Anomia is the inability to name things in general, not just people. People with anomia have a hard time naming objects you show them, even though they know how to use them. Sometimes it's very pervasive, sometimes it's limited to a few things. I don't know that it's ever limited to people, although there's a separate deficit caused by inability to recognize faces visually. Pure anomics don't always have damage to the medial temporal lobes, and if you want to characterize it as a form of amnesia (which is an apt informal description, but not how neuropsychologists think about it), it would have a big retrograde component in the sense that anomics have trouble with names they learned before (and after) their injuries.
Noboody's forcing MPAA members to even release their movies. If they wanted, they could produce them and then burn them. Or they could release them only to a select few people who are willing to have their brains removed after the viewing, as a copy protection measure. Luckily, they're continuing to release movies as usual, and just using their massive capital to compel various legislative bodies to eliminate a few more of our basic freedoms. It could be worse.
Whatever level of restriction the MPAA is eventually successful in imposing, we can make the following observation. There are two kinds of people: those who love the MPAA's products so much that they are happy to sacrifice their own freedom and that of future generations in order to have access to it; and those who do not. I'm personally getting close to the point where no conceivable movie, even if it answered every question I have about the universe in 90 minutes, would be so important to see that I would be willing to contribute to this organization. But I'm not there yet -- I do buy the occasional DVD, so I guess I'm partly to blame for this mess. I don't think enough people feel similarly to make much of a difference, and since I live in the US, I guess the path of least resistance (legally speaking) will be to buy the DVDs I want, live by the laws paid for by the MPAA, and funded by my neighbors, who for the most part are so desperate to see the latest cynically produced, factory generated vacuous drivel that they can't be bothered to worry about where their money is going.
If you want to make a general point, you need to pick a typical case, not an extreme case. Is the open source model flawed? Yes, of course it is! The alternative claim would be that it is completely perfect. Is the commercial model flawed? Yes, profoundly so. Of course, if the goal in software development is to make money then the commercial model is a more natural choice. If the goal is to develop quality software, then this article makes especially misleading arguments that call this guy's experience and insight into question (even given that he's a hardcore user of at least one open source project).
My main gripe is that this guy has picked the best possible case to make his points: a project that is currently open source, but has inherited a lot of messy code. OpenOffice is probably five standard deviations more complex than the average open source project. It's also extremely immature compared to its commercial competitor. If you pick the worst imaginable case for open source, then obviously it has problems compared to commercial software. This author is either only familiar with a small number of atypical cases or has intentionally tried to argue from an atypical case that supports his argument.
That said, here is one feature OpenOffice has that Microsoft Office can't come close to matching and never will. OpenOffice runs on Linux. Since Linux is the operating system I have to use for my work, from my point of view this is a fatal limitation of the commercial software model. Again, we know which model makes money faster. But from my point of view, the commercial model produces software that is fatally flawed with no possibility whatsoever of remediation. OpenOffice has other advantages, and many other disadvantages. To me, it's pretty obvious that OpenOffice is still improving rapidly, while in my view MS Word has only gotten better at revenue generation.
I've considered starting a security company for ma-and-pa stores to battle these forms of theft. There are many ways a store can protect itself, but the best way is to have intelligent staff who aren't helping the thieves. Good luck there.
Who exactly are you accusing? And I want names. Ma or pa?
Is there anything at stake here? Does a hunk of rock get more representatives in congress if it's called a planet? Is labelling something a planet going to change our knowledge of its shape, composition, orbit, history, appearance, or anything else meaningful? Is the word "planet" a natural phenomenon, the definition of which we can discover through scientific investigation? Is there any realistic circumstance in which agreeing to a formal definition of planet is going to help scientific communication any more than simply being explicit when it's important? (Bearing in mind that agreeing to a formal definition means we'll have to annotate all uses of the word, formal and informal, for the next fifty years.) And most importantly, if some committee settles on a definition that excludes Earth, will we all have to leave and go find a real planet to live on?
There's nothing more irritating than a debate about terminology masquerading as a scientific or philosophical debate. Can someone convince me this isn't just yet another example of this annoying pastime?
Phishers (or whatever you want to call them) don't want your credit card number so that they can long into your card issuer's site as you. They want it so that they can buy stuff using the card. Your site can ask for your fingerprints, a sample of your DNA, and a photograph of your bathroom, and it won't help a bit with the phishing problem as long as vendors, the people who accept credit cards in exchange for merchandise, are willing to make do with the kind of information phishers can get most easily.
