The store staff took your money and didn't give you anything in return. That sounds like theft to me. If you are intent on making a stand regarding the idiocy of their policies (I'm not knocking you - I would do it, just for fun), then you should suggest that its time to call the police regarding the matter of their theft from you. It would be interesting to see how far they would take that, and I think that there is a better than even chance that the police officer would side with you.
This is all assuming that you look like a reasonably decent member of society, and not a homeless gangbanging miscreant of course (not that there is anything wrong with looking like one if you want to - just don't expect other people to treat you like they would treat someone who's appearance is more in keeping with their expectations).
For fun, you could ask them if they will be storing this personally-identifiable medical information in a data store that complies with HIPAA regulations... http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/ Then suggest that you will check with the local authorities (don't name anyone) to see if the store has been certified as compliant with the HIPAA privacy requirements, disclosures, etc. And finally, ask them if they *really* want you to write all of that personally-identifiable medical information on their form.
Sure, its like poking the bear in a cage. But in this case, the bear deserves it:-)
Do we really need yet another Apple-controlled walled garden? Don't we have enough of those already?
So vote with your wallet. I bought an AppleTV just before Christmas as a "santa gift" for the kids (hey - only $99!). My aim was to introduce Internet-based streaming media as a movie-delivery device in addition to RedBox DVDs (we don't have cable TV), and I was thinking only of NetFlix when I bought it. Before I set it up, I did the research I should have done before I bought it, and saw that although it worked with NetFlix, it didn't work with anything else except for Apple's media store. The day after Christmas, I saw a Sony BDP-S370 Blu-ray plus Internet streaming video player for $99 at the Sony store. It did NetFlix, plus some other services (Hulu Plus, Amazon, Crackle). Oh, yeah - it plays Blu-ray discs, too! It didn't play anything from Apple's media store, but that didn't seem such a big loss to me based on the prices I had seen ($1 for a freaking TV show *episode*?). No brainer. Returned the AppleTV, bought the Sony player. I'm happy.
I think that the streaming video market is so very different from the music distribution market that Apple's "walled garden" play will stumble. Here I am, a long-term Macintosh user (Mac Plus, SE30, PowerMac 7200, PowerMac G4 Digital Audio tower, and Intel-based 24" iMac) with a family of iPods (my wife and I have classics, my two kids have Nanos). I'm happy with iTunes and iPods - we still buy CDs which we then load into iTunes for playback on our SliMP3 player in the living room and our iPods everywhere else - but the movie world is a different beast altogether. I'm not going to rip DVDs/Blu-rays into a home library unless the technology gets a lot better (cheaper, faster, less seemingly illicit), so the whole local playback capability of the AppleTV is moot (as is the DLNA-based local playback of the Sony player - at least to me). What matters in both markets is choice, and while I could use iTunes/iPods and still maintain the power of choice (despite the moans some people make, iTunes/iPod users are *not* locked into the Apple media store), the same is not nearly as true with the AppleTV. Sure, I have some choice - I can choose NetFlix and/or Apple's media store. With any one of a host of other media players (Sony is just one of a plethora of choices now) I can't have the Apple media store, but I can have practically every other distribution option available on the Internet.
I have to leave the question of whether the video game market is more like the music distribution market or the audio/video movie/TV show distribution market up to those of you who play video games... I don't. In fact, it may be yet another paradigm, as my outside-looking-in view of video games is that they are all walled garden's in a way - each company's game console only plays games brought out on that console - yet video game companies often produce multiple versions of each game title, one for each game console - which means there isn't much of a wall. If Apple chooses to play in the games console environment, won't they be essentially like every other games console? A video game company will choose whether or not to port a title to the Apple console, the same way they choose to port to other consoles. At the same time, some number of "Apple-only" games will probably spring up, just as their are titles available on only Sony PlayStation and only Nintendo whatever and only Microsoft XBox.
If the lure of a game that is only available on the AppleTV game console causes you to buy the $99 AppleTV in order to be able to play it, isn't that what a free market economy is all about? Each of us is free to buy or not to buy, no one will force anyone to make that purchase to play that game.
