Evidently, the free version of Unity *does* have render-to-texture now. In terms of functionality, only differences between the paid and free versions of Unity seem to be that the free one doesn't let you use a custom splash screen and no multiple developer support.

How does the serve admin know that the software is accurately reporting what hardware the user has installed when the user controls his own PC, which could without *too* much difficulty be set up to misreport its hardware configuration.to the software that connects to the server?

I'm sure there'd be a DMCA violation in there somewhere, but this concept and the measures that are being proposed here wouldn't make anyone who genuinely wanted to cheat even blink.

.... you get promoted to a new position before you are actually fully qualified for that position.

In my experience, companies don't promote people to having additional responsibilities before that worker has already proven that they are capable of handling those responsibilities, perhaps through a management training program. Such a promotion must actively be sought out by the employee.

The only other "promotions" that I know of are something like annual cost-of-living salary increases that the most respectable companies may offer to their employees, or else performance-based raises, which are not promotions either, being where one's duties and responsibilities remain essentially unaltered, but one has shown that they are providing a sufficient utility for the company to justify paying them more... generally because after factoring in training costs, the company feels they may have to pay more just to replace them and still get the same amount of utility.

Well played, oodaloop... well played.

What are you talking about? Steven Wozniak built the first Apple computer.

They use the word hologram to describe this because that's the word that pop culture identifies with... even though it is wrong.

You are right, however... this no more makes holograms than a View-Master toy invented in the 60's... it just has a lot more tech behind it.

... if you have multiple computers on your lan, streaming different content from different sites.

I've found routinely that video streaming tv shows from a network's website, which ordinarily runs fine will still start to choke if somebody else in my house is watching a moderately long youtube video in HD, for example.

Easier said than done... obviously I'm not suggesting that nothing get done about it, but I am saying that pretending that criminals aren't going to ever use this kind of thing is laughable... and, as I said, law abiding citizens will have to use inferior mechanisms to defend themselves.

Right.... so there's nothing prohibiting a criminal from getting it, because he's not following the law anyways... Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens who might want to defend themselves with a firearm will be using inferior mechanisms to what the criminals have.

....then the thug will let you go.

Why should I believe that? If a person is morally bankrupt enough that they are willing to threaten somebody's life, why on earth should I think they are not at least equally capable of lying?

Hanging a person over a balcony with an implied threat to let them fall is quite definitely qualifies as a threat against a person's life, and that *IS* illegal. Even if no "permanent" harm was done, their actions fail on points 5, 6, 7, and 9 in The Ethics Scoreboard list of ethics fallacies.

If a communication barrier exists because of some demographic difference between one employee and everyone else, why should a company have to tolerate what they may be able to measure as a reduced level of productivity because of it?

I'm not saying it should happen, but it *does* happen... I've been fired from jobs for simply "not fitting in" myself... why should being older or even being of a difference race somehow protect somebody from such an evaluation?

... in the company culture is a wholly reasonable justification for an employer to not hire someone who is otherwise even the most qualified job applicant. While age shouldn't ever be a reason to exclude an otherwise entirely competent person, if the fact is that if the rest of the office isn't going to easily be able to relate to the person simply because this one person is so much older than they are, that can introduce a communication barrier, however unintentional it may be on everyone's part and that will impede the effectiveness of any programming team that person is put on. Generally, this kind of thing would be more likely to be determined during an initial probationary period than during an interview, however.

What I know about is just how sensitive a dog's sense of smell is... and how easily they would be able to identify *exactly* where a given odor is coming from. Through positive reinforcement during training, a dog that is being trained to identify a particular scent, is conditioned to find the source of the scent, and so in the field, they would always go straight for the point where the strongest scent is coming from, because doing so was what led to the quickest rewards for the dog. If they can't find what the dog has been trained to sniff out in the very first place that the dog leads them, then either it's simply too well hidden for the officer to find, or else it's not there at all. Claiming that the dog alerted them to the presence of drugs therefore makes them look incompetent if they didn't actually find any.

If an officer searches a car and finds no drugs, the officer can say something to save face and wave the driver on.

Of course... my original point is that the officer isn't generally going to say that the dog actually alerted him to the presence of drugs somewhere in the car when they can't find any in there. If a dog is actually alerting to the presence of drugs, it will go *straight* to the location of those drugs, or if the scent is only residual, at least straight to the location of the strongest scent. If that scent is on the driver or on a wad of cash in his pocket, then the dog will alert to the driver, not the car. Remember, a dog's sense of smell is millions of times more sensitive than a human's... they exist in a sensory world that most people can probably barely imagine... and given that they would go straight for the location of the strongest scent, there wouldn't even be any extensive search, per se, beyond perhaps moving things out of the way so the officer can access some concealed location... If there are no drugs there, then that should be the end of it, where if an officer were to say that their dog alerted them to the presence of drugs in the car but they end up looking in several different places in the car, then it appears as if the officer doesn't really have a clue how to interpret what the dog is supposedly actually alerting to.