Heh. Now I'm thinking of something involving rigging a freestanding ATM so that as soon as it's filled, it gets ripped out of the ground and choppered away, or the back falls off and the money shoots out into a waiting pouch.
Caper movie scene: New guards fill up an ATM and drive off. ATM turns out to be a fake; the building frontage had been switched with the one next door. I guess it would only work if ATM refills were done somewhere outside normal business hours... unless the directions to the ATM were switched as well, and a fake security team arrived and refilled the real ATM with counterfeit notes at the same time...
It's all a bit silly, though. The largest bill currently around is $100; if you want to steal enough of them to retire on with even a moderate lifestyle, that's going to be a fair chunk of mass to lug around, hide, and/or eventually distribute. Unless you have access to a cash laundering system, I guess. There really aren't that many ways you can acquire high-value assets with cash without attracting the attention of various authorities. Try buying a car worth more than a couple of thousand dollars, or a house, or even paying rent in some places. Then try doing it without attracting the attention of the tax authorities.
In which case, you make your "once-off" crime ripping off a whole bunch of fully-stocked ATMs in the same night.
As long as you can perform an action or series of actions before the cops/security/investigators can react and put measures in place to prevent or hamper you doing it again, it counts as a once-off.
What gets me is that an ATM restocker/repairguy would be the perfect person to commit physical money laundering: if you had a whole lot of hot cash (maybe the serial numbers are sequential, or being looked for by the police), you could simply swap it for the ATM's stash and let the ATM distribute the results.
This is of course assuming that the serial numbers of cash which goes into ATMs aren't recorded. Then you're right back where you started once the trail leads back to the ATM. Although a high-capacity ATM in a busy CBD might make it difficult to determine exactly which batch of ATM cash had been substituted, which means the range of serial numbers of interest to the police would increase and they'd have to track down more false trails.
Tried it. It's a lot harder to separate multiple simultaneous conversations when they're all coming in on the same channel and there's no easily browsable history.
And one conversation at a time makes my brain want to kill itself for lack of input. Particularly when that conversation itself makes me want to slap the talker for lack of intelligence. That's not enriching, that's taking a bath in acid. Really, really BORING acid.
So it would seem that a lot less war and death in general would occur if we just shot anyone who tried to convince the country they were being attacked.
Less silly these days, given global information networks and the ability for a lot of people to verify the evidence behind such claims.
Perhaps any claim of being attacked on a national scale should be accompanied by the announcing political party voluntarily standing down from all positions of power. I mean, if the evidence is true, then any subsequently elected representatives would be able to verify it, and of course any true patriot in the ruling party would be more than happy to put the fate of the nation above their own political careers, if the matter was indeed that important.
...oh wait, it's not THAT important after all, and we're not really at war? You don't say!
An individual who doesn't have religion inevitably creates something to fill that space.
What would mine be, then? I'm not religious, I have no particularly strong brand preferences, celebrity and idolism in all forms seems vaguely creepy, I don't have personal heroes, and the few things I occasionally collect amount to spending about an hour's pay a year and five minutes browsing eBay, and it all fits into one bookcase.
I don't have strong ties to any one location. I don't follow sports teams. I'm not into waving the national or state flags. I was into getting as much desktop real estate as I could for a while, but with modern hi-rez screens I have plenty now, thanks.
I'm not a part of local community clubs. I don't regularly go out to the same places. The various things I think are cool enough to put personal time into researching only hold my attention for a few years, at most. The closest thing I have to a long-term admiration for is elegance, and even that's not exactly a burning passion.
China has fifty times Australia's population. Indonesia has ten times. If either of them feel like invading, all they have to do is keep swarming over the border until we run out of shrimp and barbies to throw at them.
Yeah, but the ten guys putting in a couple of hours are going to duplicate a lot of each others' work when it comes to finding the really deep bugs. Buffer overruns are easy, subtle implications of common yet ever-so-slightly mismatched data structures spread across fourteen modules are less so.
Celebrity isn't something that's always controllable by the person involved. If an outside agency decides you're a celebrity, you are one, like it or not. Should you have to suck up what would previously have been violations of your privacy? The 'compensations' of celebrity aren't always things that everyone wants.