The MicroVAX ran the same VMS operating system as all of the other VAXes. There were processor differences; bigger processors implemented most instructions in hardware, while smaller/cheaper processors would have software routines for more arcane and less likely-to-be-used instructions. One of the benefits of the VAX computer line was that the same software ran on the entire line, all the way from the tiny MicroVAX up the the big 9xxx VAXes. Another benefit was the 4 modes of processor operation (user mode, supervisor mode, executive mode, and kernel mode) with a tightly controlled method to change to a more powerful enhanced processor mode. Couple that with a virtual memory operating system (VMS), huge linear address space (4 GB was big in 1978), symmetric instruction set, and you had a great system.
I suppose it depends on which way you look at it... is the most abused word (period) automatically the most abused word in every category, or does its omni-abuse potential render it ineligible for the award in a particular category?
However, I wouldn't be surprised if the word in question wouldn't win on its own in tech. It has certainly been my experience that people involved in technology tend to abuse that word quite a bit. "Why the f*** isn't this working?" "The f***ing code is screwed up" "What f***head configured this router?" and that sort of thing.
One wonders just how long you have been waiting with that bit of humor, waiting for the right moment to introduce it into a thread where it was actually on-topic...
Did you even read the review? The reviewer reviewed the restaurant, related what he liked and didn't like about the restaurant, then closed out his review with a discussion of what he did after eating the meal to get the bad taste out of his mouth. He only mentioned the competitors as a comparison - i.e., he preferred his experience at those competitors to his experience at the restaurant he was reviewing.
The response from the general manager of the restaurant and the lawsuit sound like they are the result of someone who is used to never being questioned, being questioned. How dare someone publicly discuss the shortcomings of the restaurant? How dare they criticize my place of business? I don't know whether the general manager is right, and such criticisms are against the law in Kuwait, but if they are it looks to be to be very repressive.
Free speech does indeed mean being free to voice your opinion about anything, even if your opinion is distinctly negative, without suffering legal problems as a result. If it were otherwise, all negative opinions could be silenced with the threat of a lawsuit. I have read the review, and it seems even-handed, not a one-sided tirade against the restaurant in question. I'm not sure what you think the reviewer could do to "correct" the review. What part of the review do you think is incorrect - given that the review relates that reviewers experience when they went to the restaurant?
It is too bad that there isn't a set of counters to provide information about data usage on each smart phone. Something one could use to form a basis for decisions about how to manage one's data over the network. Something simple that would collect information about network usage for management purposes.
Maybe someday smartphone vendors will provide such a tool. They could call the set of counters something like a Management Information Base, and they could name the protocol used to access these counters something like the Simple Network Management Protocol. Yeah, that's the ticket. SNMP with a smartphone data usage MIB.
The answer isn't to whine about what a carrier might or might not be doing, or how a test for data usage is flawed. The right start is to get the instrumentation in place so that everyone can know what the actual numbers are, and then use those numbers to verify billing and whatever else needs to be verified. SNMP agents are relatively small bits of code but can provide so much useful data. If smartphones that communication over a network don't have them already, why not?
There are many possible reasons why electronics of various types should be turned off, most of the covered by the discussion here. However, most importantly, THEY SHOULD BE TURNED OFF BECAUSE THE RULE IS TO TURN THEM OFF. That's right, I'm advocating obeying the rule just because there is a rule. Sounds like I'm some kind of wuss, huh?
We like to think that we are a nation of laws, not men (read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law or here http://robertdfeinman.com/society/men_not_laws.html. A fundamental premise of this is that everyone is supposed to obey the law. I'm sure everyone can cite examples where this is not so (police giving other police a pass for infractions, etc.) but in general it is a very useful and egalitarian way to order society. We order society so that society is possible. Without order there would be chaos. One way to order society is to have multiple classes of people - you know, the nobles and the peasants. There are some who feel that this is the rightful order of things. Others don't. In the United States, one of the basic premises of our society is that everyone follows the rules. Sure, we know its not always true. But the more we pursue the ideal, the greater the chance that we will come close to it.
I get aggravated every time I see someone flaunt their disrespect for the law, such as when driving in traffic. We've all seen someone cut to the head of a line, etc. Why do we get angry? Well, its not fair, for one thing. For another, most of us recognize that its extremely easy to break the law and we probably wouldn't get "caught" (i.e., punished by some enforcer of the law), but we obey it anyway. We are frustrated with those don't, in part because most of us are smart enough to realize that if we all disregarded those laws, we would have chaos. The rule breaking only works if a very few people do it. So those few people have anointed themselves as somehow being above the rest of us. Nothing is more sure to tick a person off then another person placing themselves above that first person, especially in a society that believes it is egalitarian.
