I don't gamble and have never been to Vegas. Information here is what I gleaned from reading "Bringing Down the House", the book about the MIT team in the '90s (two teams, actually, though it only focuses on one).
Most people are not card counters and have trouble with basic probability; they will lose more than they win. Even so, the casinos have slim odds in this game, so they have to do it a lot in order to make a profit. The game is popular enough that they can do it a lot as long as the cards keep coming out. But time spent reshuffling is time where you're not taking money from shmucks.
So instead, you take a whole bunch of decks and shuffle them all at once. Cards keep coming out, and your guests keep giving you money. It does break down in the face of good card counters, though.
Once autoshufflers were generating random enough decks with good speed, all the Vegas casinos adapted them. That pretty much puts an end to card counting in Vegas.
The book does tell some stories about a new Indian tribe casino that didn't know anything about card counting and got taken hard by the two MIT teams in just a few nights. If you're going to count cards, you'll have to pick places like that.
That's ultimately TI's problem. In any case, there's hardly any need to reprogram the OS to do that. There's plenty of programs out there you're not supposed to have for the SAT, and they make you clear the memory before taking the test. This only led to a bunch of programs that mimicked the "Clear Memory" screen.
What would you have people do? Write desperate missives to their congressmen imploring on them how ridiculous this law is in theory using hypotheticals? How far do you think that has ever gotten anyone?
It can actually get you pretty far. Congresscritters don't get as much mail as you'd think. Sure, they'll be a deluge for hotbutton issues, but there's a lot more going on in Congress than what gets on CNN. One letter on a given issue, provided it has proper capitalization and has at least been run through a spell checker, can go a long way.
The key itself was never published by TI, and as far as I can tell was never registered with the copyright office, so copyright doesn't apply to that
You don't have to publish or register anything for a copyright. You can stick in a drawer somewhere if you wanted and you would still have protection.
But I bet you could argue that this number was really a trade secret. Trade secret protection would be thrown out the window since reverse engineering revealed the secret.
(even if it can apply to a number, which I doubt.)
Every executable binary program on earth is basically one giant number. In fact, anything that you can store as information can be broken down that way.
I haven't followed Wii homebrew much, but historically, Nintendo has needed a dedicated laser printer operating 24/7 to keep its C&D's going out. In particular, they targeted devices that could copy cartridges on the NES or SNES, anything that could disable the 10NES lockout chip so you could make NES games without Nintendo's approval, and the Game Genie.
Prototypes of a 200kW ground system are already in ground testing, and agreements are already signed to put one on the ISS within the next few years. This will eliminate the need for the shuttle to give the ISS a boost.
Also there are other alternatives to VASIMR.... Some of which are flying right now.
Such as? Chemical rockets don't have the specific impulse, traditional ion engines don't have the thrust, solar sails are at least as theoretical as VASIMR and will still have crappy thrust. Project Orion's nuclear pulse rockets have similar specific impulse with even higher thrust, but nuclear test ban treaties currently forbid them. If you're willing to get really exotic, antimatter propulsion would probably give even better results than Orion without the political problems and might still be feasible with technology currently available, but it's certainly nothing now flying.
If anything currently flying could do what VASIMR promises, it'd be attached to the ISS already so we can save some shuttle fuel.
VASIMR means the only expensive part is getting to LEO. Once there, a space tug using VASIMR can lift satellites to GEO for almost nothing (compared to today's prices). It's not really fast enough for human travel, but for moving equipment around Earth orbit (or elsewhere), it's very promising. Between this and SpaceX reducing the price to LEO, the next 10 years should be very exciting in commercial space travel.
Because some drivers and applications don't work on 64-bit. HP doesn't make a 64-bit driver on XP for one of my printers, though they do for Vista. Some features of iTunes (like burning CDs) also don't work on 64-bit XP.
'This case shows there are solutions to the problem Carol Shloss faced other than simple capitulation,' says Fair Use Project Executive Director Anthony Falzone, who led the litigation team."
Yes, a solution that takes years to go through and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's a great solution, if you're a lawyer.
"After 8 years of being a White Elephant, the USB 2.0 standard has begun its long-deserved journey into obsolescence. Dutch storage company Freecom has announced the first mainstream storage product based on 'SuperSpeed' USB 3.0. Sheep will be interested to hear that the new external Hard Drive XS 3.0 doesn't cost the earth at £99 (approx $160) for a 1TB drive, even though that excludes the £22.99 for a desktop PCI-bus controller necessary to drive up profit margins. Laptop users can pair it with a £25.99 plug-in PC Card to achieve the same effect. Subtle incompatibilities between manufactures, who will once again just ship the first implementation that almost works, will drive down the usefulness of USB 3.0, providing an excellent excuse for USB 4.0."
