Every college level textbook I have ever had had the answers to every problem in the back, and most had an optional paper back book with a detailed description of how to work them out you could buy. Even if they didn't, copies of the instructors version that had the answers worked out in detail were available online. In what bizarre universe are schools actually grading assignments from the problems sections of textbooks? My professors always assigned us problems he felt were relevant, but whether or not you did them was up to you. If you didn't do them, chances are you failed, with the exception of the few quick learners with an aptitude for the subject.

The few graded take home assignments I remember were given on the assumption that most of use would split into groups and collaborate anyways. They were universally assignments given out of pity if the class average was lower then expected, and only served to weed out those who truly didn't give a fuck and couldn't even be bothered to cheat.

The big hurdle to custom games right now is they are region locked. Maps from one realm can't be played on any others, which has frustrated devs to the point many of them have given up. The new popularity system also means that 99% of maps never get seen, as the list itself is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Get on the top of the list, you get played a lot because you are on top, so you get played more, etc. Blizz has tried to help by choosing "featured" maps to force to the top of the list for a few weeks, but it's kind of an ugly hack to a broken system. When you make a game, you choose the map, and then slots are automatically filled and the game starts automatically, making announcing any sort of gametype impossible. So for games like Dota, which had dozens of game types, the only way to implement it in sc2 is to make different maps, which splits the player base and keeps the map from hitting the popular list. Oh and my personal pet peeve, when the game fills, it auto starts a 30 second countdown. If people leave during this time, the countdown doesn't stop. Theres no way to stop it and get a player to fill the slot without leaving, and starting over, and if you don't leave fast enough you are stuck hitting load screen. It was a known problem in wc3 and they actually made it 10x worse not better.

The problem is, it's not just Google, all big companies do this. And because they do it, they get a big advantage over the small and medium businesses that are stuck paying 35% because they cant pay an army of lawyers and accountants to setup and run these loopholes. Congress should either close the loopholes, simplify the tax code so fewer loopholes are possible, or get rid of corporate income tax entirely to kill the whole incentive to play the "tax haven" game in the first place. At least that way you level the playing field and cut out a parasitic, wasteful element in the form of the army of tax attorneys and accountants every Fortune 500 company must employ.

His Dell rep is taking him for a ride. He needs to call HP and Lenovo, and get quotes, pick the lowest one, show it to the others, and ask for new quotes. Repeat a few times. Even if he still picks Dell in the end he should be able to get a better price and probably some perks. We get our Dell and HP reps to compete over 100 desktop orders, I'm sure they will be willing to negotiate for a 1000+ order. Building your own machine is asking for disaster. I love building my own machines, and wind up with a better machine for it, but I'm a geek and if my motherboard blows up tomorrow I have enough spare parts laying around to cobble together a new pc. When all the ram in all your pc's starts failing over a 2-3 month period, and the ram vendor is blaming the motherboard vendor and the motherboard vendor is blaming the ram vendor and neither will give you the time of day, you are going to be screwed. That's not a fictional scenario, that's a real life scenario from my personal experience, and it happened to about 300 pc's and was a nightmare, I wouldn't want to see it with 1000.

Your rep probably knows you are a "dell shop" and you want to stay that way (because mixing vendors is a pain in the ass for support) so he figures he will through out a high number and hope you will bite. If he won't budge, hang up the phone, look up the sales line on Dell's site, and start calling until you get someone willing to play ball. The real money is in servers anyways, so while you are negotiating feel free to threaten to take your desktop AND server business to another vendor. You have to fight for it but PC vendors will sell to you at almost any margin above break even for them, because they want their foot in the door. Building your own PC's is kind of like not having insurance. Sure, you save a little money, and for most people, nothing bad will happen. The few that do have something bad, it will be catastrophic. You buy insurance to spread the risk. The same with PC vendors. They do a lot more testing up front, and they are large enough to absorb particular models having high failure rates without it becoming a complete catastrophe.

The DotA community on Battlenet was killed by Blizzard, when they began banning people with no possibility for appeal for using the 3rd party tools necessary to making a decent game on battle.net possible. Tools like visual custom kick and banlist became bannable offenses, but they were pretty much necessary to have a game on battlenet that wasn't full of laggers, leavers, and griefers. The more serious players moved to 3rd party services/leagues, and the casual players quit or moved to League of Legends or Heroes of Newerth. I haven't played Heroes of Newerth since beta, but to call it a drop in replacement for Dota was pretty far fetched, Dota relies on extremely fine tuned RTS and pathing mechanics, that wc3 provides, and that simply didn't exist in HoN when I played.

CLI's are great for scripting, but they also make it very easy to make errors of omission. If you don't know about a command, you don't use it. If there's an important security setting for example, you might see it poking through the GUI, but not know you need to add it when starting from a blank config file. Of course in theory no one should be admin for a system they didn't know and fully understand, but we all know in reality that is not what actually happens, especially in smaller operations. A good system uses both to do what they are best at, and a good admin should be familiar with both. Even MS finally got on this bandwagon, with Powershell and server 2008, anything you can do in the gui can be done with powershell, and a lot of rarely used commands are powershell only (keeps you from overly complicating the gui which is a good thing).

The number of messages you can store in modern versions of Outlook is effectively only limited by the file system/hard drive space available. Because Outlook uses a database for it's back end, you will get best performance by archiving older mail out to a separate file, which it does by default. I've seen some users with truly monstrous .pst files.