So think about it the next time you are breaking a rule, probably because you think you know it is a harmless infraction. Who are you ticking off with your self-importance? How much are you encouraging others to also choose to bend/break a rule, perhaps one more important? How much are you contributing to disorder and chaos?
Most importantly, how much are you contributing to the kind of thinking exhibited by those like Ms. Huffington who obviously think that "rules are for the little people"?
I say "yea!" to the disclosure. I would really like to know who is skirting/shirking the tax laws that I am unwilling/unable to skirt or shirk. Having those who can afford to break the rules able to do so with impunity doesn't do any good for the rest of society. Level the playing field, and then perhaps there will be greater pressure to make the tax laws more sensible.
If NASA wasn't so administratively inept, spending more money on NASA might make sense. As it is, there is a significant amount of outright stupidity going on outside of the science organizations (in NASA) that makes giving the organization more money rather a waste.
This appears to be a classic example of short-sighted, clueless management. It looks like the introduction of yet another money-wasting business cycle (other examples being "outsource things that aren't are core competency versus its cheaper and better do take care of these things ourselves" and "centralized versus de-centralized."
As the management pendulum marking the extremes of each cycle swings from side to side, a new set of managers (immune from learning from the lessons of the past) comes up with brilliant cost-reducing ideas that they can prove will save money (as long as their analysis is shallow enough - which its guaranteed to be due to their lack of experience). These ideas, when adopted, start the pendulum swinging over to the other extreme. The managers, wrapping themselves in accolades, cheers their foresight and win themselves promotions for cutting costs. Meanwhile, the business spends beauceau big dollars and disrupts major internal processes making the change. After some number of years (long enough for the old managers to not be interested anymore due to promotions and/or firings) the cycle repeats, only from the other extreme. (Note - it is not always simple dollar costs driving the swings - there are many other types of business costs that may be cited.)
This is the vocation of many managers - enacting change for the sake of change and promoting themselves rather than identifying true fundamentals and making the business work better.
One company with which I am familiar has just completed totally locking down every employee's desktop/laptop. This was all justified by various levels of management as being absolutely essential to the business, and the only means by which the company could be absolutely certain that the company's information, and that of its customers, could be protected. I wonder how long it will be until the cost of this effort becomes seen as a negative and a move to promote employee self-provisioning of computing tools emerges... of course, there isn't really anything to prevent the company from requiring employees to furnish their own computers but still taking them over and locking them down - is there?
In general, it is not only "okay" but a right specifically enumerated (not all are) in the US Constitution for private citizens to maintain "secrecy" about their operations. At the same time is is "not okay" for the government of the USA to maintain secrecy about its operations. There are limitations to both of these positions, of course. A citizen's right to secrecy ends when that citizen can be shown to have probably committed a crime. The government can maintain secrecy about certain limited operations when the government can show that it is necessary in order for the government to carry out its responsibilities with respect to the limited set of powers entrusted to the government by the citizens. The general statement holds true, however: private citizens can operate with secrecy by default, the government must act openly by default.
Yes, I recognize that in this case there is an international cast of characters. There is a lot more in play than the simplistic view of US citizen rights vis a vis the US government. But I thought it was worth clarifying the issues as they would apply to a US citizen/US government as a starting point, and as a general philosophical position with respect to citizens and governments in general.
I didn't state clearly what I was trying to say... I understand that there might be couple of points favoritism to the house with the odds, and I'll accept that as the cost of the enterprise.
The point I intended to make was about the advantage the house has over the players in how the rules are enforced. The house can nullify a large Video Lottery Terminal jackpot if the house determines that the jackpot violated pre-determined odds of paying out. However, the players have virtually no ability to determine whether the odds of them losing are equally well-policed. In the cases where jackpots have been nullified, I don't see any corresponding refunds given to all of the players playing the "malfunctioning" machine prior to the "unplanned jackpot" that is nullified.
I think the terms of the bet should be the same for both. If the casino puts the machine into service, they should have to live with the results of the machine's play, whether it fits their pre-determined odds or not. At the same time, every effort should be made to make sure the machines work properly. But large jackpots should not be nullified.
Hey - my kids came home from school saying the EXACT SAME THING! It can't be coincidence - Bloody Mary must really exist!