Seriously, has anyone gotten anywhere near USB 2.0's promised speed? Firewire would have been officially dead years ago if the claims of USB 2.0 were true.
That's just marketing doing what it's supposed to be doing, really. Every company wishes they were the one and only company in their field. It's up to their competitors to make sure that doesn't happen.
The problem here is that they degenerated into slander and faulty logic.
Does the word "cloud" have any particular meaning?
Not really. It's one of those buzzwords that can mean whatever your press release wants it to mean.
If you're going to demand a definition, I'd say that it refers to distributive application hosting, as opposed to hosting apps on an individual desktop. Something like what Sun wanted Java Applets to do back in the '90s. DNS is more infrastructure than application, but in a sense, it's always been in the "cloud".
As for this company, they're guilty of both abusing buzzwords and excreting more security-through-obscurity nonsense.
Actually the idea in the article that it was to keep the USSR generals and stuff from doing stupid things like launching first attacks because it would make sure they could always strike back was quite interesting.
In other words, the whole point of a doomsday weapon was not lost because they kept it a secret.
I still think, however, that it's not a practical deterrent for reasons that movie makes all too obvious.
I remember some trig on the ACT, particularly because I'm pretty sure I got a lot of points off the math section due to forgetting the definitions of sin/cos/tan when I took the test.
Problems with my memory aside, you're definitely going to want a calculator for those sections. Unless you want to provide a table of sin/cos/tan values like the old days (which have disappeared precisely because calculators are better at the same job).
Those 100 release things that make the calculator more useful to the millions of others.
TI is in the business of selling calculators, and only makes an OS for it because a calculator this sophisticated without an OS is just a circuit board. If a bunch of hackers wants to make a better OS, it's in TI's best interest to let them.
For cursive, certainly, but I've found that there's no good substitute for block writing notes on graph paper and sticky pads.
From around 4th through 6th grade, my teachers told the class that we'd have to write all our papers in high school in cursive, so we might as well do it now. By 8th grade, they almost always mandated everything be typed, which continued through high school. Instead of lieing to us, could we have spent that time in earlier grades learning touch typing instead?
The only time I use cursive anymore is in signatures, and that's basically an illegible scrawl that's descended from a line increasingly illegible scrawls. I suppose they look enough alike that a handwriting expert would judge them to come from the same person, which is all that really matters.
Hats off to anyone who takes up calligraphy as a hobby and can write beautiful handwritten text. I just hope that those people don't try to say that the loss of cursive portends some civilization-destroying event.
The rockets produced initially for the manned program made unmanned launches less accident prone, allowing commercial use of satellites to be done with less risk of losing the payload, therefore making it easier to find investors. The benefits to the telecommunications industry alone have more than made up for the manned program.
I view the manned program as an end goal of its own. Like America's westward expansion, there are likely to be untold benefits that are not apparent from the start, except this time there's no native population to screw up.
When it comes to actually landing stuff on the surface, Mars is cheaper than the Moon, because you can use atmospheric breaking to slow you down instead of using more fuel.
However, once you have the necessary infrastructure on the surface, the Moon is a better place for launching stuff for use around Earth. So basically, Mars is better for colonizing people, while the Moon is better for space-based industry.
These politicians insist on making that classic bungle of project management, the sunk cost fallacy:
"NASA has been working for more than four years on the Constellation program, a development program in support of which Congress has invested billions of dollars over that same period," said Science Committee chairman Bart Gordon. "As a result I think that good public policy would tell us that there needs to be a compelling reason to scrap what we've invested our time and money in over the past several years."
If they want to continue Constellation, that's fine, but it needs to:
Ignore sunk costs
Keep the ISS running past 2015
Scrap Ares I and focus on Ares V
The ISS already has a lot of sunk costs behind it, too. The argument here should be what it can achieve if the project is extended out. If we knew how the project would unfold back in 1995, I don't think the ISS would have continued past a conceptual phase, but that's looking at everything in hindsight. If it can prove that it can show practical results with a modest additional expenditure of money, and I think it can, it's worth continuing.
Ares I should just be dropped. Its payload is comparable to the SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy, and that project is already further along and promises to be much cheaper per kg. Or just man rate a Delta IV, which will still likely be cheaper than continuing Ares I. Other than "Not Invented Here", there's no reason NASA should continue Ares I.
Ares V still makes sense, because nothing has anywhere near its payload capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't gamble and have never been to Vegas. Information here is what I gleaned from reading "Bringing Down the House", the book about the MIT team in the '90s (two teams, actually, though it only focuses on one).