I can bend spoons. It's hard to explain to a lay-person, but it just takes a bit of... I don't know how to describe it, call it "leverage." I would be the last to call my powers extraordinary, this is really a power that is latent in all of us, but usually suppressed due to a mental block I will call, in shorthand, "respect for silverware."
Handwriting analysis is also not complete crap. The other day, my wife went shopping, and correctly bought an item that I had written down on our shopping list, even though I myself couldn't read my own handwriting.
It would be great if people with the time and energy to solve these problems would focus on more important problems. I'm referring, of course, to the standardization of beverage sizes.
According to the web site, you need to use either the laser or a special flashlight to view the hologram. That would seem to limit the usefulness of the process.
"Samsung predicts that a price for the 42" PDP will drop to $2099 in the next year and to $1000 in 2006."
I'm guessing you mean DLP. They're almost flat, but I'll give them full credit because they're so light. There's a lot to like about DLP, but from recent visits to electronics stores (okay, Best Buy), I'm not happy with how the image quality degrades when you're a few feet below the level of the screen (e.g., playing with your dog on the floor). They seem to handle off-angle left and right just fine, it's just down that's a problem. Does anyone know if this is liable to be solved in newer models?
xutopia wrote: "Now isn't it sad to see that people are all up in arms because the Olympics aren't coming through but don't give a damn when it's news you're not getting? I guess what they don't know doesn't hurt them."
There's a kernel of truth to this -- there are many people who care more about the Olympics than about sports. But the main reason it appears this way at the moment is that the poor Olympics coverage is news, while the poor coverage of world events (in the US) is something that's been going on for many years. If you base your impressions of what's important to people (e.g., US citiziens) on what you read in the news media, then it's quite natural you will tend to think what concerns them is whatever is topical. This is just a misunderstanding of what it means for something to be "news." It would be very strange to see the same front page stories every day, with titles like, "americans continue to be frustrated by comically poor news coverage for the 50th consecutive year." I suspect the US isn't alone in having problems that concern many people but that aren't in the newspaper every day. But I could be mistaken.
To be a bit more concise, you're mistaken in concluding that people don't know about and don't give a damn about poor news coverage. Many, many people do, and we have given a damn for a long, long time. Too few, I'm sure. But it's nothing new, and you shouldn't confuse what's new with what's important. The Olympics stuff is new, and deserves topical reporting. The general problems with the news are very old, but not particularly topical.
Now if someone took a survey and found that residents of the US would rather fix Olympic coverage than world news coverage, that would indeed be depressing. And it would be news.
unanswerable question
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Is Math A Sport?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
People ask this kind of question about all sorts of things, as though there is some kind of natural law that dictates what is or isn't a sport (or game, or whatever we're arguing about today). Alas, "sport" isn't some natural feature of the structure of the universe, it's a word that's reasonably useful in communicating an ill-defined concept. Asking questions about the precise boundaries of an ill-defined word is pointless.
Fortunately, nothing depends on it! Nobody's all that confused about which features math shares with track and field (sweating, no; competition, yes). And if the organizers of the Olympics declared that math (or poker, or cooking) would be admitted if it were a sport, the right step would not be to try to determine whether or not it's a sport. The right step would be to find out exactly what the organizing committee meant by "sport." After some run-around, we would find out they didn't have anything in mind, and were just speaking loosely in the hope that it wouldn't cause any problems.
The
Human Brain project funds neuroinformatics projects, many of which are released under free or open source licenses.
cognitive modeling of poker
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Geeks and Poker?
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· Score: 3, Informative
For a great convergence of geeks and poker, try the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling this summer, at which there will be a "pokerbot" competition. It's just what it sounds like, but if you'd like an overview (written for poker players), try my article from Card Player Magazine.
Re:Read "Bringing Down the House"
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Geeks and Poker?
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· Score: 4, Informative
The Mezrich book is fine if you know absolutely nothing about blackjack. Otherwise, it's a little hard to take his relentless efforts to make the people he writes about seem like geniuses. They may be geniuses, but not because they can wear clever costumes and count cards.
