Most keys marked "Do Not Duplicate" are not standard keys. Assuming that the kiosk carries only certain types of blanks instead of fully machining each key from a block (likely, but unspecified in TFA), it shouldn't be able to duplicate non-standard or "security" or vehicle keys anyway.

If you happen to have a normal house key marked "Do Not Duplicate", and you really want to duplicate it anyway, ten minutes with some sandpaper will take care of that problem, and then any random locksmith will do.

Holy bad example, Batman! A guy who robs a liquor store for $100 doesn't get 20 years for stealing $100. He gets 20 years for pointing a gun at the liquor store attendant and threatening his life for personal gain. Possibly as a repeat offender.

What a lot of commenters don't seem to get is that the sort of pollution that hardcore offenders engage in over there often results in human deaths. So the potential for punishment is merely being brought in line with the crime. You won't deter serious polluters with a fine.

That said, sure, many crimes are not proportional to their sentences. No news here. While we're making improbable demands, i think the act of spitting chewing gum on the street or sidewalk should be treated as vandalism, and enforced accordingly.

It doesn't, actually. The definition of "permission" with respect to contracts has a well-established (legal) definition that is not vague in the slightest.

This. Sort of. Well, almost. You started off on the right track, anyway. But neither "top end Dell" nor "$1000 Eizo" will get you a monitor without PWM.

For the uninitiated, PWM stands for Pulse Width Modulation, and essentially, the PWM component blinks the LED backlight quickly in order to dim the brightness. The dimmer your backlight, the longer the "off" time. Sometimes, PWM use causes a perceptible flicker. What is perceptible and what isn't is subjective, however, and sometimes the flicker is imperceptible to a person, but still causes eye strain. Some PWMs blink faster than others, and faster-blinking units are generally regarded as easier on the eyes. Note that the use of a PWM isn't necessary -- LEDs _can_ dim, but since LEDs don't have linear electricity->lumens output and dimmer LEDs can experience a color shift, it's the easy way out. Most monitor backlight engineers take it.

I'm quite sensitive to PWM flicker. LED monitors especially tend to drive me nuts, so I did my research on this.

A couple of months ago, I compiled a list of no-PWM monitor options, from scouring tftcentral.co.uk, prad.de, and message boards around the internet. My criteria:
- IPS, or comparable (though all TN panels would use PWM anyway)
- no PWM, period -- not even really, really fast ones.
- preferably non-glossy, but any options will be considered.
- minimum resolution: 1920x1080

That's it. No size restrictions. These are the options I came up with:
- DGM IPS-2701WPH
- Dell U2713HM
- HP zr2740w
- Samsung S27B970D
- ViewSonic VP2770-LED

[Note that the Samsung, while it doesn't utilize typical PWM tech, does fluctuate according to some tests. For this reason, I did not consider it further.]

I found it interesting that all options were 27".

I, personally, bought the HP zr2740w, and I enjoy coding on it quite a bit. It's worlds easier on my eyes than any LCD monitor I've used in the past. Newer models such as mine (which was made in late 2012) apparently have a less aggressive anti-glare coating than older versions. Fine text is crisp using either gray-on-black (my preference) or black-on-white (the web's preference). White screens do not seem at all "dirty", as some people complain about the older revision.

Or how little English the customer speaks, which is often related to how annoyed the service rep becomes. Or how xenophobic the service rep is. Or whether the service rep is currently having a bad day. Or any other of 3,723 possible factors.

I don't see, in any linked article (or the summary), any suggestion that Li understood the manager's English at all. The article says that she was earlier told that two was the limit, which is something that *can* be conveyed with body language in the case of a language barrier. Nowhere does any article suggest that she understood that she was not to come back. I fail to understand how you can infer that she spoke English from this.

The officers, on the other hand, had every reason to believe that she understood them, because when she acted ignorant initially, they yelled more loudly. I'm sure that cleared things up.

The summary doesn't say it (and the linked article doesn't expound), but according to http://www.dwicourts.org/drugged_driving this "night" of which they speak is a weekend night. So, Friday or Saturday. Living in NYC and riding a motorcycle (which I refuse to do nowadays on Friday and Saturday nights), I'd expect that number to be much higher, but perhaps the rest of the nation averages it out. Or perhaps many people who plan to drive with a BAC over 0.08 know where these checkpoints may lie. I did, and actively avoided them due to traffic concerns, when I did ride (sober) on those nights.

Why is everyone bashing HP and Meg Whitman for this? The purchase happened pre-Meg, and this write-off is a great decision on HP's part. There's a fair chance that the purchase decision wasn't even as poor as HP's making it out to be, and this write-off is just being maximized for tax purposes.

Hate HP for making us individual taxpayers pick up the slack, but don't hate them for being stupid (in this case).

I wonder how many people who posted comments here, thinking that streaming music analytics is a good idea, would also enable the do-not-track flag in their browsers and opt out of Google's targeted ads.

Right. And, according to TFA, none of their supplies ever went out. I live in NYC. A lot of the city lost power, sure. The transit system was knocked out, sure. There was a lot of flooding in fringe areas, where most data centers weren't. This guy is talking about NYC like it got demolished by the storm. Slashdot already did a piece on how a NYC data center mitigated power loss; reading TFS, I was hoping for a point of view from a more heavily battered standpoint. Instead, I got, "We had back-ups, and we think they work because we test them regularly, but we didn't actually have to do anything."

"We didn't do anything special; our power never went out."

This is perhaps the worst recommendation here.

In theory, it works. In practice, it's a terrible idea, unless your aim is to walk out with a Mac.

I'm going to examine Best Buy, but the strategy is typical, and other large retailers, such as J&R and B&H, operate similarly.

1. If Best Buy hasn't sold its old stock yet, they put it out on the floor. If you want newer stock that _isn't_ on the floor, you have to ask for it -- but it's packed up, and you don't get to play with it.

2. Cheap laptops sell well. So Best Buy management says, "Let's put out more cheap laptops!" Then there isn't enough room for high-end laptops on the floor. That's okay, because high-end laptops don't sell well. Soon, high-end laptop sales drop even more, and management thinks that has something to do with demand.

3. Higher-end laptops that are on the floor are built with poor specs, and they're from low-class brands. Again, i imagine that this is to keep the price down.

Scenario: Bob walks into a Best Buy to look at their highest-end Windows-based laptops. They're lousy. They're made by Sony or Toshiba, and they're falling apart on the shelf. But he sees low-end Lenovos with the cheapest, lousiest screen options next to them. He looks up the model and sees that many of them are from last year. Then he looks at their Mac selection. It's current (because Apple requires it), and the screens are decent. The hardware isn't rock-bottom. He walks out of Best Buy thinking that if he wants a computer that doesn't suck, he has to get a Mac.

In reference to another reply:
You want to know who's killing Best Buy? Best Buy is.

This is, in fact, how one-time passwords work. Once upon a time, RSA strengthened the security of their tokens through algorithm obscurity. The only news is that the algorithm cannot be considered obscure any longer. And this news is old. The fact that some random "researcher" learned enough of a programming language to create a program that takes a number and uses it as a random seed is not something that anyone (aside from said "researcher", and probably his proud parents) should care about.

Unfortunately, dump requires a supported filesystem. But most people forget about the incremental backup features of regular old tar(1).

The only one who wins here is the ad affiliate.