office PC if you threw enough RAM at it. It doesn't. Try streaming Internet radio while doing work in Office XP and you'll see exactly what I mean.
I probably will build a C3-based media box, but I don't expect it to have the number crunching abilities to do any more than MPEG-2 SVCD encoding on the fly. This may be adequate now, but it's not going to be very happy with DVD-resolution video.
The obvious solution, of course, is to rescue and resurrect all the P3 and Athlon systems being dumped by people who should know better.:) Unless you REQUIRE a 15 cm square board for your project, you can probably manage a lot more bang for the buck with used mini-ATX boards.
"Approved by the Code Code", indicating that it does not use offensive or un-PC terms such as "Master/Slave". Very useful in getting those L.A. County contracts.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is nice because lunar aluminum, silicone, etc will be what we build virtually any big orbital structure out of.
If we build the structure out of silicone, no work will get done as the miners stand around and squeeze it all day long.
Mal-2
Even if you buy by the case, you don't typically carry that case around once you get it home. Buy a whole pallet of Cheetos if you want, you're going to be carrying individual bags when you go anywhere. Not only that, but Sam's Club is probably going to want their pallet back. If the RFID tag gets discarded with the bulk packaging, why does it really matter? If you're afraid of getting your trash scanned, nuke it first.
:) Really it would be in their own best interests to mark used tags in the database, and not allow them to be re-used.
Now resellers may indeed have a problem, as "mystery guests" might be able to tell if that pallet of Cheetos on the shelf came from their store, which forbids "sales to dealers". It's unlikely they'll care (they already got paid) but at least it's plausible.
It may seem a small step from tagging the crates to tagging the products, but until that step is taken, they can't track you... even if you buy by the crate. They'll know the crate left the store, which is fine -- that's how they know to put out another one. Then how likely are you to be carrying the crate around with you in daily life?
If they really DO attempt to track the crate, it opens up any number of spoofing possibilites. You could fill the crate with dehydrated dog shit, tape it up, and leave it out back of their store. After a few such incidents, they'd know not to just bring in a crate and shelve it based on its tag alone.
I'm as much a tinfoil-hat type as the bulk of you, but this isn't that big a deal. It's worthwhile to let companies know in no uncertain terms where the line of acceptability is BEFORE they cross it, however.
TRACK YOUR GOODS = acceptable, TRACK MY GOODS OR PERSON = unacceptable. Pretty simple.
Mal-2
Garlic is useful in another, simpler (and tastier) way. Just plant one clove of garlic every few feet of garden, and most insects will avoid your garden. They're not the most aesthetically pleasing plants (they look like any other bulb plant minus the pretty flowers) but they aren't offensive either. This requires no special maintenance beyond what you'd be putting into the garden anyhow, and as a nice side benefit you will find an entire bulb of garlic underground come harvest time.
Also falling into the non-hazardous pest control category would be cola bottles with something still at the bottom (insects drop in to eat, can't fly back out), and leaving shallow containers filled with beer around for slugs and snails to climb into. Then they get drunk and drown.
I believe it is diatomaceous earth that is at the hear of the "ant chalk" you can buy at the local 99 cent store. If not, it's probably borax, which as far as I know operates by the same means.
Mal-2
This is almost certainly out of your control, but there is a solution to the problem. It'll take money but it does work. That answer is to move.
Not move to another existing building, with all the property buying (or leasing) and hauling that entails. Move on-site. Build another building in the parking lot, and when it's done, you all move in there. Demolish the old building and pave it over and park there. You'll have to park in the boonies for a year or so, but if it's a job you could see yourself staying with, it'd be worth it.
I bet a lot of the people above you in the organization would be just as happy about it as you would if it actually happened, so propose it. Worst that'll happen is that they laugh at you, it hardly seems like a firing offense to say "we need a new building, so we should build one".
Mal-2
I saw Steppenwolf live on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. They were quite audible from the 7th floor of the Lady Luck, and it was intolerably loud two blocks away. By the time we were within one block, we had to duck inside Binion's Horseshoe just to keep our ears from bleeding. We exited out the other side where it was somewhat quieter, but by that time one of our group had started to bad trip. I would question the wisdom of eating a quarter bag of mushrooms and heading out onto Fremont Street even with no band present... and she knew the band would be there (we could already hear them) before consuming.
