Probably not. I've repaired and/or replaced many keypads and phone jacks on CC terminals over the years. I've done this for readers made by several different companies and many levels of features, including Hypercom (the most popular brand), and terminals that have RFID readers and external pinpads. Opening them up has always been easy, and they accept my soldering iron and screwdrivers just fine. I doubt there's much in the way of tamper-proofing on the portable ones either, even though I've never worked on them, considering the lack of tamper-proofing on anything else they make.

We have this in Michigan. You can see how many critical and non-critical violations each restaurant in the state had at the last semi-annual health inspection. It sucks for the restaurants though, since silly things are "critical", like having a dumpster lid (outdoors) open from the wind, or a completely shaved-bald man not wearing a hairnet, or cutting a milk dispenser bag nipple at a 30deg angle instead of 45deg, or using a steamtable rated for reheating food instead of a double boiler or the oven. The latter one's particularly ridiculous, since the steamtable in question brings the food up to temp in the exact same amount of time as a double boiler (this has been tested and documented) and ovens don't reheat large amounts of food in anything approaching a reasonable amount of time. In case you're wondering, reasonable to me is one hour to get to 160 deg F. Double boilers and proper steamtables do this. The oven doesn't. It doesn't even do it in legal time (2 hr). Before you say I'm crazy, try it. Reheat a gallon of 33 deg F gravy in the oven some time.

Some of the non-critical stuff has been pretty silly, too. Like the time we got written up for having a bathroom door closer that shut the door too fast. Or the time the health inspector "smelled mice" (huh) in a different bathroom. I'm not sure what mice smell like, but I'm pretty sure that someone had just taken a dump. The mice bait traps throughout the building had been empty for years at that point and no one had seen a mouse turd in aeons. Or the time he saw an unused crackpipe (crackpipes are made of glass test tubes which come with paper roses in them at gas stations. You break one end, put some steelwool and crack in and heat.) in an employee's locker and made him clean out the locker for broken glass hazard. I was cracking up laughing.The crackhead was fired later for smoking crack in the bathroom. And also for fighting with his girlfriend in the bathroom, after smoking the crack. The girlfriend won. The bathroom sink and toilet required replacement. It was the girlfriend's crack.

Heroin overdose among experienced users with steady supplies are unheard of. Heroin is quite safe, actually. The overdose problem is usually among black-tar heroin users who inject or snort (rather than smoke or eat) who then buy white powder heroin. Black-tar heroin is very impure (20-30%), being manufactured directly from unpurified opium or poppy straw extract, while white powder heroin is very pure(80%+, unless heavily cut), being manufactured from purified morphine. Even when cut, white powder heroin tends to be at least twice a potent as black-tar. Furthermore, black-tar and white powder are misnomers; both are yellow to yellowish brown, which is how those overdoses happen.

Until recently, white powder heroin was only available in large cities such as NYC, but now it's moving West, leading to a string of overdose deaths along the east coast and as far west as Michigan.

If it were regulated and legal, this entire class of overdose deaths would be eliminated. Considering that this type of overdose death is the majority of overdose deaths in the US, we are killing people by keeping it illegal. Considering the rate of overdose deaths among long-time users, legalization would result in fewer overall deaths, even if everyone picked up the habit. Now that you know all this, you and all other prohibitionists, especially those in Congress, are engaged in willful murder.

Have fun sleeping tonight, murderer.

I see that your Aunt's son is very bright. (and also nephew)

Exactly. The dictionary specifically says that America, used alone, refers to the USA. America, with North or South prepended to it, refer to the continents. And The Americas (plural, with the definite article), refers to both continents, together, with all countries therein. You'll note that "America" without any qualifiers, according to Webster (parse those definitions carefully), unambiguously means the United States of America.

I expect them to have working servers and the right number of them available on game day and the reason is Amazon. What EA should have done is put a few copies of their server software on Amazon's Cloud servers (EC3 or whatever it's called), tested them and threw them into the loadbalancer's server list with a low priority. When they got whacked they could have just increased their capacity with more Amazon until the storm is over. That's why this we're-ordering-more-servers bullshit is bullshit. They should have had excess capacity from the cloud for launch day and ordered servers as needed after the initial wave to save money. This should be true for everyone at this point, given the low cost of a nearly unused instance.

I've had a triple monitor setup for years, but I've never actually gamed on it. This article makes me want to give it a shot. Unfortunately, my machine is kind of low powered (Core 2 Duo E6???, Radeon 5770) for the more recent games that could actually use triple monitors, so maybe not. And, I hate most recent games. I wonder how Defense Grid would look on three.