Personally, I'd value being able to walk down the street unknown and enjoy the day over every vapid tabloid-reader in the world knowing my name and face. I don't want to be approached to appear on commercials or crappy TV programs, I don't want to be the subject of articles in either BRW or Hello! magazine, and I don't want my face on a salad dressing.
So where's the option for opting out of celebrity, once some media outlet decides it's going to be the all-you channel, all the time?
It's actually a bonus from Cisco's point of view. If the morality heat gets turned up high enough, someone's going to pass a law saying that American networking companies can't sell kit to China. As long as _no_ American companies can sell to China, Cisco's going to be less concerned about its marketplace position than if only _they_ can't sell to China.
Of course, at that point it simply becomes a case of feeding the black market. The Chinese government pays triple for its networking gear and doesn't even notice, a bunch of shady people get very rich, and the market rolls on.
Fastballs are impressive because they're launched at their travel speeds, and the effort is on the part of the pitcher. They don't have built-in rockets to accelerate them after they're thrown. An actual baseball pitcher could have thrown a ball faster than the shuttle lifted off the pads.
Run the algorithm in reverse. A politician says "I want more tax breaks for people in X circumstance. Find the combination of smallest tax law adjustments which would result in this while not affecting anybody else by more than 0.05% (because then they'd complain)."
Alternatively, run thousands of parallel copies of the algorithm to find out the smallest changes you could make to your life (or even how you report your cashflow) in order to maximise your after-tax income. Who needs an accountant when the computer can find out you get a $10,000 tax break if you invest $20.68 in Jim's Fruit, Film-Making, and Not-Farming Franchise?
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. Now I'm thinking of something involving rigging a freestanding ATM so that as soon as it's filled, it gets ripped out of the ground and choppered away, or the back falls off and the money shoots out into a waiting pouch.
Caper movie scene: New guards fill up an ATM and drive off. ATM turns out to be a fake; the building frontage had been switched with the one next door. I guess it would only work if ATM refills were done somewhere outside normal business hours... unless the directions to the ATM were switched as well, and a fake security team arrived and refilled the real ATM with counterfeit notes at the same time...
It's all a bit silly, though. The largest bill currently around is $100; if you want to steal enough of them to retire on with even a moderate lifestyle, that's going to be a fair chunk of mass to lug around, hide, and/or eventually distribute. Unless you have access to a cash laundering system, I guess. There really aren't that many ways you can acquire high-value assets with cash without attracting the attention of various authorities. Try buying a car worth more than a couple of thousand dollars, or a house, or even paying rent in some places. Then try doing it without attracting the attention of the tax authorities.
In which case, you make your "once-off" crime ripping off a whole bunch of fully-stocked ATMs in the same night.
As long as you can perform an action or series of actions before the cops/security/investigators can react and put measures in place to prevent or hamper you doing it again, it counts as a once-off.
What gets me is that an ATM restocker/repairguy would be the perfect person to commit physical money laundering: if you had a whole lot of hot cash (maybe the serial numbers are sequential, or being looked for by the police), you could simply swap it for the ATM's stash and let the ATM distribute the results.
This is of course assuming that the serial numbers of cash which goes into ATMs aren't recorded. Then you're right back where you started once the trail leads back to the ATM. Although a high-capacity ATM in a busy CBD might make it difficult to determine exactly which batch of ATM cash had been substituted, which means the range of serial numbers of interest to the police would increase and they'd have to track down more false trails.
Hell, if he was in political office in Australia he'd be known as "Barmy Bazza" by one and all, and it would make his ratings skyrocket.
How was the Zuckerburger?
Tried it. It's a lot harder to separate multiple simultaneous conversations when they're all coming in on the same channel and there's no easily browsable history.
And one conversation at a time makes my brain want to kill itself for lack of input. Particularly when that conversation itself makes me want to slap the talker for lack of intelligence. That's not enriching, that's taking a bath in acid. Really, really BORING acid.
Note to users: command 'finger' has been replaced with command 'tsa'.
1 in 2 downloads from Microsoft is maliciously collecting data on your download habits...
How do Boston political leanings compare with first-world Western countries in general?
That quote alone was worth winning the war
So it would seem that a lot less war and death in general would occur if we just shot anyone who tried to convince the country they were being attacked.
Less silly these days, given global information networks and the ability for a lot of people to verify the evidence behind such claims.
