Yeah, I meant to mention the slots, but forgot. Those are the only 'standard' games where the odds vary, because all slot machines differ. (Duh.) However, the casinos don't have some knob where they turn them up and down. The electric ones can probably be re-weighed once installed, but normally the rules are never changed.
And side bets can differ, especially at craps, where there aren't really any standard rules on them that I'm aware of. Hopefully if you've started a) playing craps, and b) placing side bets, you understand enough to know this, considing that's about the most complicated way to bet at a casino possible. And it pays the best odds, barring baccarat and counting cards in blackjack. (And playing baccarat is a good way to lose your house.)
However, I was taking issue with the concept that casinos just set payoffs to whatever they want, and change them so, on average, they make money. They don't set them, and usually can't legally set them, on blackjack, video poker, baccarat, roulette, or normal craps. They, plus slot machines, are where 90% of the 'walk-in' gambling happens, and I wouldn't want people wandering the streets of Vegas looking for the best odds on blackjack.;)
So you're proposing that humor can arises from some sort of variation between what you expect and what actually happens?
So I could say something like:
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas.
Which, logically, means I was wearing my pajamas while shooting an elephant. But if I then continue:
How it got into my pajama I don't know.
Thus changing the interesting, but possible interpetation, to one completely absurd, to wit, that it was the elephant that was in your pajamas.
My God, you're right! Let's try another one:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
This one is phrased like a riddle, and you try to think of an answer. But the answer is:
To get to the other side.
And you are suddenly...outraged. Of course that's why it crossed the road, that's why everyone crosses the road. It's not funny at all, it's not thought-provoking. And then, suddenly, you get that that was the joke. It was a pointless riddle, an excersize in absurdity.
That is the stupidest argument I've read in a long time.
What, money involved in gambling just vanishes now? You mean it doesn't move from lower-middle class people to large corporations, who are something like a bajillion times more likely to invest it in the market?
Not that I think online gambling, or any gambling, is really a good thing, but worrying about the market is just stupid. A much better thing to worry about is addicts spending all their money on it.
Races are contests. Gambling in casinos is not a contest.
Robots should be able to play poker, just like they should be able to build refrigerators. If I'm paid to build refrigerators, it's not unethical for me to build a robot to do that for me. If I'm trading on the stock market, it's not unethical to build a robot to do that for me. If I'm paid to deliver pizza in thirty minutes or less it's not unethical to build a robot to do that for me. (Assuming the robot is not dangerous to others, obviously, but we're talking about software 'robots'.)
Anyone who wants to play poker as a contest is more than welcome to collect several friends and play penny-ante poker in the real world. Once you go to a site where the point is make money, it's not a let's-compete-to-see-who's-the-best contest anymore, it's a business, and it's no more unethical to build a robot to help you than any other business.
I'm all against using a robot to help in Everquest or Quake or actual competitions online, but online gambling is a business.
They don't 'adjust' the payoff, either. Anywhere there's gambling in the US, there are strict laws about the payoff on standard games. A casino can't set up a roulette wheel and pay off 35 to 1 instead of 36 to 1.
You're right in that the casino will always win on all games, but they don't go around randomly adjusting the payoffs until that happens...the payoffs are set by long tradition, and, eventually, by law.
That's not to imply they can't invent new games with whatever probabilites they want, but they can't adjust existing ones.
That's why there is/was such a big flap about card counting. Standard blackjack is slightly favored towards the house. Even if you play a perfect game, your odds are something like 49% of coming out ahead. Well...with card counting, you can up the odds to something like 52%. And casinos cannot change the payoffs of blackjack. So they have to come up with ways to fight counting, like shuffling more often, and often just resort to making you stop gambling by kicking you out.
(No, it's not cheating to count cards. Cheating is when a bunch of people are in an even contest to see who is best. It's not cheating to come up with a stragety to make more money from gambling, anymore than it's cheating for the casino to give out free drinks so you'll gamble longer. Talking about 'cheating' is just crazy.)
