You are compliance chum for their H1b hire. They need to go through the motions of looking for an American and somehow never find anyone.

Tons of published tech jobs are h1b compliance chum.

Okay! Say it with my (like an asthmatic chihuahua).

SPACE!!! MADNESS!!!

a mouse driver can be modified to filter through the cheat software before moving onto the anti-cheat device, then the game, etc... the time-shift wouldn't be really large enough to alert anyone (and might even help emulate a 'human' factor into the cheat, thereby saving you from writing in a few random delays). Same w/ the keyboard, come to think of it...

This, right here. Wanna play for money? Use our computers - each one is normalized, matched, patched, and clean of everything but the game... hell, fill the USB and other ports with epoxy if you're worried about someone sneaking in a geek stick with cheats, and proxy the hell out of it to prevent Internet access. Allow players to configure the game through the UI if they want, but otherwise no other action allowed outside of the game itself, and seal the cases with tamper-evident tape.

The only possible obstacle is from players who demand to use customized config files for their game of choice. Example: the Quake 2/3 WeaponsFactory** MOD relied *very* heavily on players using fairly heavily modified key/mouse mapping configs, because otherwise you'd never be able to do much in the game - it was that complex when using some of its team characters for best effect.

Of course, the tournament could audit the config files to insure no cheating, but there's a lot of gray area in there (e.g. having a specific combination of player events tied to one key or click that can perform fairly incredible stunts, etc).

** WeaponsFactory was the Quake2 answer to the lack of Team Fortress in that game version.

Sorry, but a hardware-based solution isn't going to be much different.

I say this because for years, software applications like 3DS Max/Viz required a hardware dongle latched onto the back of one's workstation before the app would even launch (it was replaced by a software version of C_DILLA eventually). Before and after, it was almost trivial to emulate the hardware, its responses, and 'plug' the emulated hardware into a virtual port. Today, most mobos don't have as much variety of hardware I/O (you're lucky to find a serial port nowadays), which probably means USB, HDMI, or Thunderbolt... and the original 3DS dongle required a parallel port, FFS.

Even comparisons of input-to-screen don't mean much, because the eventual circumvention/cheat will emulate one, the other, or both, and send the 'results' to who/whatever is monitoring the user's gameplay.

Furthermore, I daresay that once money gets involved (via eSports), the incentive to built/implement a seamless means of circumventing the cheat-detector will be far greater than the motivation of some asshat griefer who wants to punk on a few pub server players.

If a brain surgery fails, one person either has his life screwed-up, he gets killed, he becomes crippled, or nothing happens but at great expense to find out. Either way, it only affects one person.

If geoengineering fails, every human being in current existence has their lives screwed-up, get killed, becomes inhabitants of a crippled ecosystem, or nothing happens but at incredibly greater expense to find out. Either way, it affects everyone.

The greater the potential/actual impact, the greater the caution required. A brain surgeon can try a failed experimental procedure again on some other person. No one among the budding geoengineers seem to have a spare Earth on hand for some odd reason.

Asking because apparently no one knows just yet exactly *why* this thing is putting out, err, 'thrust'. They know how, well, sort of...

No. It's that geoengineering can be dangerous on a scale usually reserved for asteroid impacts and total thermonuclear war.

Done right? Sure, it could be beneficial.

Done wrong? And you could not only not fix the problems the project was designed to fix. But you could exacerbate them, or create entirely new problems. A Best Case Scenario for something like this is billions to quadrillions of dollars wasted and nothing happens.

What's being argued, right now, is that we don't have a sufficient grasp on the technology, or a suitably unified scientific/sociopolitical agenda.

With with Lithium Ion's charge cycle limits.

The practical result says that it works anyway.

I suspect that there is a balance in physics somewhere... just that no one knows where or what that is yet.

I am kind of curious though - does it have the acceleration curve of a VASMIR/Ion engine, or can we build something with it that will give greater speed in less time?

(...also, is the acceleration graph linear, curved sharply in either direction, hits a curve at a certain point... what?)

That's the thing.

Those costs ARE factored into what you pay for power.

If they weren't, the power companies would be going broke.

I think you've overestimated exactly how much power one of these batteries stores and how long it lasts.

Think of it this way... psychology is the 1960-70's equivalent of today's MBA, and have many similarities:

* neither has an objective means of measuring success or failure, in spite of claiming to have a wide array of methods by which to do so.
* neither the psychologist or the MBA is held accountable for incompetence or non-criminal malice.
* sometimes either one can take on the semblance of religion, minus a deity.
* the big 'do-nothing-but-are-promised-great-riches' degree of the 60's-80's was psychology, as hordes of students took that class thinking just that. In the 90's through today it's the MBA program.
* both can stretch logic and credulity in their work to attempt things that would get an engineer either incarcerated or killed.

(...add your own here...)

(Trigger warning for the MBAs and Psych majors: this is what is known as a joke.)

To be fair, radio is/was was as 'free' as Google is today.

The radio's 'product for sale' isn't the music, but the ears of its listeners sold in a 15/30/60 second time-slice to advertisers.

It goes back even farther than the 8-track era... I still have a *huge* collection of my father's mid-to-late 1960's equivalent of mix-tapes and concert bootlegs... on reel-to-reel.

But, yes, there were kids dragging portable reel-to-reel recorders out to concerts back when the Beatles were still a fairly new thing, and they were certainly running a wire from their friends' record players to the line-in/mic jack on the aforementioned player/recorders (and more than a few who rigged a few similar setups off their dads' brand-new HiFi AM/FM stereo sets.

The biggest draw from what I've heard is that you can fit a whole lot of LP albums and/or a metric ton of 45-RPM singles onto a single reel...