Poker is not gambling. It's a game of skill as much as golf, bowling, or any other individual sport. Why this is not obvious to everyone I do not understand.
If you do not understand, then you may not be in the best position to explain to those who believe it is, at least predominantly, a game of chance.
Is there skill involved? Of course. You need to be able to weigh your odds on a non-emotional level. But that goes along with learning what a straight is and whether or not it beats a full house. That's not particularly 'skill'. The skill element comes from gaming your co-players. Reading their tells, faking your own, bluffing, etc. However, your actions therein may influence the game - then again, it may not. Thus: chance.
The point at which things become rather difficult is when proponents of "poker isn't gambling" point to the professional poker players who, when pitted against a random bunch of other poker players, tend to win far more often than a random selection would dictate. Thus their skill at influencing the game outweighs the chances. But this is only against such a random selection of other poker players and only when they're human. Pitted against a computer, their results suddenly fall well within a bell curve of chance.
Compare this to golf and bowling, which you cited, where you are far more in direct control of how the game is played. Yes, a sudden gust of wind can throw the ball off course (in golf, perhaps in bowling if it's the hurricane season) - but the course you're presented with is known beforehand. It's not a randomly dealt course, and you don't have to read the other player's 'tells', you can see exactly where his ball went. ( Surprisingly, you didn't mention chess; also considered a sport, and also not uncontroversially so. But almost universally considered a game of skill rather than chance. )
So is it skill, or is it chance? I'd say it's a little of both, with chance being predominant in the game's actual elements, and skill being predominant in its (human) players.
This presents a bit of a problem as the laws currently are sort of black-and-white. It's either a game of chance or a game of skill with nothing in between. So when a bunch of experts from both sides of the fence speak up during the latest debate on this and once again decide that it's more chance than skill, by however narrow a margin, the law says it's a game of chance and all regulations thus apply.
But those same regulations can't exactly be bent to a situation where it would be declared that poker is 55% chance and 45% skill and thus 55% of the regulations apply.
To much chagrin of both poker site operators as those looking to welcome 'taxing' the games played.
In the end, though, a highly skilled poker player can still lose against somebody who never played before and sat down just for kicks. A well-trained marathon runner, however, is not going to lose against a couch potato short of an external influence.
That's why it's not obvious to everyone that poker is not a game of chance, and thus it's not obvious to everyone that playing poker with an ante is not gambling.
I guess the point you're making is that it doesn't matter - we should ignore the TLDs anyway
You got it:)
Fine and good, but what bothers me is that ICAAN has just managed to pad it's coffers by a significant amount without really helping the Internet work better.
Oh I agree that it's mostly a money grab. But we already have similar such money grabs with the existing TLDs under the maintenance of registrars - especially those who park domains themselves in the hope that somebody would actually come register it or a subdomain of it, and registrars who have sole discretion over a given TLD (such as those of tiny island nations).
[q]Very little meaning? I don't think you've thought that through. How is domain name resolution supposed to work?[/q] Well, enlighten me - how does it work now?
How does an IP lookup for something.com differ from that of something.net?
How was domain name resolution affected by the addition of something.aero, something.museum, something.xxx?
How would it be affected by something.rocks?
And, finally, how would it be affected by 'something' (no dot-anything after it)?
Actually.. I do think it's an improvement, in a way.
There's plenty of non-commercial entities on.com domains..org domains sometimes have commercial entities.net could be anything from raindows and ponies to hardcore porn a.us site may well be run by a company on the Seychelles acting for a business in Georgia
Given that there's really very little meaning to the a TLD anyway, I welcome its further dilution to the point where we realize that really it doesn't matter whether we access http://coca-cola.com/ or http://the.real.thing/ , as long as we know what's on there (via prior visits or via google results), it doesn't matter.
Yes, there will be some additional trademark bickering - good for the lawyers. Yes, there will be some domain squatting - who cares, deal with them as you do now. Who cares if somebody registered pepsi.anything - why would anybody looking for pepsi go there? No reason. So why worry about it? Trademark dilution? So print out a template complaint. There, done your trademark defense obligation bit. As it is, with the existing domains, Pepsi Co doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry to get pepsi.cc unsquatted, pepsi.lu isn't set up yet, and pepsi.lv is a dead end.