:)
Out of a group of seven we had three who were drunk, one who was drunk AND stoned, two who were just stoned, and one who was both tripping and stoned. It wasn't exactly an example of fine activity planning, and was very strange as the two youngest members of the group (23 and 30, the latter being me) had to try to keep the other five (who you'd think would know better) from wandering off and hurting themselves.
All this proves is that Las Vegas may not be the best "neutral site" for an IRC channel gathering.
Mal-2
The day we have Internet-connected dildoes is the day a new era dawns, and it represents nothing short of the beginning of the end of mankind. This is the future, and the future is called "dildonics". Now instead of having cybersex via a keyboard and your own hand, you can have your genital stimulation machines manipulated by SOMEONE ELSE'S HAND (or other parts).
At first it will seem a novelty. Within a few decades, it'll be more popular than real sex involving infectious agents and bodily fluids. Those who grow up with the technology won't even realize the potential for harm. Breeding will become completely optional (you won't even have accidents to speak of), and marriage will be doubly so.
The fastest growing population sectors will remain in the Third World, and sheer numbers will mean there is no organized resistance to the barbarians at the gates. Robots will be pushed out of jobs by underpaid laborers who prove even cheaper than maintenance on the machinery, since only a small handful of people will know how to service them and they'll be busy virtually fucking, or installing eSex machines. When the number of the unwashed masses reaches some critical point, they will overthrow their soft, flabby, oversexed masters, quite possibly with the help of the clinically depressed robots they displaced.
Enjoy your Paris Hilton video. Operation FUCKUP is coming.
Or not.
Mal-2
Why not go digging where the airbags have already scraped off a good portion of the surface layer? All right, the strangeness of the soil was totally unexpected, and nobody had anticipated the airbags would cause that kind of "damage", but why not use it to our advantage?
Mal-2
These people are in business to make money, legally or otherwise. Here's what I've done to fax spammers to drive up costs:
:|| (vamp and fade)
:)
1. Receive fax? Use toll-free opt-out number immediately. If there are no more faxes, fine.
2. Second fax from same people (whether it's the same product or not)? Opt out twice, they obviously didn't notice the first time.
3. Third fax? Program autodialer to tie up their opt-out line for 20 minutes at a time by whatever option says "no i made a mistake entering the number, let me do it again". It enters a new number and waits. It tries again. Something like
18005555555,,, ||: 1,3,1,0,5,5,5,1,2,1,2,,,,2,,,,
Meanwhile use that newfangled Intarweb thingy to track down the spammers for a little show of love.
The most persistent fax spammer I've had to deal with was dialing in from near Vancouver (Coquitlam, IIRC) and I was unable to get their identities ("Info4U", maybe they spam you too) but I did figure out how to set the fax machine to cap its receive speed at 2400bps before I'd go home at night. Faxes coming in overnight were either relatively local and legit (they faxed us 10 times a day with pickup and delivery orders, they wouldn't notice they took 3 minutes instead of 40 seconds to send those two pages) or from spammers. This raised both the monetary and opportunity cost to the spammers, but probably not enough to matter. If EVERYONE did this though...
Mal-2
Picture this:
:)
Hunter S. Thompson, a case of beer, a fifth of cheap tequila, a case of whip-its, and an 8-ball cut with rat poison.
Yeah, I think that's how articles like this happen.
Mal-2
The AGP slot in Shuttle's cases is literally right next to the case wall.
I think you've seen the answer to that, maybe without realizing it. A mesh-covered window will take care of that. The mesh can be cannibalized from a metal inbox. You wouldn't even need the whole treatment, since you know exactly where the GPU fan is. A simple hole saw and a drill should do it, which is much less effort than an hour with the Dremel.
As a more extreme re-engineering/cram job, you could watercool it. If you leave the adequate CPU cooler as is, you would only need to cool the GPU and RAM, allowing for the use of a small 12VDC pump. The radiator wouldn't have to be as large as most, though it would still have to dangle from the back of the case.
complete inability to do any work inside the case without disassembling the whole damned thing.