In most places, the casino do have a purse limit. They can't load out in chips what they actually possess. Sometimes they can't loan out in chips more than they actually have in the vaults, including chips the dealers have. (I.e., each chip must have corrosponding cash, or not be on the floor at all.) In reality, of course, this is why they have several million dollars in their vault, and they can get more if they're running low.
The example in the grandparent is interesting because, being a ship in international waters, they were able to do something that most casinos can't do...keep going after they were broke. OTOH, I suspect the only reason they hit the limit was that they didn't want to haul around all that cash...even if they hadn't gotten the winnings back after five days, they could have gotten more cash from their parent company, or, at worst, gotten a loan from the bank. So they weren't literally 'broke', they were just out of cash on hand. But, regardless, it's something that normal casinos cannot do in most places.
I don't think you have to be selling something, I think they do. I can't go around labeling blue jeans with 'Levi' just because I'm giving them away. If it was something that the producer was giving away, and you gave away something similiar labelled with their trademark (Fred's Internet Explorer, anyone?), I think it would still be trademark dilution, but they would have a hard time proving damages. But they could make you stop.
However, the whole point of the experiment was 'create a site that would fool automated systems and waste their time and crediblity by causing them to send automated C&D letters'.
Actually pretending to be a file sharing site, by saying 'This file is a copy of the movie 'The Terminal', now in theaters' is going a bit beyond that, even if it's not actually such a file. It may be legal, but it's not MPAA-was-laughed-out-of-the-courtroom legal. Pretending to infringe copyright is probably legal, but it's certainly a question for the courts.
Whereas 'Here is a copy of my short documentary about how some people facing death cope better than their families do: The_Terminal.avi' would get laughed out of court.
You can't trademark titles unless they're in a series.
That is, I can't come out with a movie Lord of the Rings: The Three Oceans, with the implication that was a Lord of the Rings movie. I can come out with a movie called just 'The Two Towers' or 'The Terminal'. (Although the major movie studios won't produce a movie with those names right now.)
However, it's a moot point. A filename is not magically a trademark infringement. If you've got a page talking about how you made some movies of matrixes being altered, with one named matrix_revolutions.avi, even delibrately set up to confuse automated tools, there's no trademark infringement. To be a trademark infringement you have to be likely to confuse people.
I don't know why people always bring up bills as a form of contact that's magically excluded from harrassment laws.
The phone company will, quite, happily, stop sending you your bill. If you want, you can even have them delete your mailing address.
However, this will not result in a free phone service. You still have to pay your bills, whether you get them or not. (In fact, the mailing address the phone company has for my landline is way the hell in the wrong county, so I usually end up paying my bill without seeing it first. As I don't make long distance calls in the first place, I don't have to worry about extra charges...it's 25.56 a month, always.)
(Also I have to point out that harrassment doesn't instantly happen just because you ask them to stop...that's what restraining orders are for. You can keep them off your property, which includes your mail server, by asking, but you can't stop them from contacting you at all without a restraining order.)
I always hear that DC loses power quickly when it transported from palce to place, but what I wonder about is...how far is far?
I mean, could we have a central converter in each house? I bet that would work. So let's just standardize on a plug with 12 volts or something and be done with it. IIRC, rack mounted devices already have some standard voltage and plugs, so we could just use that one.
If we were really clever, we could get two converters...one outside, and one inside, and just use whichever one was outputting heat in a useful location.
So your theory is that ACs and refridgerators are thermodynamically impossible? I mean, according to your logic, they remove heat, which is just blatantly impossible.
But no one said you can make four watts of heat from one watt of power. What heat pumps and ACs do is move heat, just like the grandparent post said. So you make the inside warmer while you're making the outside colder.
And that relates to a device that would cost almost nothing compared to the price of a shower, but won't save you any energy...just your skin.
