Better question: what game actually requires this?

Seriously now. Unless you're trying to just throw money away on some 6-screen rig or something, a single-screen at 1920x1080 will run almost all games of today fine from 3-year-old cards. "Bleeding edge" is a function of throwing your money away on diminishing returns problems.

Yeah, you've basically got the idea. The Wii U is a stillborn idea of a console that'll be out of style even faster than previous Nintendo flops. I bet even a new Pokemon couldn't save it (which is what it took to limp the N64 along back in the day).

Sneakier to modify the reader, because then the register doesn't give you any clues if it's on stock firmware (and someone running a register diagnostic, checking firmware checksum, maybe even checking the firmware flash increment counter will come up blank too).

The attack here is going to be passing plausible-looking counterfeits to an unknowing person who trusts the reader/register in a "Garbage in, Gospel out" manner that most people approach computers with. Buy something or trick the cashier into making change and voila, "free money" for the counterfeiters.

That's why in sane countries they've gone Single Payer, as opposed to the USA which is run by lunatics who still think laissez-faire anarcho-libertarian economic theory does anything but cause monopolism and boom/bust depression cycles.

Funny how medical tourism turns out to only be available to the wealthy...

Precisely this. The illusion of "choice" and "capitalism" is strong in the USA.

Then you get down to the nitty gritty.

In the town I live in, precious few grocery stores aren't the HEB brand. There is no real competition for them and they gouge.
In the neighborhood I life in, I can't get FiOS and the AT&T DSL options are a joke (they won't bother putting in capacity). So if you want anything but *shudder* dialup, your options are Warner, Warner, or... Warner. Zero competition, price gouging accordingly.

The communications market is so "deregulated" that monopolism takes over, with deliberate barriers to entry placed by noncompete agreements and dirty tactics. And yet so many people think anarcho-libertarian, "laissez faire" deregulation will somehow make their lives better in every aspect.

I wonder if everyone's already figured out that you can't fix the real problems.

Try to get upper management to follow the requirements of security. I'm not talking even the "OMG SO ONEROUS" stuff, I'm talking the basics. Not installing rogue wireless devices, not using insecure passwords, and for fuck's sake allow time for proper patching and testing.

The reason nobody goes into security is they know at the end of the day CEO Dipshit McRetard is going to have a screaming fit about how he's too "important" to remember a password or to properly change his password, and can't see why he should bother to or any other employee should either, because "security is the job we pay you to do and we shouldn't have to do anything to 'make your job easier' just make us secure already."

True story, I did consulting work for a construction firm for a while. Everyone's password was their username plus the company acronym, because the CEO wanted to "always know everyone's passwords in case he needed their files" (despite having full access via SMB shares they all used anyways). Never could get him to change it. I found out later he'd gone and created a Carbonite backup account and installed it on the server just in case, putting all their financial and other sensitive records there unencrypted too. The password was his wife's name. And her name was only 3 letters long.

You just can't fight that, and then you get blamed when their crappy decisions cause problems. It's a thankless task and that's why nobody wants to do it.

I think you meant "Animal Farm" (book link), not "Animal House."

But the mental image of wikipedia admins as insufferable pigs is something I can totally get behind.

In 2007 he was busy banging a journalist, writing her wikipedia entry for her, and embezzling money from Wikimedia Foundation.

http://gawker.com/362814/the-goodbye-email-from-jimmy-waless-girlfriend

http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/3/is-wikipedia-s-jimmy-wales-really-an-embezzler-

300+ articles on pokemon say you're wrong...

Precisely this.

At one time, ages ago, getting admin privileges was easy. Make some good edits, prove you could contribute well, and you were basically in.

Then came editcountitis, where people with less than X thousand edits (I think it's at what, 50,000 now?) were cast aside. Editcountitis created the current "revert monkey" culture and the fast-action tools so that people can automatically revert anything that happens without even reading the edit. Push button, issue revert. Most of these monkeys sit around slapping "revert" all day without reading; some of them actually just use a script to automatically click "revert" on their tool of choice in order to pad their edit counts.

Then came, also, the cliques. Self-protecting groups formed, and the worst is the admins because once you are an admin, you are expected to ALWAYS back up the actions of another admin. You can't badmouth other admins - that's not the way the game is played - but you can be as ugly and mean-spirited to any normal user you want, and when they respond in kind you can either issue a block yourself or ask a supposedly "uninvolved" admin to be your proxy in return for Favors To Be Named Later. Because after all, "civility" only applies to those who don't have the Special Buttons.

The way the game is played, if you are trying to influence an article on Wikipedia, is simple. You revert-monkey someone right to the point of 3RR. You never discuss anything on a talk page and if you've hit 3RR, you find someone to collude with to start reverting in tag-team, then you accuse the other side of either "breaking 3RR" or "not discussing." If you want to and have the backing of a friendly admin, you get them blocked and then issue gloating messages or just template the hell out of them to further infuriate them and bait them into responding "incivilly" to your harassment, at which point your friend the admin gets to escalate the blocks over and over again. Eventually, you'll run the new person off and you get to [[WP:OWN]] your article again, so long as you can keep new editors from ever sticking around long enough for them to actually work and discuss and change the consensus.

The goal of wikipedia's admins is to drive off new editors, and anyone who tells you differently is likely a wikipedia admin.

Always the way.

I'll just recomment this from yesterday:

So many burnt-up, cynical admins who think that they can just do what they want and abuse people - because they pretty much can. Look at the way Toddst1 treats people as a great example of how crappy Wikipedia culture really is.

Every time I see a story about Wikipedia, I remember this from years ago. And I chuckle, because that corrupt place hasn't changed one bit since. They have a new crop of Essjays now, and the Durova List behavior is alive and well too.

The reason they are losing participation is because those at the top - the Toddst1's of Wikipedia who run things - DO NOT WANT there to be participation. They want to keep anyone new away, so that their existing friends who "WP:OWN" (look it up) various articles can maintain control. The more new people come, the more likely it is that consensus will actually overturn bad edits and POV editing perpetrated by organized POV editing groups who maintain a list of "interested editors" to aim at an article where someone differs on their POV edits, poised to attack and overwhelm with multiple admins ready to instantly issue blocks as needed.

Cloud services take all of your IT problems, and give them to someone else, period. A cloud is not inherently going to fix your problems, or make them worse, but just delegate them to someone who may or may not give a crap.

FTFY.

I don't trust Cloud services with anything, for good reasons:
- Lack of deletion confirmability.
- Lack of security (seriously, Dropbox will accept "1111" as a valid password)
- Lack of confidentiality - law enforcement says "we want to look at user32X's files", Dropbox/Google/etc will cheerfully hand them over without so much as a notification to you. Your account is hacked or your password guessed, poof your files are in the wild. One person misrepresents themselves and the file gets shared out, or some bit is flipped making your files "visible", you get no notification and your files are in the fucking wild.

Yes, that was how Essjay worked too. The lying little piece of shit was like every other Wikipedia admin, they're all lying pieces of shit.

Try living there a while and see how close some of these people are to stereotypes firsthand. You're the one who hasn't ever been near Texas.