Unless the parts inside are smaller as well, this seems rather inevitable, doesn't it? It might even be enough to drive some to adding external drives rather than fighting the innards of the beast, which would really be counterproductive in terms of space used. The only answer I can think of would be to make something that looks pretty much like a desknote or laptop sans battery, which makes it an entirely different kind of machine.
Mal-2
It is apparent, from the fact that you watch ST at all, that there is no such thing as an "unforgivable continuity breach".
Mal-2
On another point, how often is a file legitimately mailed to a large number of users in a single organization? Perhaps a server that could say "25% of the users have gotten this exact (renamed) file, quarantine it and all previously received and subsequent copies" is in order. Sure the early birds will still get hit, but it should stop the snowball before it becomes an avalanche.
Mal-2
I don't listen to commercial radio, so any time I go sniffing around a p2p network, it's generally either old or on someone else's behalf. If it's new and interesting, then generally someone I know will tell me about it and helpfully provide me with a link or a simple "it's on my ftp" message.
This is not to defend my position, but I can honestly say my p2p downloading has NO effect on my purchases of new music. That is because I don't MAKE any, and I didn't even before I could download. CDs borrowed from other people are a different story entirely, they account for about 2/3 of what I've collected. Admittedly most of THAT is crap too, but quite frequently I have never even gotten around to listening to it. I just grabbed it when it passed by, in case I never saw it again.
For the record, the last thing I downloaded was Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music. I'm glad I did, because now I don't have to go through the effort of trying to return it!
Mal-2
now with extra chunky goodness
More than that, all you have to do is encrypt the file (as a zip or a tar or a rar or whatever) and put the key in the filename. If your file is spotted and blocked, you just re-encrypt with a new key. The encryption doesn't have to be great, you're not really trying to stop anyone from reading the file. It's just quick and dirty obfuscation to get it past the hash filters.
Of course if the filters can pick the password out and decrypt the file before checking it, then some sort of obfuscation for the password will also be necessary, but that's not hard to do, and it'll slow down automated filters a lot more than it'll slow down wan^H^H^Hconsumers.
Mal-2
> Since the student is submitting to the plagarism detector himself, he can plagarize, then tweak then test and if it fails the test, he can tweak it some more until eventually it passes the plagarism test.
What happens when you steal parts of three different essays and paste them together? Also, what happens when you are properly quoting someone, with citations and all that?
Often a change of a word or two can dramatically alter the meaning of a passage. Is this enough to pass from "plagiarism" to "satire"? How can a computer tell? If it can't, will a human be checking up on each flagged "violation" or will the student simply receive a fail because "the computer is always right?"
Completely off-topic, but why hasn't the goatse.cx de-registration hit the front page? Those who still can should go there and read (yes, read) the document there. It already won't resolve here.
Mal-2
Exactly. After all, the chips are the property of the casino, only the money they are worth is yours. I don't have a problem with the casino tracking something they own. Want to break the tracking? Cash out, get new chips (there or somewhere else). It's that simple. I *really* have no problem with RFIDing chips that are not meant to move from table to table, such as roulette chips. You're required to cash out when you leave (assuming you have anything left, which a lot of people don't).
As for card counting, I have done it quite openly. The fact is they don't care if you're counting cards at the $3 minimum/$25 maximum table. They'll just be more aggressive in providing the free drinks, both to get you drunk and to distract you from your count. I'm sure the story is different on the high-roller tables.
The only game I'll drink while playing is roulette, and that only when I already have my favorable numbers sussed out. The main difficulty is finding a wheel that's out of true, and figuring out its tendencies. In my experience, 10-15% of the wheels out there are out of true enough to give YOU the advantage over the house. Once you've figured out what numbers to play (or more accurately, what segment of the wheel), you can drink all you like. All you have to do is remember what you've already figured out.
I've openly admitted to pit bosses that I chose a particular table because the wheel is somewhat predictable. They let me keep on playing anyhow. I've even had them stand there and watch, rather than being called over every time the dealer has to pay me stacks in excess of $300. They know what I'm doing, but there's nothing illegal about it. If they don't want me to do it, they should pull the table out of service and replace it with one in better condition (which actually happened to me once in the Bahamas). It's not like I'm betting "under the radar" either -- if I find a "hot" wheel, it's not unusual to be throwing $80 a spin on the table ($10 x 8 numbers, all in sequence on the wheel).