Because the entire site had been completely overwhelmed by spammers? Digg went from a great site to go see whats new to a glorified RSS feed for cracked.com , college humor and reddit. They had to change something,

This happens because an application aborts the shutdown. The normal use would be, an user has an open document, the application prompts them to save, don't save and exit, or cancel. If the user clicks cancel, the shutdown needs to be aborted so they can do whatever they needed to do that made them click cancel. Because MS has no means of telling what mechanism an application will use to present this kind of choice (or if it needs to at all), any application can do it at will. Some applications abuse this, and do it without giving any clear indication why. I think an event may be logged saying what application stopped it, but it might require you to turn the logging up to see it normally.

If you really, really want to shut down, without any pesky apps stopping you, make a batch file with the following command "shutdown -s -f -t 0". This will do a forced shutdown that won't stop for anything. Just don't blame anyone but yourself when the you lose that document you forgot to save before shutting down.

The better thing would be to record it, and grow the fuck up and realize that two people talking about how the stewardess is a hot piece of ass while the autopilot is on is not a big deal. Make a rule the FCC will bleep out non-relevant/personal conversation before releasing it to media if you really need to, but acting like two adults won't ever think or say anything foolish or "inappropriate" is silly. You couldn't hold Priests to that standard, much less airline pilots (many of whom are ex-military and been exposed to far worse). So rather then pretend we are all perfect saints until we get caught, accept the fact that pilots will make a sexist, racist, or otherwise offensive joke every now and then, like most other people, and just ignore it if it isn't relevant to flying a plane, which is after all, their job.

Allowing secret ballots (No one except you knows who you voted for) and ballots that can't be cheated on is nigh impossible. It can't be done even for paper ballots, so why should a machine with thousands of parts involved be able to do it? The only difference with electronic ballots is because people can not see and understand the processes that go on inside them, it is easier for a smaller group of people to alter them without being caught. If someone is molesting paper ballots in some way, it is obvious to anyone who sees it. If someone molests voting machines in some way, it will be undetectable to anyone but a trained expert with prolonged access to the machine.

You can't make a piece of electronics that can't be modified by someone who has physical access to it. You can make it more difficult then it is on modern machines (where it is almost excruciatingly simple) but you still have the problem. At least with paper ballots, the number of people that must be involved to cause large scale manipulation is much larger, and thus much more likely to be caught. Electronic voting machines are a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. They aren't any more efficient then paper ballots, their only benefit is they can give results very quickly, which is a benefit to the news media, not anyone else. Does it really matter if it takes an extra day to determine who won an election?

The shuttles are a definitely not the best possible design, we know that now, but at the time they were built they seemed like a good idea. Either way, just because the shuttles aren't the ideal vehicle doesn't mean we should toss the whole program away, which is what we are doing. I live in Floida, and visit the space coast often and know a lot of the "little people" in the space program. They are insanely dedicated, even the people who do jobs others would consider demeaning or unimportant. They knew the people who died in the various NASA accidents way better then the engineers in Houston did, and they work every day to keep the astronauts safe. The majority of them can and will get better paying jobs in the private sector, many of them routinely turned down offers when economic times were better (no one is getting rich at NASA).

There is a ridiculous amount of institutional knowledge in the shuttle program, as well as a culture the defies all the regular government stereotypes. Once the team is disbanded and goes their separate ways we will have lost our best shot as a country at safe sustained manned space flight. We should have had a next generation vehicle ready to transition them too, but politics and the vague promise that somehow commercial space flight will fill in has killed it. Apparently as a country we no longer want to lead in the realms of science and engineering, and are content to have our only government funded innovations come in the form of new banking procedures to steal from the poor and give to the rich.

This is my experience as well. The old "use an up to date AV and don't browse porn sites" line is completely outdated. The modern source of infection is either through using exploits in rarely patched software (Adobe, Flash, Java, etc.) combined with using SEO techniques to boost malware sites to the top of google rankings for big breaking news stories, infecting wordpress and other blog systems en masse, and infecting the servers used to host advertising on major sites (or just buying the advertising straight up and redirecting it to malware after it goes live). A lot of them don't even rely on an exploit, they just make it appear that a site they trust is telling them they need to download something, so they do.

The variants change multiple times a day, and no AV product can keep up. Once installed they install rootkits that hide them from the AV. The rootkit part normally fails on Vista/Win 7, but the usermode still runs, and users will happily click an escalation prompt. The only defense is to lock machines down tight enough nothing unauthorized can be run on them and users don't have admin rights (note that I didnt say don't run as admin. Sudo won't help you here. They will enter the admin credentials anyways, because users are dumb and don't read things) . I've taken to doing some forensics on some of the pc's that come by me with fake av, and about 90% of the time, at the time of the infection they were reasonably up to date, had working AV, and from the browser history were on normal, everyday sites like msn.com or whatever immediately before being infected.

AV is useless for the new generation of exploits, at least in it's current form.

It's generally referred to as the JTAG hack. It requires minor soldering and modification of the 360. It does not work on every revision of the 360 currently. Frankly, if you are not savvy enough to find the info with Google, you are better off not bothering or paying someone else to do it.

The 360 has been hacked for a long time, and has a thriving homebrew scene. I currently have a completely redone dashboard (that replaces the MS one) and a ton of arcade and console emulators on mine. Previous to the current hack (that allows unsigned code execution) their was a hack for the DVD-Rom firmware that allowed you to play with burned disks.