They do operate on the honor system, basically.

When the port (or a railroad) accepts the container, it comes with a shipper certified weight attached to it in the computer. In rare cases the railroad or port will 'fudge' the weight closer to reality, reweigh it, or hold it for inspection. I'd say if you had a slightly overweight container you could get away with it 99.99% of the time.

I had to support a manufacturing company 15 years ago that was using (at the time) 15-20 year old gear. I did it by scavenging and making it myself. Robot needs a new SSDD floppy drive? Flea market Commodore. RAM in the Soviet S100 clone going bad? Take apart a broken synth. Winchester drive controller going tits up? Drive around and look at all the junk bins of every computer shop in the county. Need to move a bit of kit but now the non-standard 45-pin cable is too short? Clip the ends off and Radio Shack them to RS-232. I also swapped a lot of gear around; The DOS machine that was used to program one robot was gradually upgraded from an 8088 machine to a 486 as I stole parts from it to keep the CP/M-86 one running.

The other thing I did a lot of was preventative maintenance. Blow out the dust, check the power supply, clean the disc drive, make sure everything is well seated. Switches got lubed, cables checked for faults, and media replaced.

I've done jobs that required me to carry a non-camera phone. Simply proving that the camera was non-functional was good enough to keep my shiny smart-phone. Remove the back panel, apply a bit of electrical tape between the camera module and the external cover and Bob's your uncle.

The worst I ever had to do was take apart the vendor firmware and replace the camera binary with another application, then fudge a checksum somewhere and document the entire process. That company was super paranoid, but it saved me carrying a WinCE PDA, Palm PDA, three cables and a dumb-phone, plus chargers for each of them.

Just wipe the camera APK in a provable way and tell them to shove off.

So what do you think about fitting power brakes to a MG TD?

Superinjunctions and libel tourism seem to say otherwise.

There some more of us out here in Seattle. My wife has a smaller ID than I do, and I know a few more folks with lower ID numbers than mine in Seattle and the environs.

Not quite sure if I'm going to be able to make it to SLU next weekend though, have to spend a week out of town shortly after.

Only one form of spicy is wrong. Take the noodles I had for lunch, which had a diced serrano, a fat pinch of smoked jalapeno powder, and two squirts of chili oil in 'em.

Or my standard scrambled egg recipe, which stars white and black pepper, chipotle peppers (roughly chopped), and habanero peppers (finely chopped). Toss them on a plate with hash browns, add salt and tabasco. Mmmmmm!

Clarkson and May were both automotive print journalists and reviewers/presenters on the old, more serious 'Top Gear', and Hammond was a professional radio and TV host, including a stint on 'Motor Week'.

In addition, they're all giant children.

So yes, they're all experts at what they do; Talk about cars and act like children on television.

I saw a lot of that at one job, though I can't blame HR or management. I know IT was being CC'd on firings/layoffs/etc, they just never did anything about it.

One employee quit to pursue a college degree. When he returned three years later, his uid/pass still worked. Another, a friend of mine, supplied me with his user/pass on the way to retirement; It worked five years later, and probably still works now, ten years on.

Hmm. Maybe you're right. I looked around for some numbers, and it looks like it took Microsoft nearly three years to take 20% with Vista. Win7 is currently at 19% after only one year.

They've seen the horrible uptake numbers from Vista continue with Windows 7.

Step 1. Convince everyone to get behind the idea of black-holing insecure or infected machines.
Step 2. End support for all versions of Windows other than the current.
Step 3. Wait for a new remote vulnerability in older versions.
Step 4. Refuse to patch the issue.
Step 5. Profit as everyone either has to buy a new PC or a newer operating system to access the internet.

Just think about it. Something like two thirds of machines running a Microsoft operating system are still running the end-of-life Windows XP.

A friend of mine who taught at a community college actually did this back in the mid 90s. He took a copy of Nowhere Man's Virus Creation Lab and tossed together a couple annoying but non-destructive viruses and infected a few stand alone machines for the students to play with.

You can probably still find VCL out there, or a more modern DIY virus kit. Though with the new ones, I'm not sure I would trust they don't have any hidden functionality.

Why not just get him an antique? Kiddo can't hose the OS install on a Apple II or a Commodore 64, and they're pretty indestructible.

At $20-40 on eBay, they're cheap too.