But on the other hand, does it really ruin the game if someone magically goes from 1 to 70 in two weeks without working for it?
"Players" who do that will quickly find no one to play with as they have never learned to play the game.
But as to farming, yes it spoils the game. On the server I play on, raw mats tend to cost more than the finished crafted goods I produce out of them. Not to mention general inflation in the AH.
Of course Linux is not a magical shield. But having a diverse eco-system is known to protect against many attacks.
Amen! Even so, I would expect to see patches coming from David Miller shortly if Linux is truly vulnerable. Similar to how Linux was the first system to be protected against the F00F Intel Pentium hardware bug.
If I understand your link correctly, they have implemented "cheating on a test".
The three way TCP handshake involves REQUEST, CHALLENGE, RESPONSE (connection is established). State must be maintained to respond to the challenge. They have implemented a way of correctly guessing responses so that they can ask for one TCP connection and then ask for and get! endless further connections without having to keep any state.
My guess is that the attack looks like REQUEST, CHALLENGE (attacker saves and computes further RESPONSEs), then REQUEST (requester drops CHALLENGE but returns a correct RESPONSE anyway) ad infinitum, blasting the other end with connections with minimal resource usage on the attacker's end.
My Powerbook is in the shop getting its motherboard replaced, so I cannot check right now. I know what I saw.
We are talking about Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5, right?
And nobody has answered my question regarding regions. Dang (partially) closed source systems since I cannot check the source code myself. My 10.4 Powerbook was purchased in San Jose. My wife's 10.5 Macbook and my 10.4 -> 10.5 upgrade were purchased in Manila (at an official Apple store).
I'd be more than happy to be called an idiot for missing a setting I should have turned off. That does not make any less a misfeature though.
My wife's Mac was purchased in Manila as was my 10.4 -> 10.5 upgrade (the original computer was purchased in San Jose, CA). Does Mac OS X vary on region?
In any case, it's hard to reconcile your praise of RMS's ACM Emacs brilliance with saying, "His MO when writing code is to create a giant steaming pile of crap and then depend on others to fix the problems and maintain it."
I know you are also twitter, but that does not matter.
The paper was brilliant. Full featured computer programming languages as extension languages for applications *are* a brilliant invention and how many billions of dollars has Microsoft made from copying it? Give me a couple of weeks to get my references down and some spare time and I think I'll write in my journal about that. The world needs to know.
I was terrified of the implications of Gnus 5 accidentally executing code, especially after finding stack overrun errors in the XEmacs 19.14 base code I inherited and kept a careful watch over what larsi was doing, though being the sharp guy he is, did his usual brilliant job.
If you cannot find a link with regards to Richard asking someone else to finish a crop coding job, feel free to contact me offline and I can put you in contact with someone who knows where the links are. It's like a multiple offense, but Richard naturally does development behind closed doors so it's not as easy to find the dirt as it with other Open Source software projects and people.
Oh, and the dirtiest thing I did in XEmacs development was to unilaterally decide that all the comments in XEmacs calling Richard Stallman an idiot and worse should be removed and did so without telling anyone. The changes were captured in posted diffs and CVS so I got "caught".
I regret doing that in a way, but not really. Personal attacks in source code just do not have a place.
No one owns GPL'd software. Assigning it to the FSF simply gives the FSF the ability to fight on your behalf.
And if we don't want or need anyone to fight "on our behalf"? Or about how Richard decided that manual changes could not move from Emacs to XEmacs, or XEmacs changes to Emacs without copyright assignment...
For the first time (I've experienced divorce, hence war since then:-() someone declared war on me personally if I would not follow his dictation.
(Apply sarcasm tags on the quote I will respond to)
you should be playing only Free software games which don't require serial numbers.
s/playing/using/
That's a sad attitude and one which I strongly disagree with and also too often made.
There is nothing wrong with buying a propriety program that runs on Linux.
I've been using Linux since 1995, developing what has now been named Open Source software since 1987 and even spent a stint working at Turbolinux.
Richard and most Linux distro makers make the mistake that proprietary software is evil. It isn't. It's often subpar quality, but it is not inherently evil.
Commercial users just want their equipment to work with all the devices attached to it. Greg KH, the Linux device driver guy understands that and so does Linus.
I have bought a number of propriety software packages for Linux. I supported Wnn6 (a commercial Japanese language input method) for XEmacs. I am an enthusiastic player in World of Warcraft because it is a portable game and I will buy Diablo III if Wine can run it.