As it is, a lot of people don't even go straight to a site anymore.. they enter the company name, or even the URL, into the (google) search bar, then hit the (usually) first result there.
If the opening up of TLDs were to have been stopped, it should have been stopped long before the days of.xxx and.aero and far stricter regulation of the use of the existing.com,.net,.org,.edu and ccTLDs.
I think they understand how these systems work just fine. The problem is that 'we, the people' like to think that the technical workings of things offers ways around the intent of laws in addition to getting around the letter of them.
e.g. if I get 1,000 individuals to upload 1,000 movies to 1,000 individual sites which don't have any particular public presence, then those 1,000 individuals are technically the ones breaking the laws. The people behind those 1,000 sites may also be breaking the law (depending on (nation) state and internationally applicable conventions, they may be in direct violation of a copyright law or at least in violation of a copyright 'safe harbor' clause a la the DMCA). Any of the, say, 1,000,000 who directly download from those locations - by having received one or more of those locations - may also be breaking the law (depending on the (nation) state in question).
But finding those 1,000 individuals takes a lot of time, and costs a fair amount of money, and there's no guarantee that even one of them is found. Shutting down 1,000 sites takes a lot of time and costs a fair amount of money, and there's no guarantee that even one of them is actually shut down. Finding and suing the 1,000,000 downloaders takes even more time, costs even more money, and there's no guarantee that even one of them is actually found/sued.
Not to mention the great public backlash against actions taken against downloaders; not so much when it's against uploaders, oddly enough.
But now imagine that those 1,000,000 downloaders got those 1,000 addresses from 1 site. One single site. Now they've got an easy target. Now they've got the site that, while not responsible for the uploads, not hosting them, and not exactly putting a gun to people's head and saying THOU SHALT DOWNLOADETH, can certainly be successfully argued to be facilitating copyright infringement in a significant way.
The facilitating argument is usually what's used in these cases, at least around Europe. Not sure how that is in the U.S., but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the same were to apply there.
Wouldn't it make more sense to constantly emit the infra-red signal so that it affects all iPhones?
Wouldn't it make even more sense to just use a high power broad-spectrum IR emitter element in the projector and ruin the picture for practically all video recording equipment that doesn't run well into the thousands of dollars to block the IR completely?
Or maybe it makes even more sense to just ignore the people who are recording a movie off a theater screen even if they use an Arri cam to do so, as the quality is always crappy enough that most downloaders are going to wait for a screener/R5 rip or better anyway?
Instead, of the last 3 movies I went to, 2 had warnings about recording equipment before the movie started; it was like watching a comedy, so amused the audience was - one of them recording a part (first 5 minutes or so) of the movie with, indeed, an iPhone - while at the same time annoyed that they would have to even be bothered with such a message at all.
same story. nvidia wants you to use cuda, microsoft wants you to use... amp?
Good question.. what happened to DirectCompute? Or is that going to be a layer underneath AMP?
Either way, OpenCL is what you probably want to be looking at. CUDA = NVidia lock-in, ATi/AMD Stream / APP = AMD/ATi lock-in, DirectCompute/AMP = Microsoft Windows lock-in. Not sure what Intel are pushing these days.
If 2/3 of the population is using one platform, couldn't that automatically mean that most of the discussion would take place there, regardless of anyone's wishes?
Oh absolutely - the majority of the discussion would be on the (social) platform that people largely use.
However:
I think you may be seeing an agenda where there is only acceptance of reality.
The reality of the matter is that while 2/3rds of Iceland's population may have a facebook account, the Icelandic government is still, will, a government.
And when a government says "It is possible to register through other means, but most of the discussion takes place via Facebook", alarm bells should be going off to understand that what they're actually saying is: "you can also write us an e-mail, or a letter, or call us - but we're going to either A. ignore you or B. ask you to participate in our discussions at Facebook".
And that sets dangerous precedent.
If it were merely a "We set up a facebook account, friend us and join the discussion, which we're also feeding to officialsite.government.is along with discussions on twitter, flickr (insert other services popular with the Icelandic population) and the official forum", it'd be a different story.