I "zealot + Grammar Nazi = zelot grahamor" thought always.

On a side note, I've decided that grahaming is the process of writing English which sounds correct when spoken aloud but is subtly ungrammatical.

You missed what I was saying happened. The middle school had the "bomb". The High School was evacuated. The High School's students were put into the middle school, where the "bomb" was. That's the nonsense.

That was my reaction to a botched bomb-threat reaction when I was in eight grade. One of my friends called in the threat to the middle school from the middle school payphone at 7:45 AM. I heard the call, and he definitely said the bomb was in the middle school in a bathroom by the gym. At 8:30 AM, the high school (the two schools share a single campus) was evacuated into the middle school gym. At 9:00 AM, my friend was arrested. The evacuation was completely unnecessary, as they knew he called it by 8:00 anyway. He called his mom right afterward and said that she needed to pick him because a bomb threat had been called in. She called the school to find out if it was true, and they asked, "Wait, how did you know that again?" Anyway, in addition to the evacuation being unnecessary, it was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Why would you evacuate an unaffected school's population into the area containing the bomb, and why would you wait an hour and a half?

Not Catholic School but Baptist school or some-other-evangelical-protestant school. Catholic Schools (at the ones I've been around) are very serious about providing a proper education. Evolution and post-modern philosophy are right up at the top of that list. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Catholics believe in evolution. PJP2 said that evolution is simply one of the tools God used to create us. Or at least that's what the priest at my Grandfather's funeral said.

Have you considered embedding a blender in the door of a refrigerator with hoppers and a timer and a dispenser, so that we could be awakened by an automatically created fresh smoothie/milkshake waiting for us in our fridges?

I think you may need to go back to law school, Mr. Expert Lawyer. J.C.'s is a derivative work, yes, and so it doesn't automatically gain copyright protection except insofar as the individual recording is concerned (mechanical rights, IIRC). However, the underlying music is completely new. J.C. definitely holds a copyright on the music, excluding the lyrics which are still Mix-A-Lot's (or whoever). J.C.'s work is not a direct cover, it is substantially changed from the original, and as such, the changes receive their own copyright protection. This is Derivative Works 101 here. If J.C.'s cover had been faithful to Mix-A-Lot's original, or even reasonably close, you'd be right; J.C. would only have a case if Glee had used his actual performance. However, J.C.'s cover isn't faithful; it's a new creative work, derived from Mix-A-Lot, and, therefore, the differences are copyrightable.

You clearly don't live in Michigan where drunk driving penalties are already ridiculous. One DUI will cost you at least $5000 (reinstatement fee, jail costs (you WILL be arrested), driver responsibility fee, actual fine, probation costs), in addition to community service and probation.. A second will cost at least $7500 + some jail time + community service + probation + another $3000-$5000 if you ever want your license back. A third (and subsequent offences), is the same plus possible prison time (probable in some counties), plus a few more grand, and you're probably never getting your license back, no matter how hard you try. Forth offense is just asking for prison time.

And heaven forbid you get in an accident. You become personally liable for all medical costs and damages in an accident, and jail time is a given. If someone is killed or seriously injured, your asshole is sentenced to become a vagina for the next decade, as well.

Seriously, is that harsh enough, because it seems a bit ridiculous to me. Oh, and if you're above .15 BAC, jump up a level for being SuperDrunk.

First, he was 100% correct about cancer. Second, even if he doesn't know how homeopathy works, I do, and it doesn't. This is how homeopathic "medicines" (no, they aren't medicine; I'm not even willing to just put medicine in scare quotes and leave it at that. It must be said explicitly, homeopathy is not medicine; it is water.) are made:

1: Put random shit in bottle. Set counter C to 0.
2: Dilute 100:1 with water.
3: Shake solution up and down ten times.
4: Shake solution side to side ten times.
5: Shake solution back to front ten times.
6: Tap bottle of solution on a Bible (King James preferred for some reason) ten times.
7: Increase C by 1.
8. GOTO step 2 until C is 30 (or whatever number you prefer).

The interesting thing here is that by 13C or so, there's no way that there's any of the original substance left unless you poured some 1C in the ocean and smacked it up a few times with a Bible. At 14C, you're lucky if you got a single molecule. Beyond there it's just gone. So unless Jesus comes down from Heaven to make water into medicine every time you shake a bottle and beat a Bible with it, homeopathy is nothing. See this website for more details: http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/