The Null Device

A former university lecturer from the US, dissatisfied with the quality of student cheating, has written a guide on how to cheat better:

5. Malaprop big words
Make sure you pick a word that sounds impervious and use it incorrigibly, or inventorate words. We'll be udderly convinced of your genuinity (not to mention your precedential potential).

8. Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text
This is my Number 1 piece of advice, even if it is numbered eight. When you copy things from the web into Word, ignoring #3 above, don't just "Edit > Paste" it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I'm going to guess that something odd may be going on. This seems to happen in about 1% of student work turned in, and periodically makes me feel like becoming a hermit.

A student in Wuhan, capital of China's central province of Hubei, used earphones so small that they slipped into his aural canal and perforated his eardrum, the China Daily newspaper said.

Another student's earphones required an operation for their removal, the paper said, while an electronic device connected to headphones and strapped to a third student's body exploded, leaving a bleeding hole in his abdomen.

(via Boing Boing, /.) ¶ cheating society university 1

An interesting article about the arms race between game developers and cheaters, written by one of the developers of Age of Empires, and describing various forms of cheating and strategies for preventing it. (via bOING bOING)

¶ cheating videogames 0

Marketing ploy of the day: ASUS, manufacturer of 3D graphic accelerator cards favoured by computer gamers, have hit upon a clever way of boosting the sales of their brand: offering the cards with a driver which allows you to see through walls, thus giving ASUS-based players of first-person shooters an unfair advantage over those using rival cards. However, the public didn't like this idea much, and the driver was withdrawn.

¶ asus cheating computer graphics hacks tech videogaming 0