The illegality for screening against a particular vote or political preference may very well be established. But nobody can deny that e.g. color of skin is also screened against, despite the law leaving no room for interpretation there. More often than not, there's also nothing you can do about it as rarely would an employer say "we're not hiring you because you're X". You just get dismissed with a "we have reviewed your application and we regret to inform you that you did not make the selection process." with no particular reason given at all.
Thus given the realities of the world, what is legal vs what is not legal rarely gets into play at all.
Which leaves the question of ethics.
Now my ethics are unlikely to be your ethics which are unlikely to be the ethics of any other random person.
But in my view, without detailing specifics, I find screening against something a person has no reasonable control over a display of lower standard of ethics than it does screening against something where the person makes a clear choice.
they weren't willing to help a company in Colorado check for if someone was gay not because it's illegal (apparently it's not), but because it would be unethical. I'm sorry, guys, but drop the pretense. You were willing to help another company go on a witch hunt for those whose political beliefs they disagreed with, you have no sense of ethics.
Although I have no doubt that they have very low standards of ethics - especially as I rather suspect that the only way to see the reports they have on you, like a credit check report, is going to cost you a pretty penny - I can see their point made there.
Your political preference is a choice. Yes, you may have grown up in a conservative family and surrounded by conservatives all your life and the school you went to may be largely filled with people (students and faculty staff) who are conservatives), but it's still your choice as to whether you'd vote Tea Party or Republican or Independent or Democrat or whatever.
Your sexual preference, however, tends not to be a choice. This has been debated to hell and back, of course, but last I knew the consensus among scientists at least was that it's far less nurture than it is nature.
Screening for either is kinda effed up - compared to screening for things that could, or would, directly affect the employer - but it's less ethical to do screening on sexual preference than it is to screen on political preference.
Well was the applicant just drinking a beer on a terrace? If so.. hey, great, they know how to enjoy themselves a little.
But what if they were shitfaced, doing shots off some scantily clad young lady clearly much younger than them, in a dark bar with a bunch of other obviously drunk people around them? Now that person is a potential liability.
Similarly, if somebody is a registered firearm owner, part of a (sports) shooting club, etc. Hey, not my cup of tea, but good on them.
But if they're posing with guns 'gangsta style' in front of a collection of guns that wouldn't look out of place in military cache and one of their facebook friends is a down-with-the-man type collection of anti-corporate individuals, perhaps I'd rather avoid the situation that might occur when the person gets let go by simply not hiring them in the first place.
Now, of course, that person at the terrace might get shitfaced at home with a friend who works for the competition. And somebody who has never touched a gun can develop a rage the world has not witnessed before, buy themselves a firearm and go postal, too.
But at least they have the sense to keep such events or inclinations out of the social media sphere.
So yes, I can understand why companies might screen applicants' social media presence.
I do think it's ridiculous and rather invasive (since not everything in the social media sphere is under the applicant/employee's control), however. But there's no way to put that genie back in the bottle.
The rarity is in actually getting to see it. For most of North America, it's on the wrong side of the planet right now.
For large parts of Europe, cloud cover is ruining things.
So while there may be one almost every year, the number that you could see from your location is much lower, and the number that you actually -can- see, due to clouds or fog or whatever, is lower still.
as a co-respondent noted, those assisting may be charged.
However also keep in mind that the legality of suicide, or lack thereof, may affect things like inheritance rights, property rights, what happens with the body, etc. This in addition to more private parties, such as insurance companies, who aren't exactly keen on making good on a life insurance policy if that life was consciously ended by the person themselves.
Although the person committing suicide isn't going to be affected by the above, friends, loved ones, etc. may well be.. at a time when they're (most likely) grieving.
Europe: suicide legal, wearing a hijab illegal -- people need to stop acting like Europe is less corrupt, more free, and more enlightened than the united states.
People need to stop acting like Europe is a single country, first.
You're referring, principally, to France when it comes to 'illegality' of the hijab. This applies to public schools there, and also applies to e.g. wearing a cross. A hijab is still allowed in public, however, as it doesn't cover the face. You might be thinking of a burqa, or other clothing that conceals the face, being banned in public. Note that this also bans the wearing of skimasks, helmets (when not operating a vehicle requiring it), etc.