It's called a pressure sensor. There is absolutely nothing stopping them from installing them on showers so that when the cold water goes off, the hot water also goes off. (Think about it. Wouldn't you rather stand there like an idiot without water for four seconds instead of getting scalded out of your skin?) They're mechanical versions of relays...to keep one path of water flowing, you need to keep water though the other path. They cost like four dollars. But no one makes drop-in shower versions for no obvious reason at all.
With a little more expense, you could get a proportional valve that, if the cold water is 50% gone, you only get 50% of the ordered hot water also. But that's more work.
Of course, this wouldn't fix your problem. However, that needs to be fixed at the hot water heater...when there's no hot water, it shouldn't give out any water.
This entire discussion is getting goofy since there is almost no likelyhood a court will uphold the copyright on nine lines of code. Once you strip out the functional aspects (You can't claim copyright on, for example, defining a variable, as there are only a few ways to define a variable with a certain name.) and descriptive aspects (If your variable is called 'counter', and, duh, it's a counter, just because someone else, who looked at your code and rewrote it called it 'counter', doesn't mean they infringed.), and standard stylistic choices, and required function calls that you can only do one way, and modification of lines of code that always exists...you've basically got absolutely nothing to claim infringement on.
That's the standard for copyright code violation...they run it though a 'filter' first, to remove all the non-protectable elements. IANAL, so someone could explain it better. But by the time anyone judges it, those nine lines of code would be down to about two. Which is like four seconds worth of originality.
And this is assuming that the code was copied, which it doesn't sound like in the first place.
As for 'trade secret' claims, that's just idiotic. While you could, indeed, have the concept be a trade secret, it rather loses any protection when you display the features on a public webpage. Duuuuh.
No. Incidental copies of computer programs are explicitly legal if made in order to use the software since the late 80s or so. This includes installing the software, copying it into memory, cache, the processor, the swap file...it's all legal if the end result of that is to use the software. Absolutely no license is required for use.
Also copies are legal for backup purposes. (Everyone parrots 'one backup copy', but what the law actually says is that if a copy is made, it is legal if it is for backup. It doesn't say you can only do that once. It's like it's legal to have a dog if you have a dog license for it...that doesn't mean you can just have one dog, that means the legality of each dog is judged seperately by the law.)
That's not creating wealth, anymore than a hurricane destroying a city is creating wealth. (I think you might be sarcastic here, but it's not obvious and I'm sure some people fell for it, so I will explain the economic theory behind 'wealth'.)
Wealth is, roughly, how far human beings have gotten in making 'stuff'. You can generate it via creating things or indirectly by moving things or doing work that frees up other people to create things.
Destroying things, or creating things that don't work as well as they could, removes wealth. For every hour someone spends fixing a Windows box back to a good state, they could have been creating wealth, instead they're running as fast as they can to stay in one place.
Claiming otherwise is akin to claiming that a cup with a leak will hold more water, and, thus, more water will be created. The fallacy there is that cups don't have anything to do with the production of water. Water just exists, and can neither be created of destroyed. (Okay, yes, it can, but this is an analogy.) A leak means you will put more in the cup than otherwise, so other cups get less. (Of course, at this point you can get into supply and demand, and point out a leaky cup creates a higher demand, so the price of water will go up, which will 'help' the people selling water. But hurt everyone else.)
Likewise, the amount of work the human race can do is fairly constant, and wealth is the amount of work actually done minus however much it takes to stay in the same place. Creating more work does not automatically create more wealth, and if it's work getting things back to how they were, it will never create wealth. (Well, okay, technically, it destroys wealth and creates new wealth.)
That's not to say you can't increase the creation of wealth. You just either need to make more people work, or you need to make them more productive, or you need to make things last longer. And there are probably some other ways I can't think of right now.
Yeah, that's what I was saying. My idea isn't in any way less secure, hell, it's not even more secure, really.
It's just a way to counter all the people who think vote counting by hand takes too long, by pointing out we have a ready supply of people to do the counting.
So, basically, you're arguing that producing IE confers no advantage on Microsoft?