For a gambling book with much more hacker appeal, try Thomas Bass's "The Eudaemonic Pie." For a poker book with geek appeal, try Yardley's "Education of a Poker Player" (the geek appeal is more in the backstory, which involves codebreaking).
There are a few points it might be worth clarifying.
Many people are skeptical that casino poker can be beaten, because they don't realize that the casino has no interest in how well you play. You're not playing against the casino in the sense that they don't win more when you lose more (or vice versa). You don't have to beat the house any more than you have to vanquish the gas stations that sell you the gas that gets you to the cardroom. The rake is just a rental fee, cover charge, whatever. If someone is skeptical that the casino would offer games that can be beat, it's worth pointing out that in some games, you're not beating them. Where I play, percentage rakes are reserved for the smallest limits, 5-10 and smaller. The rest are seat charges. I absolutely do not have to "beat the house" in any meanigful sense to win at these games. I have to beat the other players, and I do have to beat the other players by enough to cover expenses. That's understood -- all businesses have overhead.
Most pros in live games expect to make little more than 1 big bet an hour, 1.5 tops. For a full-time pro (not just weekend play, 2000 or so hours a year) in live (not online) games bigger than 10-20, 2.5 big bets an hour would be an astonishingly high rate. Except maybe in some California games.
Thomas A. Bass wrote a pretty good book on this. I think it's out of print at the moment, but Amazon seems to list it as shipping, so who knows. It's called "The Eudaemonic Pie." It's a far better book than the recent Mezrich book on blackjack. The teams Mezrich describes were basically working some old and well-known techniques that they didn't themselves invent (despite Mezrich's heroic efforts to make them seem like geniuses). The folks described in the Bass book are much more interesting people, doing much more interesting things. The Bass book has good hack content, the Mezrich book has little if any.
As an aside... If you really want to play an advantage game in a casino, try a game where you don't play against the house. Like poker.
A lot of the comments so far seem to assume the issues has to do with deep linking, which is probably not the case. LinuxToday includes a few paragraphs of each linked article, and it's a fair guess that that's the real issue. The linked editorial by Brian Profitt seems to assume that's the real issue, and it seems pretty obvious anyway.
It's less obvious to me whether or not this exerpting harms the linked sites. I don't visit LinuxToday regularly, but when I do, I don't click through to all of the target articles. For some I just read the headlines, for others I just read the excerpted paragraphs. For a necessarily smaller number I click through to the complete article. I don't know the legalities, but I can understand why an ad-sponsored site would be upset by this. News is often reported in such a way that the first few paragraphs convey most of the content of the story. If LT included less content, or only the headline, most likely more readers would click through to each original story. I would have guessed that it's still better than no link at all. But I don't know for sure. Perhaps CMP believes it will get more traffic on its IW pages if people can't follow links from LT. Or perhaps the just picked an odd way to coerce LT into including less content.
You don't know how much physical junk mail you'd get it it were free. Fortunately, I do. You would get over 12 tons of physical junk mail a day. If you're getting less than that, then you should conclude that postage has done a good if not perfect job of curtailing your problem.
"And why the heck not? IANAL, but here in the USA, at least, there's a doctrine referred to as 'probable cause.' It states that you can't be arrested or searched without some degree of evidence that you've committed a crime or that evidence of your having committed a crime exists at a particular location. You can't even be temporarily detained by a police officer without him having evidence to support a 'reasonable suspicion' that you've done something illegal."
I wrote that I don't expect the police officer to assume I'm innocent. You're not arguing that the police should assume you're innocent. You're arguing that they shouldn't detain or search you without probable cause. That's obviously true. But it would be senseless to argue that the police shouldn't engage in their normal monitoring activity, which doesn't violate your rights, just because you happen to be a nice guy. I'm not saying they should arrest all students who turn in papers. I'm saying they are entitled (and reasonably expected) to check to see if those papers match archival sources.
For college papers, comparing a student's work to work from which it might have been plagiarized is completely different from unreasonable search, detention, or whatever else police aren't supposed to do. Comparing a student's work to earlier work is not only reasonable, it's actually the responsibility of the professor, who is responsible for evaluating the student's work for, among other things, originality. Teachers at all levels have been monitoring the work of their students for various forms of cheating for probably as long as there have been teachers and students. It's only recently that it's become possible to do this effectively, and it doesn't seem to violate anyone's actual rights (contrasted with imagined rights).