You should have seen the looks on my kids' faces when I stood in front of the mirror and spun around while chanting "Bloody Mary!" three times! (Sadly, Bloody Mary did not appear in the mirror.)
After that, my wife showed them who "Bloody Mary" was in medieval English history, including why she (the historic person, not my wife) was called "Bloody Mary."
Don't forget the spaceship. The earth isn't in the same spot that it was 1000 years ago, never mind 6,600. You will need to be able to travel around a bit.
The problem with the approach that you have outlined is that there are bound to be some random inputs picked up by these sensors, and the human brain is wired to find patterns, even in random noise. Without a pre-determined notion of what types of input will correctly identify the presence of a ghost, any random input that appears to have a pattern will be determined to be evidence of a ghost, and its highly likely that random input will appear to have a pattern, to at least one member of the group. With as much equipment and monitoring as you are suggesting, it would be surprising if nothing happened that could construed as "evidence" of "something weird" happening.
Limited data collection attempts as proposed (without a theory, and without a lot of repeated trials under various conditions, including locations known to *not* have ghosts) may well *backfire* and convince people that something really is out there. In fact, when the random input phenomena are observed occurring in locations believe to not have ghosts, your "true believers" are going to insist that that location has ghosts, too, rather than accept that the original location doesn't. The scientific equipment doesn't lie, does it? This is how psueudo-science gains adherents.
You may have missed all the fun and excitement of the book "Chariots of the Gods" by a guy named Erich von Daniken http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F. It was all the rage when I was young, and I couldn't understand why *someone* wasn't doing more about it... when I got older and wiser, and found out that von Daniken made mountains out of molehills, rejected quite plausible explanations, and in some cases just made crap up, I was enlightened.
It didn't take me too long after that to begin to question the evidence shown to me in my church youth group that Noah's Ark was real, and had been found on the slopes of Mt. Ararat. We were even taken to see a movie, in a cinema, showing the discovery. After that I became even more enlightened.
There have been a number of scientific investigations into the "paranormal" phenomena of "ghosts." Not one has ever found any unexplained behavior, in searching for all types of ghosts in all kinds of environments attached to all sorts of ideas about hauntings, the afterlife, the spirit world, etc. How many investigations will you need to see before you believe that the hypothesis has been falsified?
Skepticism does require an open mind when there is insufficient evidence one way or the other. Skepticism as a practice does not require entertaining every single variation of every possible manifestation of a phenomena for which there is no objective evidence, no scientific basis, and an already existing body of proof against its existence.
For example, you haven't included "perpetual motion" in your list of "low-hanging fruit." Perpetual motion hasn't been proven not to exist, but most Skeptics aren't going to spend much time looking at a newly proposed perpetual motion machine unless the person proposing it has a well-developed theory of how it functions *or* an extremely convincing demonstration.
As with perpetual motion, the idea that the theory of "ghosts" can be falsified would depend on their being an actual theory of how this phenomena functions. There is no such theory, so no falsification is possible.
However, it is a fact that no claimed manifestation of ghostly behavior has ever been substantiated despite many attempts and a significant value in doing so. On this basis, I think it is quite reasonable to believe that ghosts are so unlikely to be a real phenomena that their investigation can be safely avoided by most Skeptics without damaging their credibility as Skeptics or considering them to be "narrow-minded."
Perhaps you could review other postings to this thread, where folks who actually worked for some slot machine companies commented on the "robustness" of the machines and the code development process. I would like to know if those posters were talking out of their butts or not.
My personal view is that you have an over-idealized concept of state regulation and how well it works, especially when there are very large amounts of money at stake for both the casino owner and the state. With the state and the casino owner being essentially partners in the endeavor, as it were.
I would be happy with a few citations of instances where the casinos refunded all of the money taken from players for all of the plays prior to a "malfunctioning" machine indicating a jackpot that is not paid due to the malfunction. Ideally, this refund cycle should go all the way back to when the machine was last known to be working properly.
Winnings for counting cards are not denied in "legitimate" casinos (is that an oxymoron?). Card counting is legal, but once you are known to be capable of playing the game this well against the casino, the casino will refuse to let you play.
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The store staff took your money and didn't give you anything in return. That sounds like theft to me. If you are intent on making a stand regarding the idiocy of their policies (I'm not knocking you - I would do it, just for fun), then you should suggest that its time to call the police regarding the matter of their theft from you. It would be interesting to see how far they would take that, and I think that there is a better than even chance that the police officer would side with you.