If so...why are they doing it? Out of the goodness of their hearts? They got sued over doing it and fought, that seems like rather extreme lengths to carry a charity project.
With adblocking on Firebird, you can do it two different ways. You can have it delete the ad from existence, or you can have it pretend the ad is transparent.
The first one changes how the page is formatted, which can be good or bad. It works fine if the ad was a banner ad at the top, it can screw things up if it was a sidebar. The other was will never screw up formatting, but will leave empty areas where the ads go. Yes, these areas are transparent, not 'white', but that doesn't mean they won't show up as white if the page designed put the ads in a white table cell.
The grandparent post apparently discovered that IE defaults to the first behavior, and doesn't know enough to go into the AdBlock extention on Firebird and change it to do that. It's another one of those 'I like the way Microsoft does it better, and I'm too lazy to realize that what I'm talking about is an option on the competing OSS' complaints, just ignore it. It's like those goobers who complained about focus follows mouse.
I, personally, like 'make ads transparent', but what would be nicer is a way to change that on a per-ad basis, which no one can do, as far as I know. What would be really nice is some sort of automatic guessing with an option to override if it's wrong. (For example, if it's not in a table or moved with CSS, it can never screw the formatting to just delete it.)
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And side bets can differ, especially at craps, where there aren't really any standard rules on them that I'm aware of. Hopefully if you've started a) playing craps, and b) placing side bets, you understand enough to know this, considing that's about the most complicated way to bet at a casino possible. And it pays the best odds, barring baccarat and counting cards in blackjack. (And playing baccarat is a good way to lose your house.)
However, I was taking issue with the concept that casinos just set payoffs to whatever they want, and change them so, on average, they make money. They don't set them, and usually can't legally set them, on blackjack, video poker, baccarat, roulette, or normal craps. They, plus slot machines, are where 90% of the 'walk-in' gambling happens, and I wouldn't want people wandering the streets of Vegas looking for the best odds on blackjack. ;)
So I could say something like:
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas.
Which, logically, means I was wearing my pajamas while shooting an elephant. But if I then continue:
How it got into my pajama I don't know.
Thus changing the interesting, but possible interpetation, to one completely absurd, to wit, that it was the elephant that was in your pajamas.
My God, you're right! Let's try another one:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
This one is phrased like a riddle, and you try to think of an answer. But the answer is:
To get to the other side.
And you are suddenly...outraged. Of course that's why it crossed the road, that's why everyone crosses the road. It's not funny at all, it's not thought-provoking. And then, suddenly, you get that that was the joke. It was a pointless riddle, an excersize in absurdity.
Much like this entire post.
What, money involved in gambling just vanishes now? You mean it doesn't move from lower-middle class people to large corporations, who are something like a bajillion times more likely to invest it in the market?
Not that I think online gambling, or any gambling, is really a good thing, but worrying about the market is just stupid. A much better thing to worry about is addicts spending all their money on it.
Unless something has happened in AI I'm not aware of, bots may not have to pay taxes, but their owners do.
Let's just forget all this 'poker' crap and send some money directly to the casino.
Races are contests. Gambling in casinos is not a contest.
Robots should be able to play poker, just like they should be able to build refrigerators. If I'm paid to build refrigerators, it's not unethical for me to build a robot to do that for me. If I'm trading on the stock market, it's not unethical to build a robot to do that for me. If I'm paid to deliver pizza in thirty minutes or less it's not unethical to build a robot to do that for me. (Assuming the robot is not dangerous to others, obviously, but we're talking about software 'robots'.)
Anyone who wants to play poker as a contest is more than welcome to collect several friends and play penny-ante poker in the real world. Once you go to a site where the point is make money, it's not a let's-compete-to-see-who's-the-best contest anymore, it's a business, and it's no more unethical to build a robot to help you than any other business.
I'm all against using a robot to help in Everquest or Quake or actual competitions online, but online gambling is a business.