I wouldn't have any problem with a professor searching his/her memory to determine if a paper may have been plagiarized, or turned in by more than one student. It seems reasonable for that professor to poke around the internet for key phrases from papers that seem suspiciously well written. If that professor has copies of previous years' papers (which may even be administratively required), it doesn't seem too out of the realm of reasonable behavior to do some cross-checking when something raises a red flag. So what's the problem with paying a service to do these kinds of things for you automatically? If the problem has to do with the specific business practices of this one service, then that's one thing. But raising some kind of ethical objection seems poorly considered.
Of course, if I asked students to turn their papers in to an anti-cheating service, I would expect those students to be insightful enough to understand that I'm asking them to help me with the extremely difficult task of ensuring that what they're handing in is their own work, a task that is clearly with the responsibilities of anyone who teaches.
To put it a little differently, running papers through a service isn't treating students like criminals. It's treating them like potential cheaters. Which they are. And those are two completely different kinds of treatment. In the same way everyone who goes through an airport is a potential terrorist. I don't tell the airports that I'm offended. I express my understanding that they have to treat me like a potential terrorist because they don't have an intimate personal relationship with me. No one should expect to be trusted by people they don't know well. And frankly, even if a professor knows one or two students in a class well, it's a lot more ethically defensible to just check everyone instead of making judgment calls.
I'd be a bit more offended if a professor singled out my work to check for plagiarism. (Well, first I'd be flattered.) But I'd be reassured if they used a service to check everyone's automatically.
What I really don't understand is if Rosenfeld has thought through the difference between treating students as guilty vs. treating them as potentially guilty. If they were treating students as guilty, they would have kicked everyone who turned in a paper out of the university. Being treated as potentially guilty is something we should all expect, and from which we all benefit. I don't expect a police officer I've never met to just assume I didn't do something because I know I'm a nice guy. And if I were taking a course, I would understand that it's reasonable for the professor, who probably has a recent, short, and not very close relationship with most of the students in the class to treat the students as potential cheaters. They're not singling anyone out. They're just being appropriately diligent at a time when it's finally possible to catch some of the ridiculously rampant cheating.
If we use the FSF's mode of describing things as a point of reference, this is probably an open source project, but not a free one. If it were a software project, it would violate the very first of the freedoms the FSF considers essential (look here) in that it restricts who may use it for what purposes. Whether or not they can meaningfully impose that restriction is a separate issue.
This is just an old trick, popularized by horoscope and fortune cookie writers, applied to the computer industry. There's almost no conceivable course of events during the next year (especially given the certainty of more SCO-related headlines, at least on Slashdot) that couldn't be described as at least provisionally consistent with this prediction. If Cringely provided some analysis or insight, I guess there could have been an interesting point here. But it's really just a throw-away.
As an exercise, review the years to date for Linux. Each year has seen some significant movement towards both growth and death. Lately there have been interesting maintainer changes, which would probably qualify as changes in organizational structure. It's hard to remember a significant period of time during which Linux hasn't confronted something that could be loosely described as a do-or-die challenge. The same could probably be said for most if not all organizations in the tech industry. If Cringely really wanted to make a non-obvious prediction, and this was the best he could come up with, he probably just didn't give it much thought.
Going on evidence from brain-injured patients, it's a lot easier to prevent the formation of new memories (anterograde amnesia) than to prevent the retrieval of old memories (retrograde amnesia), where "old" and "new" are relative to the injury, procedure, or whatever. Although anterograde amnesia often includes a retrograde component, it's supposed to follow a temporal gradient -- the most recent memories are the first to go. Blocking a specific set of memories (e.g., your high school years) would seem like a pretty distant prospect for now.
There are many labs studying the neural underpinings of memory (mine included), but there is hardly any broad agreement on how things work, which bears on how easy this would be to do. In particular, there is no consensus that it makes any sense to discuss where a particular memory is stored. It may be that it would take dismantling and reassembling someone's entire neural connectivity to do this effectively, which is certainly well out of reach now.