Idealism aside (sadly impossible for Richard), there are any number of good reasons to buy software that you do not have source for. Games are at the top of the list.
O.K. Games like Hack/Nethack are tough even reading the source code while you are playing but while they are classic, they are hardly mainstream.
While Stallman has rewritten Linux as Linux/GNU or worse, GNU/Linux, he has substantially raised the mainstream barrier to entry. I value Freedom, liberty and Open Source software, but why should I be discouraged from buying World of Warcraft on my machine? Freedom also includes the freedom to "enslave" yourself if you so choose.
Not that I consider the Warden enslavement...
"GNU/Linux" or "Linux/GNU", Just Say No! It's just plain Linux. GNU is irrelevent in today's GUI environment.
This:
$/bin/true --help Usage:/bin/true [ignored command line arguments]
or:/bin/true OPTION Exit with a status code indicating success.
--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit
NOTE: your shell may have its own version of true, which usually supersedes the version described here. Please refer to your shell's documentation for details about the options it supports.
Report bugs to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org>.
is truly representative of crap code and crap system design.
The GNU "standard" of referring man(1) users to texinfo documentation also sucks.
And to the guy I was responding to, I'm agreeing with you, right?
Relinquishing control over your data to an outside source seems unfathomably retarded, no matter what kind of spin is put on it.
It's been a matter of enforced law in the US for a long time now. I cannot get a copy of my credit report because I no longer have all copies of addresses I lived at and cannot prove I am me to the credit agencies. Do you remember exactly where you lived 20 years ago? I do not.[1]
The system has been rigged for a long time and people are already conditioned to give up their just by day-to-day living in the US. The rest of the world will follow, or show a spine and not.
The horrible thing about US credit agency identity requirements is that if someone who had been stalking me and writing down all my addresses for the last 20 years shows up, they can prove they are me easier than I can.
Oh, I'm a home owner now except that it is in an area too dangerous for me to visit since the US has intensified its War on Islam. Sigh. Paid cash for it, so there's no mortgage problem. Sometimes I wish I had other people's problems. At least the people being foreclosed on in the US got to see their homes.
[1] I've also lived in Asia for most of the last 10 years and of the ten addresses I have had there, 2 had street addresses (streets do not have names in most of Japan, but all of residential Japan) and most of the others did not even have usable postal codes - no snail mail delivery throughout rural Philippines. I'm not sure how to further describe the bahay kubo I lived in in the jungles of Mindanao without a street attached to it, let alone a postal code as no mail is delivered in that area.
Well I think secret questions/password hints by definition are NOT proper security procedures.
That was my point.
I'm free to disregard the password hint option, and I could just bang my head against the keyboard and enter in random jibberish for my secret question that no one (not even me) would be able to guess.
You could, but we're also running into the overload issue. Of things I use every day, I'm looking at least a dozen, more likely a couple dozen potentially different passwords.
That's probably an underestimate because I've given up.
Sometimes it is OK to put all your eggs in one basket... if you guard that basket with extraordinary care and I wish the DES card I have at work for VPN login could be used for other things.
I would not mind a much, much longer PIN and output string to type in for password if one DES card could be used to generate all my passwords.
The problem with anything approaching secure encryption is, what happens in the event of a disaster? You either err on the side of security, OK, so your town flooded during the night and you woke up when the water level reached the top of your bed, your encryption card under water and all your password protected encrypted stuff is gone forever. Or convenience.
Finally, while many people admire and respect Mr. Stallman, he's never claimed to represent anyone.
While I seriously doubt that (that he's never claimed to represent anyone), it's possible. His MO when writing code is to create a giant steaming pile of crap and then depend on others to fix the problems and maintain it.
I know from personal experience that he is a control freak. All "official sanctioned" GNU code is owned by him, by copyright assignment. It is not enough for software to be under the GPL. My only direct experience was a phone call right after I had taken over the job of Mr. XEmacs and he told me how he must "wage war" (direct quote) against me and XEmacs because even though we were true blue GPL, he must have FSF copyright assignment.
The Emacs source code which we inherited and forked is littered with 1000+ line functions, 6+ levels of nested if-else and assorted other crap that looks like it was being written to violate as many rules of good programming style as possible. The amount of time it took to get the code in a state where we could display CJK fonts in Emacs (and in a stable state) was staggering, especially considering that we were basing our work off the good folks' at ETL Mule.