This is all assuming that you look like a reasonably decent member of society, and not a homeless gangbanging miscreant of course (not that there is anything wrong with looking like one if you want to - just don't expect other people to treat you like they would treat someone who's appearance is more in keeping with their expectations).
For fun, you could ask them if they will be storing this personally-identifiable medical information in a data store that complies with HIPAA regulations... http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/ Then suggest that you will check with the local authorities (don't name anyone) to see if the store has been certified as compliant with the HIPAA privacy requirements, disclosures, etc. And finally, ask them if they *really* want you to write all of that personally-identifiable medical information on their form.
Sure, its like poking the bear in a cage. But in this case, the bear deserves it :-)
Do we really need yet another Apple-controlled walled garden? Don't we have enough of those already?
So vote with your wallet. I bought an AppleTV just before Christmas as a "santa gift" for the kids (hey - only $99!). My aim was to introduce Internet-based streaming media as a movie-delivery device in addition to RedBox DVDs (we don't have cable TV), and I was thinking only of NetFlix when I bought it. Before I set it up, I did the research I should have done before I bought it, and saw that although it worked with NetFlix, it didn't work with anything else except for Apple's media store. The day after Christmas, I saw a Sony BDP-S370 Blu-ray plus Internet streaming video player for $99 at the Sony store. It did NetFlix, plus some other services (Hulu Plus, Amazon, Crackle). Oh, yeah - it plays Blu-ray discs, too! It didn't play anything from Apple's media store, but that didn't seem such a big loss to me based on the prices I had seen ($1 for a freaking TV show *episode*?). No brainer. Returned the AppleTV, bought the Sony player. I'm happy.
I think that the streaming video market is so very different from the music distribution market that Apple's "walled garden" play will stumble. Here I am, a long-term Macintosh user (Mac Plus, SE30, PowerMac 7200, PowerMac G4 Digital Audio tower, and Intel-based 24" iMac) with a family of iPods (my wife and I have classics, my two kids have Nanos). I'm happy with iTunes and iPods - we still buy CDs which we then load into iTunes for playback on our SliMP3 player in the living room and our iPods everywhere else - but the movie world is a different beast altogether. I'm not going to rip DVDs/Blu-rays into a home library unless the technology gets a lot better (cheaper, faster, less seemingly illicit), so the whole local playback capability of the AppleTV is moot (as is the DLNA-based local playback of the Sony player - at least to me). What matters in both markets is choice, and while I could use iTunes/iPods and still maintain the power of choice (despite the moans some people make, iTunes/iPod users are *not* locked into the Apple media store), the same is not nearly as true with the AppleTV. Sure, I have some choice - I can choose NetFlix and/or Apple's media store. With any one of a host of other media players (Sony is just one of a plethora of choices now) I can't have the Apple media store, but I can have practically every other distribution option available on the Internet.
I have to leave the question of whether the video game market is more like the music distribution market or the audio/video movie/TV show distribution market up to those of you who play video games... I don't. In fact, it may be yet another paradigm, as my outside-looking-in view of video games is that they are all walled garden's in a way - each company's game console only plays games brought out on that console - yet video game companies often produce multiple versions of each game title, one for each game console - which means there isn't much of a wall. If Apple chooses to play in the games console environment, won't they be essentially like every other games console? A video game company will choose whether or not to port a title to the Apple console, the same way they choose to port to other consoles. At the same time, some number of "Apple-only" games will probably spring up, just as their are titles available on only Sony PlayStation and only Nintendo whatever and only Microsoft XBox.
If the lure of a game that is only available on the AppleTV game console causes you to buy the $99 AppleTV in order to be able to play it, isn't that what a free market economy is all about? Each of us is free to buy or not to buy, no one will force anyone to make that purchase to play that game.
The MicroVAX ran the same VMS operating system as all of the other VAXes. There were processor differences; bigger processors implemented most instructions in hardware, while smaller/cheaper processors would have software routines for more arcane and less likely-to-be-used instructions. One of the benefits of the VAX computer line was that the same software ran on the entire line, all the way from the tiny MicroVAX up the the big 9xxx VAXes. Another benefit was the 4 modes of processor operation (user mode, supervisor mode, executive mode, and kernel mode) with a tightly controlled method to change to a more powerful enhanced processor mode. Couple that with a virtual memory operating system (VMS), huge linear address space (4 GB was big in 1978), symmetric instruction set, and you had a great system.