How legitimate a gripe this is really depends on what people think they'll be missing. Linux kernel modules mean that slower updates to the kernel don't necessarily mean anyone will be left out in the cold. Things that are currently supported via kernel modules may still be supported and updated by whoever maintains those modules, it's just that those updates may not make it into Marcelo's (Linus's) kernel. Whether or not those 2.4-based modules get written and/or updated is somewhat independent of the issue of whether or not they get bundled into an official new 2.4 update past 2.4.25.
Of course, if they're worried about missing out on new scheduler or vm features, or other more central kernel functionality... well, that's what new kernel versions are for.
Slashdot Mirror
Anomia is the inability to name things in general, not just people. People with anomia have a hard time naming objects you show them, even though they know how to use them. Sometimes it's very pervasive, sometimes it's limited to a few things. I don't know that it's ever limited to people, although there's a separate deficit caused by inability to recognize faces visually. Pure anomics don't always have damage to the medial temporal lobes, and if you want to characterize it as a form of amnesia (which is an apt informal description, but not how neuropsychologists think about it), it would have a big retrograde component in the sense that anomics have trouble with names they learned before (and after) their injuries.
Noboody's forcing MPAA members to even release their movies. If they wanted, they could produce them and then burn them. Or they could release them only to a select few people who are willing to have their brains removed after the viewing, as a copy protection measure. Luckily, they're continuing to release movies as usual, and just using their massive capital to compel various legislative bodies to eliminate a few more of our basic freedoms. It could be worse.
Whatever level of restriction the MPAA is eventually successful in imposing, we can make the following observation. There are two kinds of people: those who love the MPAA's products so much that they are happy to sacrifice their own freedom and that of future generations in order to have access to it; and those who do not. I'm personally getting close to the point where no conceivable movie, even if it answered every question I have about the universe in 90 minutes, would be so important to see that I would be willing to contribute to this organization. But I'm not there yet -- I do buy the occasional DVD, so I guess I'm partly to blame for this mess. I don't think enough people feel similarly to make much of a difference, and since I live in the US, I guess the path of least resistance (legally speaking) will be to buy the DVDs I want, live by the laws paid for by the MPAA, and funded by my neighbors, who for the most part are so desperate to see the latest cynically produced, factory generated vacuous drivel that they can't be bothered to worry about where their money is going.
If you want to make a general point, you need to pick a typical case, not an extreme case. Is the open source model flawed? Yes, of course it is! The alternative claim would be that it is completely perfect. Is the commercial model flawed? Yes, profoundly so. Of course, if the goal in software development is to make money then the commercial model is a more natural choice. If the goal is to develop quality software, then this article makes especially misleading arguments that call this guy's experience and insight into question (even given that he's a hardcore user of at least one open source project).
My main gripe is that this guy has picked the best possible case to make his points: a project that is currently open source, but has inherited a lot of messy code. OpenOffice is probably five standard deviations more complex than the average open source project. It's also extremely immature compared to its commercial competitor. If you pick the worst imaginable case for open source, then obviously it has problems compared to commercial software. This author is either only familiar with a small number of atypical cases or has intentionally tried to argue from an atypical case that supports his argument.
That said, here is one feature OpenOffice has that Microsoft Office can't come close to matching and never will. OpenOffice runs on Linux. Since Linux is the operating system I have to use for my work, from my point of view this is a fatal limitation of the commercial software model. Again, we know which model makes money faster. But from my point of view, the commercial model produces software that is fatally flawed with no possibility whatsoever of remediation. OpenOffice has other advantages, and many other disadvantages. To me, it's pretty obvious that OpenOffice is still improving rapidly, while in my view MS Word has only gotten better at revenue generation.
Who exactly are you accusing? And I want names. Ma or pa?
Is there anything at stake here? Does a hunk of rock get more representatives in congress if it's called a planet? Is labelling something a planet going to change our knowledge of its shape, composition, orbit, history, appearance, or anything else meaningful? Is the word "planet" a natural phenomenon, the definition of which we can discover through scientific investigation? Is there any realistic circumstance in which agreeing to a formal definition of planet is going to help scientific communication any more than simply being explicit when it's important? (Bearing in mind that agreeing to a formal definition means we'll have to annotate all uses of the word, formal and informal, for the next fifty years.) And most importantly, if some committee settles on a definition that excludes Earth, will we all have to leave and go find a real planet to live on?
There's nothing more irritating than a debate about terminology masquerading as a scientific or philosophical debate. Can someone convince me this isn't just yet another example of this annoying pastime?