For those who go to Vegas, I'll tell you that the last time I was there I found nicely biased tables at both the Sahara and the Lady Luck. I took the Lady Luck for a hundred or so, which I spent somewhere else in the same casino (so I doubt they mind), but the Sahara I took for about $400 and only played half of that back. My winnings at roulette covered the entire cost of our trip, save for vehicle wear and tear.
You do need a resonably large starting sum to pull this off. If you don't have enough money to survive 20 losses before hitting a winner (at 35:1), then don't play. $100 is generally a minimum starting sum, since most tables require $5 on every spin. And you COULD lose it all if you play the wrong table. I was $200 down from playing the wrong tables before I found the one I could predict, and won $600 in 30 minutes, leaving me up $400. So don't expect that it's a given that you will win. You may have to invest a few hundred bucks in acquiring the skill of reading an imbalanced wheel. It's well worth it though -- I leave Las Vegas with more money than I arrived with about 2/3 of the time. I'm sure anyone with the ability to do rough statistical modeling in their head can do the same.
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Odd, my experience has been the opposite -- that geeky women generally know the hardware better than they do the software. They very much dislike calling in someone else to do anything they know how to do themselves as well, a trait most of us probably know quite well.
Once my employer had received several AS/400 processors, and when it arrived, the married, thirtysomething woman who was second-in-charge said "so, when does he [the boss] want me to install them?".
Statements like that are worth more than nice legs at any company with a sense of self-preservation.
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If using a phone causes undue hardship to others, or allows unfair advantage (cheating on tests, anyone?) then ban its use in that particular environment... okay, that makes sense. You may not LIKE it, but at least there's some reason for it. But now that phones are coming with cameras as a matter of routine, they become LESS useful in some of the very situations where they were previously useful. Are you quietly texting someone to keep the library quiet or reading a message, or are you trying to snap upskirt pics of the girl in the next row? The professional worriers can't tell, so they simply insist you not use (or possibly even possess) the phone at all. Sounds a lot like MS service pack "fixes". By adding one feature, they break others.
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All I've seen in thrift stores is old (but functional) TVs that are tuner-only. In order to use such an old beast with the PS2, he'd also need an RF modulator... or a VCR, which doesn't have to work for anything else.
I've used a broken VCR as a cable box at more than one place. I'm using a working one now, and it gets maybe 10 hours of tape use a year. It also serves as the RF modulator when I run the TV out from my video card. It wouldn't deal with Macrovision I'm sure, but I don't need it to.
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Would it be called Goatse-O's?
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It's the landing strips for queer aliens. THEY don't want you to know. fnord
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I got the latest AOL CD in the mail the other day, and it went in the microwave as it always does. However, the little tin it came in is actually rather nice. Now I just have to figure out a use for it beyond the obvious "protect CD/DVD" and "target practice" applications.
Keep on sending them, AOL! Keep the discs, send more boxes, that is!
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Having the (mis)fortune to work on C3 and PIII machines at the same time, I can tell you that a 650 MHz PIII runs rings around a 1.1 GHz C3 the way the Road Runner always manages to run circles around the coyote. The IPC of the C3 chips is down -- WAY down -- versus your typical desktop processor, especially on floating point ops. I can say with confidence that a 650 MHz Athlon is also going to blow away any C3 made thus far. I thought a 1.1 GHz C3 would make an adequate office PC if you threw enough RAM at it. It doesn't. Try streaming Internet radio while doing work in Office XP and you'll see exactly what I mean.
:) Unless you REQUIRE a 15 cm square board for your project, you can probably manage a lot more bang for the buck with used mini-ATX boards.
I probably will build a C3-based media box, but I don't expect it to have the number crunching abilities to do any more than MPEG-2 SVCD encoding on the fly. This may be adequate now, but it's not going to be very happy with DVD-resolution video.
The obvious solution, of course, is to rescue and resurrect all the P3 and Athlon systems being dumped by people who should know better.
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Or perhaps...
"Approved by the Code Code", indicating that it does not use offensive or un-PC terms such as "Master/Slave". Very useful in getting those L.A. County contracts.
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If it weren't for that "useless third", all civilization would have long ago been wiped out by infections caused by particularly dirty telephones!
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