I have no respect for the man, no respect for his (programming) work. I find the names Linux/GNU and worse GNU/Linux to be as childish and offensive as the children who like to write Micro$oft and M$ and similar crap. (You might as well also write "you can't spell gOatse without the Gates and a big O". It's equally as witty.) Anyone can develop userland tools. Only a handful of people, of which Richard is NOT one, can develop a successful kernel.
On the other hand, he wrote one of the most insightful and brilliant papers in ACM history describing the architecture of Emacs and he does deserve credit for initiating the GNU project, thus inspiring many folks including myself to publish our work and help out on other projects.
Of course, even you write insightful things from time to time. No one is completely good or bad.
The botnet mafia will love this though. Once corporations rely heavily on cloud computing, they will become even more ripe targets for malware distributors.
So, what you're saying is that by RMS opposing cloud computing, he's actually supporting big business interests? Heh.
I think the danger can be mitigated with common sense security measures (strong passwords) and a level of responsibility on the service provide to properly encrypt and store sensitive user information and data.
None of the things you mention would have stopped the Sarah Palin email heist, which worked by a password reset. Without proper security procedures in place, no amount of other security matters in the slightest.
Consider Mac OS X Leopard. If you do not choose a hint for your password, it will happily display your password in cleartext at the login screen when the hint button is clicked.
Of the tradeoff between security and convenience on computers, the market is now firmly conditioned for convenience at the expense of security.
If you played at any of the levels where the pros inhabited you'd have been identified and banned quickly.
I have a question. One way brick & mortar casinos detect cheating is to video tape everything and have live people watching the play through a one-way ceiling.
Would it be an effective anti-cheat to do the same thing online? Require the client player's physical screens to be displayed in real time at the online "casino"?
Would they need the resources of a Google to do that? I have no idea what the level of participation is, but I would think that folks in high stakes games would welcome additional security to ensure they were playing in a fair game.
However, on 1,000 same-sized bets, the odds are very small that they'll lose overall. On a million same-sized bets, it's practically certain they'll make close to the "expected return."
That's a paraphrase of an old joke, "How do you expect to earn money when you're losing money on every sale?" "Easy, I'll make up for it in volume."
The only bet in the house where the player has an advantage is Blackjack with a single deck and the player is counting cards. The second closest bet is the "Don't Pass" line in craps, but there the house still has a slight (something like.4%) advantage.
Houses deal with card counters by "discouraging" them, probably in the same way depicted in the recent movie about the MIT Blackjack team.
in much the same way that a good bowler can nail a 7-10 split
Bad example. Nailing a 7-10 split involves luck and hurling the ball as hard as you can at one of the pins and pray that it bounces out of the pit in exactly the right direction. I do not think I've ever seen a good player in person hit one of those, but one of former league bowling teammates with an average barely in triple digits did it.
More like, 4-7-10 split or 6-7-10 split. Good players will tend to nail those most of the time. I saw Glenn Allison (Mr. 900) nail one of those late in a 3rd game to complete an 806. I'd hit an 805 in the same center the Friday before and he was serious not to be outdone by an upstart (after he finished he walked back to me to ask me about my score too:-)...)
Russ Hamilton, the cheater behind the scenes is a former World Series of Poker winner who was one of the founders of Ultimate Bet and seems to have set this whole scheme up from the beginning.
Yeah, that was the part I find amazing. If he was a good enough player to win the "World Series", why did he need to cheat? Nobody is going to let him play again. He's probably KOS at casinos now too.
Unless you can guarentee that you're going to play against people who are worse than you
That's rather the point. John Scarne, an author famous for writing about gambling in the 1950s and 1960s had a very simple strategy for beating poker. "Always play against weaker players. If you suspect you're not the strongest player at the table, get out of the game."
Scarne was an interesting guy. Notable in the fact that it was he who first computed and published odds of winning/losing for various popular games.
I always get a kick out of the slots that advertise their payout rate. "98.7% payout! Loosest slots in town!".
Really? The sign clearly states you'll get less money out than you put in, and people find that encouraging?
It's statistics. You win some, you lose some. If you're lucky, you win more than you lose and vice versa. The smaller house percentage means it will take a bit longer before all the money you brought with you is inside the machine. Or, if you really have discipline you get lucky and walk away with more than you started with.