For euthanasia, you might be referring to Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg and (to lesser extent) Ireland. In all of these there's strict rules to follow. I.e. it's not like a patient can walk up to a doctor and say "kill me" and have the doctor pull out a gun on them and shoot them in the head. Recent law proposals in other countries to make euthanasia legal have been shot down - see e.g. Spain and Italy.
In other news.. France's parliament today decided that same sex marriage would not be allowed.
The same applies to the United States where each State has its own laws as well.
So yes, they're different.. but by grouping their constituent (nation) states together, the differences may be highlighted with a bias toward the group(s), as your post's subject shows.
Note that it was widely slammed as being some manner of disguised snuff movie. Watch it and make up your own mind.
Personally I think such statements are more indicative of the taboo that still rests on euthanasia (and death in general) than that they have any basis in the film's content or presentation.
Old post is old, I know - the HexBright story pushed my old comments down and I'm not entirely used to the Slashdot interface for registered users yet. (As an AC, I simply bookmarked my replies and would revisit them every few days or so).
Anyway, just to address what you mention... note that your example cites a case in which the invention that 'a smart person' could easily replicate. In those cases, I agree - in fact, patent law would seem to agree (the whole 'obviousness' clause), but the patent office(s) like ignoring it a whole lot.
My example, however, was of an invention that was non-obvious, but relatively simple to reverse-engineer. I.e. not something that 'a smart person' could replicate with far less effort than that spent by the inventor, but if given the invention, could take it apart, and build a replica in no time with little investment. That's what one of the (grand)parent posters was suggesting - that in such cases, the patent shouldn't hold either as the 'natural' process of reverse engineering applies; the only worthwhile inventions in terms of a 'natural' monopoly no it would rely on how hard it would be to reverse-engineer them. A notion I find both absurd and dangerous - after all, we're already seeing the effects of people trying to prevent reverse-engineering by means of DRM in software and potting (component encapsulation) in hardware - neither of which are desirable by end users.
no longer require publishers to also sell through iTunes
publishers are now allowed to charge more through iTunes if they so desire
They're still bound to some rules:
If a subscription is offered through the app, it must go through iTunes
a subscription through iTunes still nets Apple the 30%
customer data is still not made available to the publishers (unless the user so chooses, and the data provided in that case is limited)
Publishers may not use an UI element (button) that redirects to their own subscription portal
In other words.. they can offer the subscription elsewhere, but they're not allowed to make it easy for users to pick up said subscription.
It's still an improvement (for publishers, for users I'm sure the proposed earlier method was already ideal) as publishers can now at least offset the Apple take through price differentiation - but it still has its idiosyncrasies.
I'd like to start off my reply by saying that although you group together a bunch of countries that share in common a levy on recordable media, the details can differ hugely between those countries.
For example, in point 1 you mention that "nobody on the internet is your friend, so any internet sources are not part of the deal". This, however, does not apply to The Netherlands where it is - for now - completely legal to download music, video and movies even if the rights holders have not given you explicit or implicit permission to do so.
Now to some other finer details, at least as they pertain to The Netherlands:
Yes, there's a levy. That levy doesn't exist because you will be making a particular copy. If it did, they'd make the levy as high as whatever the original material you'd be copying would be. The levy exists because the government at some point realized that people were in fact making copies (on audio tapes, back then), that this was 'unfair' to artists (or business interests, take your pick), but that going after individual infringing parties would be prohibitively expensive and technologies to make this less expensive would be far too invasive. So they went with one of the lesser evils: a levy for all. Even if you were to never record something onto tape - or now CD-R, DVD-R, Blu-Ray recordable - you'd still pay that levy on that medium. Yes, that's 'unfair' to you, but the proposed alternatives wouldn't be very pretty either. The levy also doesn't exist as a "if you pay 2 cents on this CD-R, it means you can download any $10 album you want, and it would be completely legal" as some have suggested be the case in some other countries. I don't know where people would get that preposterous idea, unless they're applying RIAA/MPAA math in reverse. I.e. the levy is not what gives you 'the right' to make a copy. Other laws deal with that. Note that this levy in NL is largely pointless. Officially, the levy be â0.60/DVD-R. However, you can get a 25-pack for â6,70 at any store, no fishy deals or ordering from Germany required. If the product is being sold at a price lower than the official levies would amount to, I'd say that levy chain is broken somewhere. Also note that they're planning on doing away with the levies, but only as part of some measures to make downloading (material from illicit sources) illegal.