Perhaps any claim of being attacked on a national scale should be accompanied by the announcing political party voluntarily standing down from all positions of power. I mean, if the evidence is true, then any subsequently elected representatives would be able to verify it, and of course any true patriot in the ruling party would be more than happy to put the fate of the nation above their own political careers, if the matter was indeed that important.
Better: after September this year, the ten-year comparisons will show swimming pools are THOUSANDS of times more deadly than terrorists!
An individual who doesn't have religion inevitably creates something to fill that space.
What would mine be, then? I'm not religious, I have no particularly strong brand preferences, celebrity and idolism in all forms seems vaguely creepy, I don't have personal heroes, and the few things I occasionally collect amount to spending about an hour's pay a year and five minutes browsing eBay, and it all fits into one bookcase.
I don't have strong ties to any one location. I don't follow sports teams. I'm not into waving the national or state flags. I was into getting as much desktop real estate as I could for a while, but with modern hi-rez screens I have plenty now, thanks.
I'm not a part of local community clubs. I don't regularly go out to the same places. The various things I think are cool enough to put personal time into researching only hold my attention for a few years, at most. The closest thing I have to a long-term admiration for is elegance, and even that's not exactly a burning passion.
So what, exactly, is my religion-substitute?
Sure, it requires a lot of CPU and electricity... but who says it has to be yours? With us now in the studio is Shady Russian Botnet Guy...
China has fifty times Australia's population. Indonesia has ten times. If either of them feel like invading, all they have to do is keep swarming over the border until we run out of shrimp and barbies to throw at them.
Yeah, but the ten guys putting in a couple of hours are going to duplicate a lot of each others' work when it comes to finding the really deep bugs. Buffer overruns are easy, subtle implications of common yet ever-so-slightly mismatched data structures spread across fourteen modules are less so.
'With games, learning is the drug,' writes Raph Koster
Insert slightly uncomfortable "America's War on Drugs" joke here...
Whoa.
Celebrity isn't something that's always controllable by the person involved. If an outside agency decides you're a celebrity, you are one, like it or not. Should you have to suck up what would previously have been violations of your privacy? The 'compensations' of celebrity aren't always things that everyone wants.
Personally, I'd value being able to walk down the street unknown and enjoy the day over every vapid tabloid-reader in the world knowing my name and face. I don't want to be approached to appear on commercials or crappy TV programs, I don't want to be the subject of articles in either BRW or Hello! magazine, and I don't want my face on a salad dressing.
So where's the option for opting out of celebrity, once some media outlet decides it's going to be the all-you channel, all the time?
Or tweet that you've thrown a shoe at someone extremely unpopular on the net, whose claims it never happened will be considered censorship.
Hey, Starscream, I know what we're going to do today!
It's actually a bonus from Cisco's point of view. If the morality heat gets turned up high enough, someone's going to pass a law saying that American networking companies can't sell kit to China. As long as _no_ American companies can sell to China, Cisco's going to be less concerned about its marketplace position than if only _they_ can't sell to China.
Of course, at that point it simply becomes a case of feeding the black market. The Chinese government pays triple for its networking gear and doesn't even notice, a bunch of shady people get very rich, and the market rolls on.
This *is* the internet.
Fastballs are impressive because they're launched at their travel speeds, and the effort is on the part of the pitcher. They don't have built-in rockets to accelerate them after they're thrown. An actual baseball pitcher could have thrown a ball faster than the shuttle lifted off the pads.
Paper and pencil? You developers and your outrageous demands! You'll use rocks for zeroes and like it!
If the company wants a good programmer to be more productive they'll give them as many monitors as they ask for.
Seriously. "Hey, Bob wants six monitors. Shit, that's under a grand total. Take it out of petty cash."
Run the algorithm in reverse. A politician says "I want more tax breaks for people in X circumstance. Find the combination of smallest tax law adjustments which would result in this while not affecting anybody else by more than 0.05% (because then they'd complain)."
Alternatively, run thousands of parallel copies of the algorithm to find out the smallest changes you could make to your life (or even how you report your cashflow) in order to maximise your after-tax income. Who needs an accountant when the computer can find out you get a $10,000 tax break if you invest $20.68 in Jim's Fruit, Film-Making, and Not-Farming Franchise?