Blackjack, like Poker, is a game of skill. In a single deck fair game, the card counting player actually has a slight advantage over the house.
I've lost too much money from Pachinko addiction (not mine, but an ex-GF's) to ever willingly set foot in a casino again, but the last time I went to Vegas in the early 1990's it was easy to get comped drinks. I'd be very surprised if they had stopped that practice. Drunk players tend to be stupid players and like the unspeakably evil US$100 bill dispensing ATMs in Vegas casinos comped drinks should be a net win for the house. Speaking, of course, from experience...
And for the jerks criticising the players who were cheated in this scandal, if you don't like the game, don't play. It's really none of your business.
But, most people don't know who he was, and a lot who could vaguely identify him as an inventor still think of him more as Rotwang in Fritz lang's Metropolis than as THE person who made things such as the New York power grid possible.
Unfortunately, Tesla was his own worst enemy. He gave control over his patents to Westinghouse who proceeded to screw him leaving him to eventually die in poverty.
Out of significant inventions that have changed human history, the only two that even come close to delivering electricity over a long distance are Guttenberg and the printing press and Hammurabi who invented modern society.
Truly it is sad that he is relatively unknown. Everybody knows Edison invented the light bulb, few know where the light comes from.
Hollerith's contributions to modern computing are... "incalculable":-) He did not stop at his original 1890 tabulating machine and sorter, but produced many other innovative new models. He also invented the first automatic card-feed mechanism, the first key punch, and took what was perhaps the first step towards programming by introducing a wiring panel in his 1906 Type I Tabulator, allowing it to do different jobs without having to be rebuilt! (The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate only on 1890 Census cards.) These inventions were the foundation of the modern information processing industry.
Slashdot Mirror
That guy in Germany seems to be doing fine going after GPL violators without FSF copyright assignment.
But on the other hand, does it really ruin the game if someone magically goes from 1 to 70 in two weeks without working for it?
"Players" who do that will quickly find no one to play with as they have never learned to play the game.
But as to farming, yes it spoils the game. On the server I play on, raw mats tend to cost more than the finished crafted goods I produce out of them. Not to mention general inflation in the AH.
Of course Linux is not a magical shield. But having a diverse eco-system is known to protect against many attacks.
Amen! Even so, I would expect to see patches coming from David Miller shortly if Linux is truly vulnerable. Similar to how Linux was the first system to be protected against the F00F Intel Pentium hardware bug.
Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.
If I understand your link correctly, they have implemented "cheating on a test".
The three way TCP handshake involves REQUEST, CHALLENGE, RESPONSE (connection is established). State must be maintained to respond to the challenge. They have implemented a way of correctly guessing responses so that they can ask for one TCP connection and then ask for and get! endless further connections without having to keep any state.
My guess is that the attack looks like REQUEST, CHALLENGE (attacker saves and computes further RESPONSEs), then REQUEST (requester drops CHALLENGE but returns a correct RESPONSE anyway) ad infinitum, blasting the other end with connections with minimal resource usage on the attacker's end.
My Powerbook is in the shop getting its motherboard replaced, so I cannot check right now. I know what I saw.
We are talking about Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5, right?
And nobody has answered my question regarding regions. Dang (partially) closed source systems since I cannot check the source code myself. My 10.4 Powerbook was purchased in San Jose. My wife's 10.5 Macbook and my 10.4 -> 10.5 upgrade were purchased in Manila (at an official Apple store).
I'd be more than happy to be called an idiot for missing a setting I should have turned off. That does not make any less a misfeature though.
My wife's Mac was purchased in Manila as was my 10.4 -> 10.5 upgrade (the original computer was purchased in San Jose, CA). Does Mac OS X vary on region?
Pardon? I have never seen this. I don't even have a hint button on my login window, but Google
I've seen it both on my Mac Powerbook Pro after it was upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5 and my wife's Macbook.
It was not visible in straight 10.4 so I assume it's a new "feature".
In any case, it's hard to reconcile your praise of RMS's ACM Emacs brilliance with saying, "His MO when writing code is to create a giant steaming pile of crap and then depend on others to fix the problems and maintain it."
I know you are also twitter, but that does not matter.