So that's as far as levies go, as pertaining to The Netherlands.
Now to move on to your next part involving actually making that copy. You say you have the right to make a copy. we do in The Netherlands as well. However, the Dutch law doesn't state what a copy is. If I take a sheet of notes you have, run it through the ol' photocopier.. do I now have a copy? If I take a show on TV and record it on my PVR, do I now have a copy? In both cases the answer is naturally 'yes' even though I don't have a bit-for-bit perfect copy. And therein lays the foundation for the argument that while you have the right to make a copy, that doesn't mean that the publishers have to make this easy for you. You don't have the right to a copy, you have the right to make one. How you make one is something the law doesn't concern itself with. In other words, if you pointed an HD video camera at your nice flatscreen, hit record on that, and hit play on your Blu-Ray player to play back that Blu-Ray movie, you're making use of your right to make a copy just as well - and in a way that isn't prohibited by a law regarding disabling of protection techniques as you're not disabling the protection of the bits and bytes. If they wanted to protect the photons coming off of your TV screen they should've gone with that. But as many have stated, you can't close the analog hole. If you then take captured video and burn it to your CD-R, you still made a copy of the movie onto that CD-R; thus justifying the levy once more.
That's as far as legal bits and pieces go. In practice, hardly anybody even takes these things into account. As I mentioned above, th
Good transit system. It is relatively easy to use, but there is one strange part. It seems there is a town called "Buiten Dienst" (spelling?) that many buses go to, but I cannot find it on the map. And those buses don't seem to stop at any of the regular bus stops. Other than that, ok.
rofl
The stuff we put on our French Fries in the stands and such isn't really 'mayo' in the sense of either the Dutch mayonnaise (okay on sandwiches, as a salad dressing base, and often used in the home when eating oven/deep fry French Fries) or the various mayos I've had in the U.S. (which work great on sandwiches).. it has a slightly more sour and fresh flavor to it. As far as I know, that migrated from the Belgians. A more typically Dutch thing to put on Fries in some areas, certainly in the last 5 years, is 'Joppiesaus'. I'm partial to 'Oorlog' ('war', mayo + peanutsauce + bits of onion), myself.
And yes, stroopwafels are awesome! I was saddened when we finishes the ones I brought (not fresh, but still delicious - 10s nuke in the microwave makes 'm better) and couldn't find anything even remotely similar where I was staying.
Personally, I use a bank with two-channel auth, and refuse to use electronic banking that relies on anything sent via my browser alone - the browser is insecure software, and can be taken over without the victim being aware of it, even when the victim is following good security practices.
I'm curious.. what is the other channel?
Here in NL there's two major forms of online banking authorization (separate from the account login, of course), both are a challenge/response type, and both perform the challenge in the browser.
The first one, the response is either on a paper sheet you have (which you can then move to a computer file or whatever if you want to spend some time typing it in) or is sent to your cellphone along with the amount (so that no transactions can sneak in without it being shown in the same text).
The other one, the response is something generated on an external device - looks like a little calculator - after entering the challenge.
In both cases, the response is also entered into the browser.
Despite these more-or-less two-factor authorizations, I'd consider this to be a single channel.
I'm not sure what other channel could exist either... a custom application that communicates over an SSL'd connection or secure FTP or whatever could just as well be targeted by malware authors.. perhaps even moreso considering its focused purpose.
A true separate channel would probably be a modification of the aforementioned challenge-via-text method to also send the response via text. Or calling the bank and checking with an employee that the order as you see it on your screen is indeed the order pending and then proceed to provide the response to the presented challenge. The former could be automated, the latter.. not so much?
So I'm curious what the 2nd channel in your banking situation is.
Well, according to my friends who actually live in the Netherlands, some are US expats, it is a great place to live. There are [...]
I've seen some people say they wanted to move to NL. Probably in jest, but one good place to check if NL is right for you would be to dig into the stories and forums here: http://www.expatica.com/nl/main.html
Note that you will find many, many bitter 'expats' there. The majority of which were really just hoping to be an American living like an American, while living in NL, rather than adapting to Dutch ways. ( Note that I say 'adapting', not 'conforming'.. we're not the Borg. )
You'll also find quite a few positive posts, however.