Phishers (or whatever you want to call them) don't want your credit card number so that they can long into your card issuer's site as you. They want it so that they can buy stuff using the card. Your site can ask for your fingerprints, a sample of your DNA, and a photograph of your bathroom, and it won't help a bit with the phishing problem as long as vendors, the people who accept credit cards in exchange for merchandise, are willing to make do with the kind of information phishers can get most easily.
I can bend spoons. It's hard to explain to a lay-person, but it just takes a bit of ... I don't know how to describe it, call it "leverage." I would be the last to call my powers extraordinary, this is really a power that is latent in all of us, but usually suppressed due to a mental block I will call, in shorthand, "respect for silverware."
Handwriting analysis is also not complete crap. The other day, my wife went shopping, and correctly bought an item that I had written down on our shopping list, even though I myself couldn't read my own handwriting.
It would be great if people with the time and energy to solve these problems would focus on more important problems. I'm referring, of course, to the standardization of beverage sizes.
According to the web site, you need to use either the laser or a special flashlight to view the hologram. That would seem to limit the usefulness of the process.
"Samsung predicts that a price for the 42" PDP will drop to $2099 in the next year and to $1000 in 2006."
I'm guessing you mean DLP. They're almost flat, but I'll give them full credit because they're so light. There's a lot to like about DLP, but from recent visits to electronics stores (okay, Best Buy), I'm not happy with how the image quality degrades when you're a few feet below the level of the screen (e.g., playing with your dog on the floor). They seem to handle off-angle left and right just fine, it's just down that's a problem. Does anyone know if this is liable to be solved in newer models?
xutopia wrote: "Now isn't it sad to see that people are all up in arms because the Olympics aren't coming through but don't give a damn when it's news you're not getting? I guess what they don't know doesn't hurt them."
There's a kernel of truth to this -- there are many people who care more about the Olympics than about sports. But the main reason it appears this way at the moment is that the poor Olympics coverage is news, while the poor coverage of world events (in the US) is something that's been going on for many years. If you base your impressions of what's important to people (e.g., US citiziens) on what you read in the news media, then it's quite natural you will tend to think what concerns them is whatever is topical. This is just a misunderstanding of what it means for something to be "news." It would be very strange to see the same front page stories every day, with titles like, "americans continue to be frustrated by comically poor news coverage for the 50th consecutive year." I suspect the US isn't alone in having problems that concern many people but that aren't in the newspaper every day. But I could be mistaken.
To be a bit more concise, you're mistaken in concluding that people don't know about and don't give a damn about poor news coverage. Many, many people do, and we have given a damn for a long, long time. Too few, I'm sure. But it's nothing new, and you shouldn't confuse what's new with what's important. The Olympics stuff is new, and deserves topical reporting. The general problems with the news are very old, but not particularly topical.
Now if someone took a survey and found that residents of the US would rather fix Olympic coverage than world news coverage, that would indeed be depressing. And it would be news.
People ask this kind of question about all sorts of things, as though there is some kind of natural law that dictates what is or isn't a sport (or game, or whatever we're arguing about today). Alas, "sport" isn't some natural feature of the structure of the universe, it's a word that's reasonably useful in communicating an ill-defined concept. Asking questions about the precise boundaries of an ill-defined word is pointless.
Fortunately, nothing depends on it! Nobody's all that confused about which features math shares with track and field (sweating, no; competition, yes). And if the organizers of the Olympics declared that math (or poker, or cooking) would be admitted if it were a sport, the right step would not be to try to determine whether or not it's a sport. The right step would be to find out exactly what the organizing committee meant by "sport." After some run-around, we would find out they didn't have anything in mind, and were just speaking loosely in the hope that it wouldn't cause any problems.
The Human Brain project funds neuroinformatics projects, many of which are released under free or open source licenses.
For a great convergence of geeks and poker, try the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling this summer, at which there will be a "pokerbot" competition. It's just what it sounds like, but if you'd like an overview (written for poker players), try my article from Card Player Magazine.
The Mezrich book is fine if you know absolutely nothing about blackjack. Otherwise, it's a little hard to take his relentless efforts to make the people he writes about seem like geniuses. They may be geniuses, but not because they can wear clever costumes and count cards.