The paper was brilliant. Full featured computer programming languages as extension languages for applications *are* a brilliant invention and how many billions of dollars has Microsoft made from copying it? Give me a couple of weeks to get my references down and some spare time and I think I'll write in my journal about that. The world needs to know.
I was terrified of the implications of Gnus 5 accidentally executing code, especially after finding stack overrun errors in the XEmacs 19.14 base code I inherited and kept a careful watch over what larsi was doing, though being the sharp guy he is, did his usual brilliant job.
If you cannot find a link with regards to Richard asking someone else to finish a crop coding job, feel free to contact me offline and I can put you in contact with someone who knows where the links are. It's like a multiple offense, but Richard naturally does development behind closed doors so it's not as easy to find the dirt as it with other Open Source software projects and people.
Oh, and the dirtiest thing I did in XEmacs development was to unilaterally decide that all the comments in XEmacs calling Richard Stallman an idiot and worse should be removed and did so without telling anyone. The changes were captured in posted diffs and CVS so I got "caught".
I regret doing that in a way, but not really. Personal attacks in source code just do not have a place.
No one owns GPL'd software. Assigning it to the FSF simply gives the FSF the ability to fight on your behalf.
And if we don't want or need anyone to fight "on our behalf"? Or about how Richard decided that manual changes could not move from Emacs to XEmacs, or XEmacs changes to Emacs without copyright assignment ...
For the first time (I've experienced divorce, hence war since then :-() someone declared war on me personally if I would not follow his dictation.
Alas, many sites do not provide the opportunity for the user to enter their own question
Well, then they are begging for their users to get pwned.
(Apply sarcasm tags on the quote I will respond to)
you should be playing only Free software games which don't require serial numbers.
s/playing/using/
That's a sad attitude and one which I strongly disagree with and also too often made.
There is nothing wrong with buying a propriety program that runs on Linux.
I've been using Linux since 1995, developing what has now been named Open Source software since 1987 and even spent a stint working at Turbolinux.
Richard and most Linux distro makers make the mistake that proprietary software is evil. It isn't. It's often subpar quality, but it is not inherently evil.
Commercial users just want their equipment to work with all the devices attached to it. Greg KH, the Linux device driver guy understands that and so does Linus.
I have bought a number of propriety software packages for Linux. I supported Wnn6 (a commercial Japanese language input method) for XEmacs. I am an enthusiastic player in World of Warcraft because it is a portable game and I will buy Diablo III if Wine can run it.
Idealism aside (sadly impossible for Richard), there are any number of good reasons to buy software that you do not have source for. Games are at the top of the list.
O.K. Games like Hack/Nethack are tough even reading the source code while you are playing but while they are classic, they are hardly mainstream.
While Stallman has rewritten Linux as Linux/GNU or worse, GNU/Linux, he has substantially raised the mainstream barrier to entry. I value Freedom, liberty and Open Source software, but why should I be discouraged from buying World of Warcraft on my machine? Freedom also includes the freedom to "enslave" yourself if you so choose.
Not that I consider the Warden enslavement ...
"GNU/Linux" or "Linux/GNU", Just Say No! It's just plain Linux. GNU is irrelevent in today's GUI environment.
This:
$ /bin/true --help /bin/true [ignored command line arguments] /bin/true OPTION
Usage:
or:
Exit with a status code indicating success.
--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit
NOTE: your shell may have its own version of true, which usually supersedes
the version described here. Please refer to your shell's documentation
for details about the options it supports.
Report bugs to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org>.
is truly representative of crap code and crap system design.
The GNU "standard" of referring man(1) users to texinfo documentation also sucks.
And to the guy I was responding to, I'm agreeing with you, right?
Relinquishing control over your data to an outside source seems unfathomably retarded, no matter what kind of spin is put on it.
It's been a matter of enforced law in the US for a long time now. I cannot get a copy of my credit report because I no longer have all copies of addresses I lived at and cannot prove I am me to the credit agencies. Do you remember exactly where you lived 20 years ago? I do not.[1]
The system has been rigged for a long time and people are already conditioned to give up their just by day-to-day living in the US. The rest of the world will follow, or show a spine and not.
The horrible thing about US credit agency identity requirements is that if someone who had been stalking me and writing down all my addresses for the last 20 years shows up, they can prove they are me easier than I can.
Oh, I'm a home owner now except that it is in an area too dangerous for me to visit since the US has intensified its War on Islam. Sigh. Paid cash for it, so there's no mortgage problem. Sometimes I wish I had other people's problems. At least the people being foreclosed on in the US got to see their homes.