You're right in that the casino will always win on all games, but they don't go around randomly adjusting the payoffs until that happens...the payoffs are set by long tradition, and, eventually, by law.
That's not to imply they can't invent new games with whatever probabilites they want, but they can't adjust existing ones.
That's why there is/was such a big flap about card counting. Standard blackjack is slightly favored towards the house. Even if you play a perfect game, your odds are something like 49% of coming out ahead. Well...with card counting, you can up the odds to something like 52%. And casinos cannot change the payoffs of blackjack. So they have to come up with ways to fight counting, like shuffling more often, and often just resort to making you stop gambling by kicking you out.
(No, it's not cheating to count cards. Cheating is when a bunch of people are in an even contest to see who is best. It's not cheating to come up with a stragety to make more money from gambling, anymore than it's cheating for the casino to give out free drinks so you'll gamble longer. Talking about 'cheating' is just crazy.)
The example in the grandparent is interesting because, being a ship in international waters, they were able to do something that most casinos can't do...keep going after they were broke. OTOH, I suspect the only reason they hit the limit was that they didn't want to haul around all that cash...even if they hadn't gotten the winnings back after five days, they could have gotten more cash from their parent company, or, at worst, gotten a loan from the bank. So they weren't literally 'broke', they were just out of cash on hand. But, regardless, it's something that normal casinos cannot do in most places.
However, the whole point of the experiment was 'create a site that would fool automated systems and waste their time and crediblity by causing them to send automated C&D letters'.
Actually pretending to be a file sharing site, by saying 'This file is a copy of the movie 'The Terminal', now in theaters' is going a bit beyond that, even if it's not actually such a file. It may be legal, but it's not MPAA-was-laughed-out-of-the-courtroom legal. Pretending to infringe copyright is probably legal, but it's certainly a question for the courts.
Whereas 'Here is a copy of my short documentary about how some people facing death cope better than their families do: The_Terminal.avi' would get laughed out of court.
The judical system is allowed to contact people no matter what. They will not issue restraining orders against themselves. ;)
The MPAA is hiring people now? I didn't know Hell was running into the same offshoring situtation that the US was.
If they do so anyway...why, that's nothing short of copyright infringement!
That is, I can't come out with a movie Lord of the Rings: The Three Oceans, with the implication that was a Lord of the Rings movie. I can come out with a movie called just 'The Two Towers' or 'The Terminal'. (Although the major movie studios won't produce a movie with those names right now.)
However, it's a moot point. A filename is not magically a trademark infringement. If you've got a page talking about how you made some movies of matrixes being altered, with one named matrix_revolutions.avi, even delibrately set up to confuse automated tools, there's no trademark infringement. To be a trademark infringement you have to be likely to confuse people.
The phone company will, quite, happily, stop sending you your bill. If you want, you can even have them delete your mailing address.
However, this will not result in a free phone service. You still have to pay your bills, whether you get them or not. (In fact, the mailing address the phone company has for my landline is way the hell in the wrong county, so I usually end up paying my bill without seeing it first. As I don't make long distance calls in the first place, I don't have to worry about extra charges...it's 25.56 a month, always.)
(Also I have to point out that harrassment doesn't instantly happen just because you ask them to stop...that's what restraining orders are for. You can keep them off your property, which includes your mail server, by asking, but you can't stop them from contacting you at all without a restraining order.)
I mean, could we have a central converter in each house? I bet that would work. So let's just standardize on a plug with 12 volts or something and be done with it. IIRC, rack mounted devices already have some standard voltage and plugs, so we could just use that one.
If we were really clever, we could get two converters...one outside, and one inside, and just use whichever one was outputting heat in a useful location.
But no one said you can make four watts of heat from one watt of power. What heat pumps and ACs do is move heat, just like the grandparent post said. So you make the inside warmer while you're making the outside colder.