I suppose it depends on which way you look at it... is the most abused word (period) automatically the most abused word in every category, or does its omni-abuse potential render it ineligible for the award in a particular category?
However, I wouldn't be surprised if the word in question wouldn't win on its own in tech. It has certainly been my experience that people involved in technology tend to abuse that word quite a bit. "Why the f*** isn't this working?" "The f***ing code is screwed up" "What f***head configured this router?" and that sort of thing.
One wonders just how long you have been waiting with that bit of humor, waiting for the right moment to introduce it into a thread where it was actually on-topic...
Did you even read the review? The reviewer reviewed the restaurant, related what he liked and didn't like about the restaurant, then closed out his review with a discussion of what he did after eating the meal to get the bad taste out of his mouth. He only mentioned the competitors as a comparison - i.e., he preferred his experience at those competitors to his experience at the restaurant he was reviewing.
The response from the general manager of the restaurant and the lawsuit sound like they are the result of someone who is used to never being questioned, being questioned. How dare someone publicly discuss the shortcomings of the restaurant? How dare they criticize my place of business? I don't know whether the general manager is right, and such criticisms are against the law in Kuwait, but if they are it looks to be to be very repressive.
Free speech does indeed mean being free to voice your opinion about anything, even if your opinion is distinctly negative, without suffering legal problems as a result. If it were otherwise, all negative opinions could be silenced with the threat of a lawsuit. I have read the review, and it seems even-handed, not a one-sided tirade against the restaurant in question. I'm not sure what you think the reviewer could do to "correct" the review. What part of the review do you think is incorrect - given that the review relates that reviewers experience when they went to the restaurant?
It is too bad that there isn't a set of counters to provide information about data usage on each smart phone. Something one could use to form a basis for decisions about how to manage one's data over the network. Something simple that would collect information about network usage for management purposes.
Maybe someday smartphone vendors will provide such a tool. They could call the set of counters something like a Management Information Base, and they could name the protocol used to access these counters something like the Simple Network Management Protocol. Yeah, that's the ticket. SNMP with a smartphone data usage MIB.
The answer isn't to whine about what a carrier might or might not be doing, or how a test for data usage is flawed. The right start is to get the instrumentation in place so that everyone can know what the actual numbers are, and then use those numbers to verify billing and whatever else needs to be verified. SNMP agents are relatively small bits of code but can provide so much useful data. If smartphones that communication over a network don't have them already, why not?
There are many possible reasons why electronics of various types should be turned off, most of the covered by the discussion here. However, most importantly, THEY SHOULD BE TURNED OFF BECAUSE THE RULE IS TO TURN THEM OFF. That's right, I'm advocating obeying the rule just because there is a rule. Sounds like I'm some kind of wuss, huh?
We like to think that we are a nation of laws, not men (read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law or here http://robertdfeinman.com/society/men_not_laws.html. A fundamental premise of this is that everyone is supposed to obey the law. I'm sure everyone can cite examples where this is not so (police giving other police a pass for infractions, etc.) but in general it is a very useful and egalitarian way to order society. We order society so that society is possible. Without order there would be chaos. One way to order society is to have multiple classes of people - you know, the nobles and the peasants. There are some who feel that this is the rightful order of things. Others don't. In the United States, one of the basic premises of our society is that everyone follows the rules. Sure, we know its not always true. But the more we pursue the ideal, the greater the chance that we will come close to it.
I get aggravated every time I see someone flaunt their disrespect for the law, such as when driving in traffic. We've all seen someone cut to the head of a line, etc. Why do we get angry? Well, its not fair, for one thing. For another, most of us recognize that its extremely easy to break the law and we probably wouldn't get "caught" (i.e., punished by some enforcer of the law), but we obey it anyway. We are frustrated with those don't, in part because most of us are smart enough to realize that if we all disregarded those laws, we would have chaos. The rule breaking only works if a very few people do it. So those few people have anointed themselves as somehow being above the rest of us. Nothing is more sure to tick a person off then another person placing themselves above that first person, especially in a society that believes it is egalitarian.
So think about it the next time you are breaking a rule, probably because you think you know it is a harmless infraction. Who are you ticking off with your self-importance? How much are you encouraging others to also choose to bend/break a rule, perhaps one more important? How much are you contributing to disorder and chaos?