[1] I've also lived in Asia for most of the last 10 years and of the ten addresses I have had there, 2 had street addresses (streets do not have names in most of Japan, but all of residential Japan) and most of the others did not even have usable postal codes - no snail mail delivery throughout rural Philippines. I'm not sure how to further describe the bahay kubo I lived in in the jungles of Mindanao without a street attached to it, let alone a postal code as no mail is delivered in that area.
Well I think secret questions/password hints by definition are NOT proper security procedures.
That was my point.
I'm free to disregard the password hint option, and I could just bang my head against the keyboard and enter in random jibberish for my secret question that no one (not even me) would be able to guess.
You could, but we're also running into the overload issue. Of things I use every day, I'm looking at least a dozen, more likely a couple dozen potentially different passwords.
That's probably an underestimate because I've given up.
Sometimes it is OK to put all your eggs in one basket ... if you guard that basket with extraordinary care and I wish the DES card I have at work for VPN login could be used for other things.
I would not mind a much, much longer PIN and output string to type in for password if one DES card could be used to generate all my passwords.
The problem with anything approaching secure encryption is, what happens in the event of a disaster? You either err on the side of security, OK, so your town flooded during the night and you woke up when the water level reached the top of your bed, your encryption card under water and all your password protected encrypted stuff is gone forever. Or convenience.
Finally, while many people admire and respect Mr. Stallman, he's never claimed to represent anyone.
While I seriously doubt that (that he's never claimed to represent anyone), it's possible. His MO when writing code is to create a giant steaming pile of crap and then depend on others to fix the problems and maintain it.
I know from personal experience that he is a control freak. All "official sanctioned" GNU code is owned by him, by copyright assignment. It is not enough for software to be under the GPL. My only direct experience was a phone call right after I had taken over the job of Mr. XEmacs and he told me how he must "wage war" (direct quote) against me and XEmacs because even though we were true blue GPL, he must have FSF copyright assignment.
The Emacs source code which we inherited and forked is littered with 1000+ line functions, 6+ levels of nested if-else and assorted other crap that looks like it was being written to violate as many rules of good programming style as possible. The amount of time it took to get the code in a state where we could display CJK fonts in Emacs (and in a stable state) was staggering, especially considering that we were basing our work off the good folks' at ETL Mule.
I have no respect for the man, no respect for his (programming) work. I find the names Linux/GNU and worse GNU/Linux to be as childish and offensive as the children who like to write Micro$oft and M$ and similar crap. (You might as well also write "you can't spell gOatse without the Gates and a big O". It's equally as witty.) Anyone can develop userland tools. Only a handful of people, of which Richard is NOT one, can develop a successful kernel.
On the other hand, he wrote one of the most insightful and brilliant papers in ACM history describing the architecture of Emacs and he does deserve credit for initiating the GNU project, thus inspiring many folks including myself to publish our work and help out on other projects.
Of course, even you write insightful things from time to time. No one is completely good or bad.
The botnet mafia will love this though. Once corporations rely heavily on cloud computing, they will become even more ripe targets for malware distributors.
So, what you're saying is that by RMS opposing cloud computing, he's actually supporting big business interests? Heh.
I think the danger can be mitigated with common sense security measures (strong passwords) and a level of responsibility on the service provide to properly encrypt and store sensitive user information and data.
None of the things you mention would have stopped the Sarah Palin email heist, which worked by a password reset. Without proper security procedures in place, no amount of other security matters in the slightest.
Consider Mac OS X Leopard. If you do not choose a hint for your password, it will happily display your password in cleartext at the login screen when the hint button is clicked.
Of the tradeoff between security and convenience on computers, the market is now firmly conditioned for convenience at the expense of security.
If you played at any of the levels where the pros inhabited you'd have been identified and banned quickly.
I have a question. One way brick & mortar casinos detect cheating is to video tape everything and have live people watching the play through a one-way ceiling.
Would it be an effective anti-cheat to do the same thing online? Require the client player's physical screens to be displayed in real time at the online "casino"?
Would they need the resources of a Google to do that? I have no idea what the level of participation is, but I would think that folks in high stakes games would welcome additional security to ensure they were playing in a fair game.
However, on 1,000 same-sized bets, the odds are very small that they'll lose overall. On a million same-sized bets, it's practically certain they'll make close to the "expected return."