Having read posts there occasionally for the last 8 years or so, I can say that it's a fairly reasonable resource for learning about NL, particular regions, what to expect, what you might love, what you might hate, etc. It also has a few small sections set up to get you on your way with actually travelling to NL and migrating to NL, but the general recommendation is that you speak to an emigration handler in your home country as they know the legal rigmarole du jour.
Here's one tip.. The Dutch know English quite well, and they're not averse to speaking it as much as people in some of the other European countries. However, unless you find yourself in an international community (e.g. the British area, Polish neighborhood or China Town of one of the major cities), you're not going to find a whole lot helping you out in English - quite unlike the plethora of Spanish signs/etc. in the southern U.S., say - so take some time and effort and learn Dutch. ( I think for official immigration you're actually required to take a short Dutch exam, but a recent advisory from a commission suggested to do away with that. )
This. (I hate using that, but apparently it's the only way to get the idea across in this day and age that I agree with your post and find it rings very true.)
However, I don't generally mind. So I'm a little 'left out' because people have to ask me what I've been up to. Big deal, I can tell them right there and then. If that means they stare in boredom until finally something I did interests them (which otherwise they would have filtered from status updates), so be it. If nothing else, maybe it'll open them up to my other interests as well and not just the ones that overlap with theirs in the venn diagram of life.
What I do mind is when they come to rely on those status updates as some sort of legitimate form of communication for the things that really, really matter.
I.e. asking what you believe to be a reasonably close friend - albeit from a distance since they moved to a different town - how they're doing, and they respond that they missed you at the wedding. Once you regain your traction of thought from the bafflement, you congratulate him and then ask what happened to the wedding date 2 months from now. They reply by saying that they decided to just do a more informal wedding because the costs for the big wedding were just too high after his now-wife lost her job etc. etc. so they relocated the wedding an opening was available a few days ago and "I posted this on facebook - didn't you read it?". Well, no, of course you didn't read it, you don't really keep up with people's facebook status messages and honestly you thought you were close enough a friend that you would be told these things directly.. an e-mail, an IM, a text message, a phone call, anything.
And the ridiculous thing is... once you realize that they didn't do that for anyone, i.e. not even for their best man, their family, etc. as long as they were on facebook... you can't even really fault them.
You can still think it's completely inane to use facebook in such a manner, but that doesn't change the fact that out of all of the people, you were the no-show.
Pretty soon people won't even bother with e-mails anymore and tell their friends to just use facebook (or twitter or whatever) because it's just so much more convenient (and, let's be honest, it is.. with all the integration into smartphones that e-mail typically lacks).
Slashdot Mirror
If you do not understand, then you may not be in the best position to explain to those who believe it is, at least predominantly, a game of chance.
Is there skill involved? Of course. You need to be able to weigh your odds on a non-emotional level. But that goes along with learning what a straight is and whether or not it beats a full house. That's not particularly 'skill'. The skill element comes from gaming your co-players. Reading their tells, faking your own, bluffing, etc. However, your actions therein may influence the game - then again, it may not. Thus: chance.
The point at which things become rather difficult is when proponents of "poker isn't gambling" point to the professional poker players who, when pitted against a random bunch of other poker players, tend to win far more often than a random selection would dictate. Thus their skill at influencing the game outweighs the chances.
But this is only against such a random selection of other poker players and only when they're human. Pitted against a computer, their results suddenly fall well within a bell curve of chance.
Compare this to golf and bowling, which you cited, where you are far more in direct control of how the game is played. Yes, a sudden gust of wind can throw the ball off course (in golf, perhaps in bowling if it's the hurricane season) - but the course you're presented with is known beforehand. It's not a randomly dealt course, and you don't have to read the other player's 'tells', you can see exactly where his ball went.
( Surprisingly, you didn't mention chess; also considered a sport, and also not uncontroversially so. But almost universally considered a game of skill rather than chance. )
So is it skill, or is it chance?
I'd say it's a little of both, with chance being predominant in the game's actual elements, and skill being predominant in its (human) players.