Most importantly, how much are you contributing to the kind of thinking exhibited by those like Ms. Huffington who obviously think that "rules are for the little people"?
I say "yea!" to the disclosure. I would really like to know who is skirting/shirking the tax laws that I am unwilling/unable to skirt or shirk. Having those who can afford to break the rules able to do so with impunity doesn't do any good for the rest of society. Level the playing field, and then perhaps there will be greater pressure to make the tax laws more sensible.
If NASA wasn't so administratively inept, spending more money on NASA might make sense. As it is, there is a significant amount of outright stupidity going on outside of the science organizations (in NASA) that makes giving the organization more money rather a waste.
This appears to be a classic example of short-sighted, clueless management. It looks like the introduction of yet another money-wasting business cycle (other examples being "outsource things that aren't are core competency versus its cheaper and better do take care of these things ourselves" and "centralized versus de-centralized."
As the management pendulum marking the extremes of each cycle swings from side to side, a new set of managers (immune from learning from the lessons of the past) comes up with brilliant cost-reducing ideas that they can prove will save money (as long as their analysis is shallow enough - which its guaranteed to be due to their lack of experience). These ideas, when adopted, start the pendulum swinging over to the other extreme. The managers, wrapping themselves in accolades, cheers their foresight and win themselves promotions for cutting costs. Meanwhile, the business spends beauceau big dollars and disrupts major internal processes making the change. After some number of years (long enough for the old managers to not be interested anymore due to promotions and/or firings) the cycle repeats, only from the other extreme. (Note - it is not always simple dollar costs driving the swings - there are many other types of business costs that may be cited.)
This is the vocation of many managers - enacting change for the sake of change and promoting themselves rather than identifying true fundamentals and making the business work better.
One company with which I am familiar has just completed totally locking down every employee's desktop/laptop. This was all justified by various levels of management as being absolutely essential to the business, and the only means by which the company could be absolutely certain that the company's information, and that of its customers, could be protected. I wonder how long it will be until the cost of this effort becomes seen as a negative and a move to promote employee self-provisioning of computing tools emerges... of course, there isn't really anything to prevent the company from requiring employees to furnish their own computers but still taking them over and locking them down - is there?
Can you explain how the latter works for tethering and with hotspots?
I'll add my US$0.02 about your (1).
In general, it is not only "okay" but a right specifically enumerated (not all are) in the US Constitution for private citizens to maintain "secrecy" about their operations. At the same time is is "not okay" for the government of the USA to maintain secrecy about its operations. There are limitations to both of these positions, of course. A citizen's right to secrecy ends when that citizen can be shown to have probably committed a crime. The government can maintain secrecy about certain limited operations when the government can show that it is necessary in order for the government to carry out its responsibilities with respect to the limited set of powers entrusted to the government by the citizens. The general statement holds true, however: private citizens can operate with secrecy by default, the government must act openly by default.
Yes, I recognize that in this case there is an international cast of characters. There is a lot more in play than the simplistic view of US citizen rights vis a vis the US government. But I thought it was worth clarifying the issues as they would apply to a US citizen/US government as a starting point, and as a general philosophical position with respect to citizens and governments in general.
I didn't state clearly what I was trying to say... I understand that there might be couple of points favoritism to the house with the odds, and I'll accept that as the cost of the enterprise.
The point I intended to make was about the advantage the house has over the players in how the rules are enforced. The house can nullify a large Video Lottery Terminal jackpot if the house determines that the jackpot violated pre-determined odds of paying out. However, the players have virtually no ability to determine whether the odds of them losing are equally well-policed. In the cases where jackpots have been nullified, I don't see any corresponding refunds given to all of the players playing the "malfunctioning" machine prior to the "unplanned jackpot" that is nullified.
I think the terms of the bet should be the same for both. If the casino puts the machine into service, they should have to live with the results of the machine's play, whether it fits their pre-determined odds or not. At the same time, every effort should be made to make sure the machines work properly. But large jackpots should not be nullified.
Hey - my kids came home from school saying the EXACT SAME THING! It can't be coincidence - Bloody Mary must really exist!
You should have seen the looks on my kids' faces when I stood in front of the mirror and spun around while chanting "Bloody Mary!" three times! (Sadly, Bloody Mary did not appear in the mirror.)
After that, my wife showed them who "Bloody Mary" was in medieval English history, including why she (the historic person, not my wife) was called "Bloody Mary."