That's a paraphrase of an old joke, "How do you expect to earn money when you're losing money on every sale?" "Easy, I'll make up for it in volume."
The only bet in the house where the player has an advantage is Blackjack with a single deck and the player is counting cards. The second closest bet is the "Don't Pass" line in craps, but there the house still has a slight (something like .4%) advantage.
Houses deal with card counters by "discouraging" them, probably in the same way depicted in the recent movie about the MIT Blackjack team.
in much the same way that a good bowler can nail a 7-10 split
Bad example. Nailing a 7-10 split involves luck and hurling the ball as hard as you can at one of the pins and pray that it bounces out of the pit in exactly the right direction. I do not think I've ever seen a good player in person hit one of those, but one of former league bowling teammates with an average barely in triple digits did it.
More like, 4-7-10 split or 6-7-10 split. Good players will tend to nail those most of the time. I saw Glenn Allison (Mr. 900) nail one of those late in a 3rd game to complete an 806. I'd hit an 805 in the same center the Friday before and he was serious not to be outdone by an upstart (after he finished he walked back to me to ask me about my score too :-) ...)
Russ Hamilton, the cheater behind the scenes is a former World Series of Poker winner who was one of the founders of Ultimate Bet and seems to have set this whole scheme up from the beginning.
Yeah, that was the part I find amazing. If he was a good enough player to win the "World Series", why did he need to cheat? Nobody is going to let him play again. He's probably KOS at casinos now too.
Unless you can guarentee that you're going to play against people who are worse than you
That's rather the point. John Scarne, an author famous for writing about gambling in the 1950s and 1960s had a very simple strategy for beating poker. "Always play against weaker players. If you suspect you're not the strongest player at the table, get out of the game."
Scarne was an interesting guy. Notable in the fact that it was he who first computed and published odds of winning/losing for various popular games.
I always get a kick out of the slots that advertise their payout rate. "98.7% payout! Loosest slots in town!".
Really? The sign clearly states you'll get less money out than you put in, and people find that encouraging?
It's statistics. You win some, you lose some. If you're lucky, you win more than you lose and vice versa. The smaller house percentage means it will take a bit longer before all the money you brought with you is inside the machine. Or, if you really have discipline you get lucky and walk away with more than you started with.
Blackjack, like Poker, is a game of skill. In a single deck fair game, the card counting player actually has a slight advantage over the house.
I've lost too much money from Pachinko addiction (not mine, but an ex-GF's) to ever willingly set foot in a casino again, but the last time I went to Vegas in the early 1990's it was easy to get comped drinks. I'd be very surprised if they had stopped that practice. Drunk players tend to be stupid players and like the unspeakably evil US$100 bill dispensing ATMs in Vegas casinos comped drinks should be a net win for the house. Speaking, of course, from experience ...
And for the jerks criticising the players who were cheated in this scandal, if you don't like the game, don't play. It's really none of your business.
And there was no mention of replacing "camera" equipment.
The police have reportedly replaced the seized equipment, at a cost of £1,000.
It sounds like he had everything restored, though he probably lost all the files on his disk(s).
But, most people don't know who he was, and a lot who could vaguely identify him as an inventor still think of him more as Rotwang in Fritz lang's Metropolis than as THE person who made things such as the New York power grid possible.
Unfortunately, Tesla was his own worst enemy. He gave control over his patents to Westinghouse who proceeded to screw him leaving him to eventually die in poverty.
Out of significant inventions that have changed human history, the only two that even come close to delivering electricity over a long distance are Guttenberg and the printing press and Hammurabi who invented modern society.
Truly it is sad that he is relatively unknown. Everybody knows Edison invented the light bulb, few know where the light comes from.
I should have posted a link the first time. Sorry.
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/hollerith.html
Hollerith's contributions to modern computing are... "incalculable" :-) He did not stop at his original 1890 tabulating machine and sorter, but produced many other innovative new models. He also invented the first automatic card-feed mechanism, the first key punch, and took what was perhaps the first step towards programming by introducing a wiring panel in his 1906 Type I Tabulator, allowing it to do different jobs without having to be rebuilt! (The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate only on 1890 Census cards.) These inventions were the foundation of the modern information processing industry.
Mechanical or not, it still computed. He is as deserving as Babbage and Lovelace.