Most people are not card counters and have trouble with basic probability; they will lose more than they win. Even so, the casinos have slim odds in this game, so they have to do it a lot in order to make a profit. The game is popular enough that they can do it a lot as long as the cards keep coming out. But time spent reshuffling is time where you're not taking money from shmucks.
So instead, you take a whole bunch of decks and shuffle them all at once. Cards keep coming out, and your guests keep giving you money. It does break down in the face of good card counters, though.
Once autoshufflers were generating random enough decks with good speed, all the Vegas casinos adapted them. That pretty much puts an end to card counting in Vegas.
The book does tell some stories about a new Indian tribe casino that didn't know anything about card counting and got taken hard by the two MIT teams in just a few nights. If you're going to count cards, you'll have to pick places like that.
That's ultimately TI's problem. In any case, there's hardly any need to reprogram the OS to do that. There's plenty of programs out there you're not supposed to have for the SAT, and they make you clear the memory before taking the test. This only led to a bunch of programs that mimicked the "Clear Memory" screen.
What would you have people do? Write desperate missives to their congressmen imploring on them how ridiculous this law is in theory using hypotheticals? How far do you think that has ever gotten anyone?
It can actually get you pretty far. Congresscritters don't get as much mail as you'd think. Sure, they'll be a deluge for hotbutton issues, but there's a lot more going on in Congress than what gets on CNN. One letter on a given issue, provided it has proper capitalization and has at least been run through a spell checker, can go a long way.
The key itself was never published by TI, and as far as I can tell was never registered with the copyright office, so copyright doesn't apply to that
You don't have to publish or register anything for a copyright. You can stick in a drawer somewhere if you wanted and you would still have protection.
But I bet you could argue that this number was really a trade secret. Trade secret protection would be thrown out the window since reverse engineering revealed the secret.
(even if it can apply to a number, which I doubt.)
Every executable binary program on earth is basically one giant number. In fact, anything that you can store as information can be broken down that way.
I haven't followed Wii homebrew much, but historically, Nintendo has needed a dedicated laser printer operating 24/7 to keep its C&D's going out. In particular, they targeted devices that could copy cartridges on the NES or SNES, anything that could disable the 10NES lockout chip so you could make NES games without Nintendo's approval, and the Game Genie.
That'll teach the Lunar People who owns this solar system!
More seriously, I was looking forward to watching this in my telescope, but it looks like it's going to rain for the next 24 hours straight.
I'm sure someone posting Anonymously on /. has the courage to stand up to thugs.
Prototypes of a 200kW ground system are already in ground testing, and agreements are already signed to put one on the ISS within the next few years. This will eliminate the need for the shuttle to give the ISS a boost.
Also there are other alternatives to VASIMR.... Some of which are flying right now.
Such as? Chemical rockets don't have the specific impulse, traditional ion engines don't have the thrust, solar sails are at least as theoretical as VASIMR and will still have crappy thrust. Project Orion's nuclear pulse rockets have similar specific impulse with even higher thrust, but nuclear test ban treaties currently forbid them. If you're willing to get really exotic, antimatter propulsion would probably give even better results than Orion without the political problems and might still be feasible with technology currently available, but it's certainly nothing now flying.
If anything currently flying could do what VASIMR promises, it'd be attached to the ISS already so we can save some shuttle fuel.
VASIMR means the only expensive part is getting to LEO. Once there, a space tug using VASIMR can lift satellites to GEO for almost nothing (compared to today's prices). It's not really fast enough for human travel, but for moving equipment around Earth orbit (or elsewhere), it's very promising. Between this and SpaceX reducing the price to LEO, the next 10 years should be very exciting in commercial space travel.
Because some drivers and applications don't work on 64-bit. HP doesn't make a 64-bit driver on XP for one of my printers, though they do for Vista. Some features of iTunes (like burning CDs) also don't work on 64-bit XP.
How did "post worthless crap on slashdot" not make the top of this list?
'This case shows there are solutions to the problem Carol Shloss faced other than simple capitulation,' says Fair Use Project Executive Director Anthony Falzone, who led the litigation team."
Yes, a solution that takes years to go through and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's a great solution, if you're a lawyer.
"After 8 years of being a White Elephant, the USB 2.0 standard has begun its long-deserved journey into obsolescence. Dutch storage company Freecom has announced the first mainstream storage product based on 'SuperSpeed' USB 3.0. Sheep will be interested to hear that the new external Hard Drive XS 3.0 doesn't cost the earth at £99 (approx $160) for a 1TB drive, even though that excludes the £22.99 for a desktop PCI-bus controller necessary to drive up profit margins. Laptop users can pair it with a £25.99 plug-in PC Card to achieve the same effect. Subtle incompatibilities between manufactures, who will once again just ship the first implementation that almost works, will drive down the usefulness of USB 3.0, providing an excellent excuse for USB 4.0."
