Then you go on to mention triggering door alarms, which is basically what BAF is talking about...

Some stores may have somebody checking your receipt on exit if you are walking out with something expensive like a laptop. Most people wouldn't expect a little kid like BAF to buy a supercomputer.

Like BAF.

And obviously a small shop isn't going to ask for your receipt, since the same guy who sold you thing is watching you leave the building with it.

So I'm not sure why you acted so surprised at BAF's comment.

I used to trig the alarms very once in a while. Usually they just said something like "sorry, our system is a bit too sensitive" and they let me go, without checking. But once they took me to a side room and used a hand held scanner to detect what caused the alarm. They found an old envelope to a memory card in my winter coat pocket. It was a strange pocket that I didn't even use regularly. I had bought the memory card in Siracusa, Italy, the previous year. Obviously they never removed or inactivated the theft prevent thing and I just put the stuff in my pocket after inserting the card itself into my camera. The guy with the scanner did check their database over items not sold and compared with the number of items on the shelf before letting me go.

Here's one: when people violate road lines. This includes people that drive too fast through intersections and have to skip across 3 lanes to make a corner in their huge-ass PoS pickup trucks, people that cut corners in the road and cut you off, and people that drive down the middle of the fucking road instead of just wearing down the snow on both sides... I would love to make a million diagrams, but I don't have the time, appropriate software, nor functional mouse.

Costco does this (or did the last time I went there). Kind of silly or not, this is a real thing.

Evidently there are enough shoplifters to warrant an employee's wages. That wouldn't really surprise me though.

They have security standing guard at the doors at a grocery store across the street. They'll ask for a receipt if they suspect you stole something, but so far they haven't bothered to ask me when I'm coming from the checkout lines with bags. I think they might have asked me once when I left without buying anything, but they didn't ask me to empty my pockets or anything. I'd say they were friendly enough.

It isn't the stores that you need to be upset with. It's the ass hats that blatantly do shoplift (especially those that can afford not to), which is the reason they need to harass everyone. I've heard of a number of acquaintances that got caught doing it. Most likely, they were just trying to acquire social status items that they couldn't otherwise afford. Society is partly to blame for that.

** APPEND **

I was probably thinking of j0rb.

• People that believe the more RAM a PC has, the faster it'll work/respond/copy/load/load p0rn for them. I'd really like to know who was the goon who spread that, wouldn't it just be better of replacing that thought with CPUs? At least people would try to buy more expensive stuff than RAM. Or maybe it's a good excuse for fitting a computer with 4gigs and maybe some cheap CPU/Mother/PSU.

Because the first thing you want to try upgrading first is the ram. Generally people will buy machines with too little ram, then keep them for years, and rarely upgrade, so the largest bottleneck is usually the amount of ram, and how much SWAP is getting used.

More ram can help, but not if you have plenty already. In fact, if you already have a lot, more ram can make your machine slightly slower. It can cause latency increases.

Some places *cough*walmart*cough* *cough*best buy*cough* always do this, especially when they're busy and they have just watched you walk from the checkout lines.

Though typically, I'm only buying a single item, or a collection of items that don't make sense to put in a bag (case of soda or water, etc), so they get suspicious when they see you with no bags. They typically check everyone who walks by though.

I save the Wal-Mart bags for little trash bags, I could easily walk in, load up a few small items after checking for transponder tags and walk out without being stopped, I suppose.

It's definitely not a "North American" thing. Maybe a BAF-town thing.

I shop at Walmart a lot, and I've never been stopped unless I triggered the exit alarm. The last time that happened, the old guy just told me, "I trust you" and didn't even check my bags or receipt.

I've never seen anybody stopped unless the alarm was triggered. Maybe BAF lives in a neighborhood where all the young white punks steal things.

People like to believe that the responsiveness of something as complex as a PC always depends on one simple factor, following the formula "more is more", when in fact, one would have to see where the bottlenecks are and solve them one by one. On most PCs in use today, I'd say the bottlenecks are, in this order:

• crapware & malware

• choice of tools

• user

• hdd

• OS

• RAM

• other system components

And yes, the CPU is not on that list. With typical PC usage (excluding games and photoshopping), the CPU is usually idling around most of the time (mine rarely hits the 50% mark under normal usage).

But still, if you have insufficient RAM, the OS will start dipping into swap like crazy, and since the hdd is typically one of the more severe bottlenecks, you'll definitely feel this. Once you have "enough" RAM though, there is little point in adding more.

Oh, and here's one of mine: They used to market special editions of certain cellphones here, where you'd receive a free 2 GB SD card with your phone - only that the cellphone in question couldn't handle anything above 1 GB. Similarly, I've seen PCs marketed as having "4 GB of RAM", but they had 32-bit CPUs and were running windows (vista I think it was), so you'd end up with no more than maybe 3.6 GB.