This presents a bit of a problem as the laws currently are sort of black-and-white. It's either a game of chance or a game of skill with nothing in between. So when a bunch of experts from both sides of the fence speak up during the latest debate on this and once again decide that it's more chance than skill, by however narrow a margin, the law says it's a game of chance and all regulations thus apply.
But those same regulations can't exactly be bent to a situation where it would be declared that poker is 55% chance and 45% skill and thus 55% of the regulations apply.
To much chagrin of both poker site operators as those looking to welcome 'taxing' the games played.
In the end, though, a highly skilled poker player can still lose against somebody who never played before and sat down just for kicks. A well-trained marathon runner, however, is not going to lose against a couch potato short of an external influence.
That's why it's not obvious to everyone that poker is not a game of chance, and thus it's not obvious to everyone that playing poker with an ante is not gambling.
You got it :)
Oh I agree that it's mostly a money grab. But we already have similar such money grabs with the existing TLDs under the maintenance of registrars - especially those who park domains themselves in the hope that somebody would actually come register it or a subdomain of it, and registrars who have sole discretion over a given TLD (such as those of tiny island nations).
[q]Very little meaning? I don't think you've thought that through. How is domain name resolution supposed to work?[/q]
Well, enlighten me - how does it work now?
How does an IP lookup for something.com differ from that of something.net?
How was domain name resolution affected by the addition of something.aero, something.museum, something.xxx?
How would it be affected by something.rocks?
And, finally, how would it be affected by 'something' (no dot-anything after it)?
Actually.. I do think it's an improvement, in a way.
There's plenty of non-commercial entities on .com domains. .org domains sometimes have commercial entities .net could be anything from raindows and ponies to hardcore porn .us site may well be run by a company on the Seychelles acting for a business in Georgia
a
Given that there's really very little meaning to the a TLD anyway, I welcome its further dilution to the point where we realize that really it doesn't matter whether we access http://coca-cola.com/ or http://the.real.thing/ , as long as we know what's on there (via prior visits or via google results), it doesn't matter.
Yes, there will be some additional trademark bickering - good for the lawyers. Yes, there will be some domain squatting - who cares, deal with them as you do now. Who cares if somebody registered pepsi.anything - why would anybody looking for pepsi go there? No reason. So why worry about it? Trademark dilution? So print out a template complaint. There, done your trademark defense obligation bit. As it is, with the existing domains, Pepsi Co doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry to get pepsi.cc unsquatted, pepsi.lu isn't set up yet, and pepsi.lv is a dead end.
As it is, a lot of people don't even go straight to a site anymore.. they enter the company name, or even the URL, into the (google) search bar, then hit the (usually) first result there.
If the opening up of TLDs were to have been stopped, it should have been stopped long before the days of .xxx and .aero and far stricter regulation of the use of the existing .com, .net, .org, .edu and ccTLDs.
I think they understand how these systems work just fine. The problem is that 'we, the people' like to think that the technical workings of things offers ways around the intent of laws in addition to getting around the letter of them.
e.g. if I get 1,000 individuals to upload 1,000 movies to 1,000 individual sites which don't have any particular public presence, then those 1,000 individuals are technically the ones breaking the laws.
The people behind those 1,000 sites may also be breaking the law (depending on (nation) state and internationally applicable conventions, they may be in direct violation of a copyright law or at least in violation of a copyright 'safe harbor' clause a la the DMCA).
Any of the, say, 1,000,000 who directly download from those locations - by having received one or more of those locations - may also be breaking the law (depending on the (nation) state in question).
But finding those 1,000 individuals takes a lot of time, and costs a fair amount of money, and there's no guarantee that even one of them is found.
Shutting down 1,000 sites takes a lot of time and costs a fair amount of money, and there's no guarantee that even one of them is actually shut down.
Finding and suing the 1,000,000 downloaders takes even more time, costs even more money, and there's no guarantee that even one of them is actually found/sued.
Not to mention the great public backlash against actions taken against downloaders; not so much when it's against uploaders, oddly enough.
But now imagine that those 1,000,000 downloaders got those 1,000 addresses from 1 site. One single site. Now they've got an easy target. Now they've got the site that, while not responsible for the uploads, not hosting them, and not exactly putting a gun to people's head and saying THOU SHALT DOWNLOADETH, can certainly be successfully argued to be facilitating copyright infringement in a significant way.