It's called a pressure sensor. There is absolutely nothing stopping them from installing them on showers so that when the cold water goes off, the hot water also goes off. (Think about it. Wouldn't you rather stand there like an idiot without water for four seconds instead of getting scalded out of your skin?) They're mechanical versions of relays...to keep one path of water flowing, you need to keep water though the other path. They cost like four dollars. But no one makes drop-in shower versions for no obvious reason at all.
With a little more expense, you could get a proportional valve that, if the cold water is 50% gone, you only get 50% of the ordered hot water also. But that's more work.
Of course, this wouldn't fix your problem. However, that needs to be fixed at the hot water heater...when there's no hot water, it shouldn't give out any water.
That's the standard for copyright code violation...they run it though a 'filter' first, to remove all the non-protectable elements. IANAL, so someone could explain it better. But by the time anyone judges it, those nine lines of code would be down to about two. Which is like four seconds worth of originality.
And this is assuming that the code was copied, which it doesn't sound like in the first place.
As for 'trade secret' claims, that's just idiotic. While you could, indeed, have the concept be a trade secret, it rather loses any protection when you display the features on a public webpage. Duuuuh.
Also copies are legal for backup purposes. (Everyone parrots 'one backup copy', but what the law actually says is that if a copy is made, it is legal if it is for backup. It doesn't say you can only do that once. It's like it's legal to have a dog if you have a dog license for it...that doesn't mean you can just have one dog, that means the legality of each dog is judged seperately by the law.)
Alternately I'm lying.
Maybe the abuility to find answers on the net is exactly what google is looking for.
Wealth is, roughly, how far human beings have gotten in making 'stuff'. You can generate it via creating things or indirectly by moving things or doing work that frees up other people to create things.
Destroying things, or creating things that don't work as well as they could, removes wealth. For every hour someone spends fixing a Windows box back to a good state, they could have been creating wealth, instead they're running as fast as they can to stay in one place.
Claiming otherwise is akin to claiming that a cup with a leak will hold more water, and, thus, more water will be created. The fallacy there is that cups don't have anything to do with the production of water. Water just exists, and can neither be created of destroyed. (Okay, yes, it can, but this is an analogy.) A leak means you will put more in the cup than otherwise, so other cups get less. (Of course, at this point you can get into supply and demand, and point out a leaky cup creates a higher demand, so the price of water will go up, which will 'help' the people selling water. But hurt everyone else.)
Likewise, the amount of work the human race can do is fairly constant, and wealth is the amount of work actually done minus however much it takes to stay in the same place. Creating more work does not automatically create more wealth, and if it's work getting things back to how they were, it will never create wealth. (Well, okay, technically, it destroys wealth and creates new wealth.)
That's not to say you can't increase the creation of wealth. You just either need to make more people work, or you need to make them more productive, or you need to make things last longer. And there are probably some other ways I can't think of right now.
It's just a way to counter all the people who think vote counting by hand takes too long, by pointing out we have a ready supply of people to do the counting.
If so...why are they doing it? Out of the goodness of their hearts? They got sued over doing it and fought, that seems like rather extreme lengths to carry a charity project.
The first one changes how the page is formatted, which can be good or bad. It works fine if the ad was a banner ad at the top, it can screw things up if it was a sidebar. The other was will never screw up formatting, but will leave empty areas where the ads go. Yes, these areas are transparent, not 'white', but that doesn't mean they won't show up as white if the page designed put the ads in a white table cell.
The grandparent post apparently discovered that IE defaults to the first behavior, and doesn't know enough to go into the AdBlock extention on Firebird and change it to do that. It's another one of those 'I like the way Microsoft does it better, and I'm too lazy to realize that what I'm talking about is an option on the competing OSS' complaints, just ignore it. It's like those goobers who complained about focus follows mouse.
I, personally, like 'make ads transparent', but what would be nicer is a way to change that on a per-ad basis, which no one can do, as far as I know. What would be really nice is some sort of automatic guessing with an option to override if it's wrong. (For example, if it's not in a table or moved with CSS, it can never screw the formatting to just delete it.)