For a gambling book with much more hacker appeal, try Thomas Bass's "The Eudaemonic Pie." For a poker book with geek appeal, try Yardley's "Education of a Poker Player" (the geek appeal is more in the backstory, which involves codebreaking).
There are a few points it might be worth clarifying.
Many people are skeptical that casino poker can be beaten, because they don't realize that the casino has no interest in how well you play. You're not playing against the casino in the sense that they don't win more when you lose more (or vice versa). You don't have to beat the house any more than you have to vanquish the gas stations that sell you the gas that gets you to the cardroom. The rake is just a rental fee, cover charge, whatever. If someone is skeptical that the casino would offer games that can be beat, it's worth pointing out that in some games, you're not beating them. Where I play, percentage rakes are reserved for the smallest limits, 5-10 and smaller. The rest are seat charges. I absolutely do not have to "beat the house" in any meanigful sense to win at these games. I have to beat the other players, and I do have to beat the other players by enough to cover expenses. That's understood -- all businesses have overhead.
Most pros in live games expect to make little more than 1 big bet an hour, 1.5 tops. For a full-time pro (not just weekend play, 2000 or so hours a year) in live (not online) games bigger than 10-20, 2.5 big bets an hour would be an astonishingly high rate. Except maybe in some California games.
Thomas A. Bass wrote a pretty good book on this. I think it's out of print at the moment, but Amazon seems to list it as shipping, so who knows. It's called "The Eudaemonic Pie." It's a far better book than the recent Mezrich book on blackjack. The teams Mezrich describes were basically working some old and well-known techniques that they didn't themselves invent (despite Mezrich's heroic efforts to make them seem like geniuses). The folks described in the Bass book are much more interesting people, doing much more interesting things. The Bass book has good hack content, the Mezrich book has little if any.
As an aside... If you really want to play an advantage game in a casino, try a game where you don't play against the house. Like poker.
A lot of the comments so far seem to assume the issues has to do with deep linking, which is probably not the case. LinuxToday includes a few paragraphs of each linked article, and it's a fair guess that that's the real issue. The linked editorial by Brian Profitt seems to assume that's the real issue, and it seems pretty obvious anyway.
It's less obvious to me whether or not this exerpting harms the linked sites. I don't visit LinuxToday regularly, but when I do, I don't click through to all of the target articles. For some I just read the headlines, for others I just read the excerpted paragraphs. For a necessarily smaller number I click through to the complete article. I don't know the legalities, but I can understand why an ad-sponsored site would be upset by this. News is often reported in such a way that the first few paragraphs convey most of the content of the story. If LT included less content, or only the headline, most likely more readers would click through to each original story. I would have guessed that it's still better than no link at all. But I don't know for sure. Perhaps CMP believes it will get more traffic on its IW pages if people can't follow links from LT. Or perhaps the just picked an odd way to coerce LT into including less content.
You don't know how much physical junk mail you'd get it it were free. Fortunately, I do. You would get over 12 tons of physical junk mail a day. If you're getting less than that, then you should conclude that postage has done a good if not perfect job of curtailing your problem.
I wrote that I don't expect the police officer to assume I'm innocent. You're not arguing that the police should assume you're innocent. You're arguing that they shouldn't detain or search you without probable cause. That's obviously true. But it would be senseless to argue that the police shouldn't engage in their normal monitoring activity, which doesn't violate your rights, just because you happen to be a nice guy. I'm not saying they should arrest all students who turn in papers. I'm saying they are entitled (and reasonably expected) to check to see if those papers match archival sources.
For college papers, comparing a student's work to work from which it might have been plagiarized is completely different from unreasonable search, detention, or whatever else police aren't supposed to do. Comparing a student's work to earlier work is not only reasonable, it's actually the responsibility of the professor, who is responsible for evaluating the student's work for, among other things, originality. Teachers at all levels have been monitoring the work of their students for various forms of cheating for probably as long as there have been teachers and students. It's only recently that it's become possible to do this effectively, and it doesn't seem to violate anyone's actual rights (contrasted with imagined rights).
I wouldn't have any problem with a professor searching his/her memory to determine if a paper may have been plagiarized, or turned in by more than one student. It seems reasonable for that professor to poke around the internet for key phrases from papers that seem suspiciously well written. If that professor has copies of previous years' papers (which may even be administratively required), it doesn't seem too out of the realm of reasonable behavior to
do some cross-checking when something raises a red flag. So what's the problem with paying a service to do these kinds of things for you automatically? If the problem has to do with the specific business practices of this one service, then that's one thing. But raising some kind of ethical objection seems poorly considered.