Seriously, has anyone gotten anywhere near USB 2.0's promised speed? Firewire would have been officially dead years ago if the claims of USB 2.0 were true.
Curse those dreamers, they never get anything done. They should be happy with their antelope on a stick.
That's just marketing doing what it's supposed to be doing, really. Every company wishes they were the one and only company in their field. It's up to their competitors to make sure that doesn't happen.
The problem here is that they degenerated into slander and faulty logic.
BSD still has certain attribution requirements. It's not public domain.
Does the word "cloud" have any particular meaning?
Not really. It's one of those buzzwords that can mean whatever your press release wants it to mean.
If you're going to demand a definition, I'd say that it refers to distributive application hosting, as opposed to hosting apps on an individual desktop. Something like what Sun wanted Java Applets to do back in the '90s. DNS is more infrastructure than application, but in a sense, it's always been in the "cloud".
As for this company, they're guilty of both abusing buzzwords and excreting more security-through-obscurity nonsense.
Petrov's gut feeling was due in large part to his lack of faith in the Soviet early-warning system, which he subsequently described as "raw."
Nothing quite like Soviet engineering. For every Sputnik success, they have a Soyuz 1 failure.
Actually the idea in the article that it was to keep the USSR generals and stuff from doing stupid things like launching first attacks because it would make sure they could always strike back was quite interesting.
In other words, the whole point of a doomsday weapon was not lost because they kept it a secret.
I still think, however, that it's not a practical deterrent for reasons that movie makes all too obvious.
I remember some trig on the ACT, particularly because I'm pretty sure I got a lot of points off the math section due to forgetting the definitions of sin/cos/tan when I took the test.
Problems with my memory aside, you're definitely going to want a calculator for those sections. Unless you want to provide a table of sin/cos/tan values like the old days (which have disappeared precisely because calculators are better at the same job).
Those 100 release things that make the calculator more useful to the millions of others.
TI is in the business of selling calculators, and only makes an OS for it because a calculator this sophisticated without an OS is just a circuit board. If a bunch of hackers wants to make a better OS, it's in TI's best interest to let them.
For cursive, certainly, but I've found that there's no good substitute for block writing notes on graph paper and sticky pads.
From around 4th through 6th grade, my teachers told the class that we'd have to write all our papers in high school in cursive, so we might as well do it now. By 8th grade, they almost always mandated everything be typed, which continued through high school. Instead of lieing to us, could we have spent that time in earlier grades learning touch typing instead?
The only time I use cursive anymore is in signatures, and that's basically an illegible scrawl that's descended from a line increasingly illegible scrawls. I suppose they look enough alike that a handwriting expert would judge them to come from the same person, which is all that really matters.
Hats off to anyone who takes up calligraphy as a hobby and can write beautiful handwritten text. I just hope that those people don't try to say that the loss of cursive portends some civilization-destroying event.
The rockets produced initially for the manned program made unmanned launches less accident prone, allowing commercial use of satellites to be done with less risk of losing the payload, therefore making it easier to find investors. The benefits to the telecommunications industry alone have more than made up for the manned program.
I view the manned program as an end goal of its own. Like America's westward expansion, there are likely to be untold benefits that are not apparent from the start, except this time there's no native population to screw up.
When it comes to actually landing stuff on the surface, Mars is cheaper than the Moon, because you can use atmospheric breaking to slow you down instead of using more fuel.
However, once you have the necessary infrastructure on the surface, the Moon is a better place for launching stuff for use around Earth. So basically, Mars is better for colonizing people, while the Moon is better for space-based industry.
*golfclap*
These politicians insist on making that classic bungle of project management, the sunk cost fallacy:
"NASA has been working for more than four years on the Constellation program, a development program in support of which Congress has invested billions of dollars over that same period," said Science Committee chairman Bart Gordon. "As a result I think that good public policy would tell us that there needs to be a compelling reason to scrap what we've invested our time and money in over the past several years."
If they want to continue Constellation, that's fine, but it needs to:
The ISS already has a lot of sunk costs behind it, too. The argument here should be what it can achieve if the project is extended out. If we knew how the project would unfold back in 1995, I don't think the ISS would have continued past a conceptual phase, but that's looking at everything in hindsight. If it can prove that it can show practical results with a modest additional expenditure of money, and I think it can, it's worth continuing.
Ares I should just be dropped. Its payload is comparable to the SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy, and that project is already further along and promises to be much cheaper per kg. Or just man rate a Delta IV, which will still likely be cheaper than continuing Ares I. Other than "Not Invented Here", there's no reason NASA should continue Ares I.
Ares V still makes sense, because nothing has anywhere near its payload capacity.