Strange, isn't it, that all of the unbelievable experiences happen in far-off places with no documentation.
Maybe we could get some believers to offer themselves up for horrible deaths in order to prove the existence of ghosts?
Don't forget the spaceship. The earth isn't in the same spot that it was 1000 years ago, never mind 6,600. You will need to be able to travel around a bit.
The problem with the approach that you have outlined is that there are bound to be some random inputs picked up by these sensors, and the human brain is wired to find patterns, even in random noise. Without a pre-determined notion of what types of input will correctly identify the presence of a ghost, any random input that appears to have a pattern will be determined to be evidence of a ghost, and its highly likely that random input will appear to have a pattern, to at least one member of the group. With as much equipment and monitoring as you are suggesting, it would be surprising if nothing happened that could construed as "evidence" of "something weird" happening.
Limited data collection attempts as proposed (without a theory, and without a lot of repeated trials under various conditions, including locations known to *not* have ghosts) may well *backfire* and convince people that something really is out there. In fact, when the random input phenomena are observed occurring in locations believe to not have ghosts, your "true believers" are going to insist that that location has ghosts, too, rather than accept that the original location doesn't. The scientific equipment doesn't lie, does it? This is how psueudo-science gains adherents.
You may have missed all the fun and excitement of the book "Chariots of the Gods" by a guy named Erich von Daniken http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F. It was all the rage when I was young, and I couldn't understand why *someone* wasn't doing more about it... when I got older and wiser, and found out that von Daniken made mountains out of molehills, rejected quite plausible explanations, and in some cases just made crap up, I was enlightened.
It didn't take me too long after that to begin to question the evidence shown to me in my church youth group that Noah's Ark was real, and had been found on the slopes of Mt. Ararat. We were even taken to see a movie, in a cinema, showing the discovery. After that I became even more enlightened.
There have been a number of scientific investigations into the "paranormal" phenomena of "ghosts." Not one has ever found any unexplained behavior, in searching for all types of ghosts in all kinds of environments attached to all sorts of ideas about hauntings, the afterlife, the spirit world, etc. How many investigations will you need to see before you believe that the hypothesis has been falsified?
Skepticism does require an open mind when there is insufficient evidence one way or the other. Skepticism as a practice does not require entertaining every single variation of every possible manifestation of a phenomena for which there is no objective evidence, no scientific basis, and an already existing body of proof against its existence.
For example, you haven't included "perpetual motion" in your list of "low-hanging fruit." Perpetual motion hasn't been proven not to exist, but most Skeptics aren't going to spend much time looking at a newly proposed perpetual motion machine unless the person proposing it has a well-developed theory of how it functions *or* an extremely convincing demonstration.
As with perpetual motion, the idea that the theory of "ghosts" can be falsified would depend on their being an actual theory of how this phenomena functions. There is no such theory, so no falsification is possible.
However, it is a fact that no claimed manifestation of ghostly behavior has ever been substantiated despite many attempts and a significant value in doing so. On this basis, I think it is quite reasonable to believe that ghosts are so unlikely to be a real phenomena that their investigation can be safely avoided by most Skeptics without damaging their credibility as Skeptics or considering them to be "narrow-minded."
Perhaps you could review other postings to this thread, where folks who actually worked for some slot machine companies commented on the "robustness" of the machines and the code development process. I would like to know if those posters were talking out of their butts or not.
My personal view is that you have an over-idealized concept of state regulation and how well it works, especially when there are very large amounts of money at stake for both the casino owner and the state. With the state and the casino owner being essentially partners in the endeavor, as it were.
I would be happy with a few citations of instances where the casinos refunded all of the money taken from players for all of the plays prior to a "malfunctioning" machine indicating a jackpot that is not paid due to the malfunction. Ideally, this refund cycle should go all the way back to when the machine was last known to be working properly.
If you haven't seen this already, take a look at this article http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=11/01/07/023215 and search for a post by bfwebster, or just search for sundog.
What are the odds?
Winnings for counting cards are not denied in "legitimate" casinos (is that an oxymoron?). Card counting is legal, but once you are known to be capable of playing the game this well against the casino, the casino will refuse to let you play.
Try reading the books about the MIT student card counting teams here http://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Down-House-Students-Millions/dp/0743225708.
Or the Wikipedia article talking about the whole phenomena, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Blackjack_Team.