Of course, if I asked students to turn their papers in to an anti-cheating service, I would expect those students to be insightful enough to understand that I'm asking them to help me with the extremely difficult task of ensuring that what they're handing in is their own work, a task that is clearly with the responsibilities of anyone who teaches.
To put it a little differently, running papers through a service isn't treating students like criminals. It's treating them like potential cheaters. Which they are. And those are two completely different kinds of treatment. In the same way everyone who goes through an airport is a potential terrorist. I don't tell the airports that I'm offended. I express my understanding that they have to treat me like a potential terrorist because they don't have an intimate personal relationship with me. No one should expect to be trusted by people they don't know well. And frankly, even if a professor knows one or two students in a class well, it's a lot more ethically defensible to just check everyone instead of making judgment calls.
I'd be a bit more offended if a professor singled out my work to check for plagiarism. (Well, first I'd be flattered.) But I'd be reassured if they used a service to check everyone's automatically.
What I really don't understand is if Rosenfeld has thought through the difference between treating students as guilty vs. treating them as potentially guilty. If they were treating students as guilty, they would have kicked everyone who turned in a paper out of the university. Being treated as potentially guilty is something we should all expect, and from which we all benefit. I don't expect a police officer I've never met to just assume I didn't do something because I know I'm a nice guy. And if I were taking a course, I would understand that it's reasonable for the professor, who probably has a recent, short, and not very close relationship with most of the students in the class to treat the students as potential cheaters. They're not singling anyone out. They're just being appropriately diligent at a time when it's finally possible to catch some of the ridiculously rampant cheating.
If we use the FSF's mode of describing things as a point of reference, this is probably an open source project, but not a free one. If it were a software project, it would violate the very first of the freedoms the FSF considers essential (look here) in that it restricts who may use it for what purposes. Whether or not they can meaningfully impose that restriction is a separate issue.
This is just an old trick, popularized by horoscope and fortune cookie writers, applied to the computer industry. There's almost no conceivable course of events during the next year (especially given the certainty of more SCO-related headlines, at least on Slashdot) that couldn't be described as at least provisionally consistent with this prediction. If Cringely provided some analysis or insight, I guess there could have been an interesting point here. But it's really just a throw-away.
As an exercise, review the years to date for Linux. Each year has seen some significant movement towards both growth and death. Lately there have been interesting maintainer changes, which would probably qualify as changes in organizational structure. It's hard to remember a significant period of time during which Linux hasn't confronted something that could be loosely described as a do-or-die challenge. The same could probably be said for most if not all organizations in the tech industry. If Cringely really wanted to make a non-obvious prediction, and this was the best he could come up with, he probably just didn't give it much thought.
Going on evidence from brain-injured patients, it's a lot easier to prevent the formation of new memories (anterograde amnesia) than to prevent the retrieval of old memories (retrograde amnesia), where "old" and "new" are relative to the injury, procedure, or whatever. Although anterograde amnesia often includes a retrograde component, it's supposed to follow a temporal gradient -- the most recent memories are the first to go. Blocking a specific set of memories (e.g., your high school years) would seem like a pretty distant prospect for now.
There are many labs studying the neural underpinings of memory (mine included), but there is hardly any broad agreement on how things work, which bears on how easy this would be to do. In particular, there is no consensus that it makes any sense to discuss where a particular memory is stored. It may be that it would take dismantling and reassembling someone's entire neural connectivity to do this effectively, which is certainly well out of reach now.
How legitimate a gripe this is really depends on what people think they'll be missing. Linux kernel modules mean that slower updates to the kernel don't necessarily mean anyone will be left out in the cold. Things that are currently supported via kernel modules may still be supported and updated by whoever maintains those modules, it's just that those updates may not make it into Marcelo's (Linus's) kernel. Whether or not those 2.4-based modules get written and/or updated is somewhat independent of the issue of whether or not they get bundled into an official new 2.4 update past 2.4.25.
Of course, if they're worried about missing out on new scheduler or vm features, or other more central kernel functionality... well, that's what new kernel versions are for.