The facilitating argument is usually what's used in these cases, at least around Europe. Not sure how that is in the U.S., but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the same were to apply there.
Wouldn't it make even more sense to just use a high power broad-spectrum IR emitter element in the projector and ruin the picture for practically all video recording equipment that doesn't run well into the thousands of dollars to block the IR completely?
Or maybe it makes even more sense to just ignore the people who are recording a movie off a theater screen even if they use an Arri cam to do so, as the quality is always crappy enough that most downloaders are going to wait for a screener/R5 rip or better anyway?
Instead, of the last 3 movies I went to, 2 had warnings about recording equipment before the movie started; it was like watching a comedy, so amused the audience was - one of them recording a part (first 5 minutes or so) of the movie with, indeed, an iPhone - while at the same time annoyed that they would have to even be bothered with such a message at all.
Good question.. what happened to DirectCompute? Or is that going to be a layer underneath AMP?
Either way, OpenCL is what you probably want to be looking at. CUDA = NVidia lock-in, ATi/AMD Stream / APP = AMD/ATi lock-in, DirectCompute/AMP = Microsoft Windows lock-in. Not sure what Intel are pushing these days.
Oh absolutely - the majority of the discussion would be on the (social) platform that people largely use.
However:
The reality of the matter is that while 2/3rds of Iceland's population may have a facebook account, the Icelandic government is still, will, a government.
And when a government says "It is possible to register through other means, but most of the discussion takes place via Facebook", alarm bells should be going off to understand that what they're actually saying is: "you can also write us an e-mail, or a letter, or call us - but we're going to either A. ignore you or B. ask you to participate in our discussions at Facebook".
And that sets dangerous precedent.
If it were merely a "We set up a facebook account, friend us and join the discussion, which we're also feeding to officialsite.government.is along with discussions on twitter, flickr (insert other services popular with the Icelandic population) and the official forum", it'd be a different story.
The illegality for screening against a particular vote or political preference may very well be established. But nobody can deny that e.g. color of skin is also screened against, despite the law leaving no room for interpretation there. More often than not, there's also nothing you can do about it as rarely would an employer say "we're not hiring you because you're X". You just get dismissed with a "we have reviewed your application and we regret to inform you that you did not make the selection process." with no particular reason given at all.
Thus given the realities of the world, what is legal vs what is not legal rarely gets into play at all.
Which leaves the question of ethics.
Now my ethics are unlikely to be your ethics which are unlikely to be the ethics of any other random person.
But in my view, without detailing specifics, I find screening against something a person has no reasonable control over a display of lower standard of ethics than it does screening against something where the person makes a clear choice.
Although I have no doubt that they have very low standards of ethics - especially as I rather suspect that the only way to see the reports they have on you, like a credit check report, is going to cost you a pretty penny - I can see their point made there.
Your political preference is a choice. Yes, you may have grown up in a conservative family and surrounded by conservatives all your life and the school you went to may be largely filled with people (students and faculty staff) who are conservatives), but it's still your choice as to whether you'd vote Tea Party or Republican or Independent or Democrat or whatever.
Your sexual preference, however, tends not to be a choice. This has been debated to hell and back, of course, but last I knew the consensus among scientists at least was that it's far less nurture than it is nature.
Screening for either is kinda effed up - compared to screening for things that could, or would, directly affect the employer - but it's less ethical to do screening on sexual preference than it is to screen on political preference.
Well was the applicant just drinking a beer on a terrace? If so.. hey, great, they know how to enjoy themselves a little.
But what if they were shitfaced, doing shots off some scantily clad young lady clearly much younger than them, in a dark bar with a bunch of other obviously drunk people around them? Now that person is a potential liability.
Similarly, if somebody is a registered firearm owner, part of a (sports) shooting club, etc. Hey, not my cup of tea, but good on them.
But if they're posing with guns 'gangsta style' in front of a collection of guns that wouldn't look out of place in military cache and one of their facebook friends is a down-with-the-man type collection of anti-corporate individuals, perhaps I'd rather avoid the situation that might occur when the person gets let go by simply not hiring them in the first place.
Now, of course, that person at the terrace might get shitfaced at home with a friend who works for the competition. And somebody who has never touched a gun can develop a rage the world has not witnessed before, buy themselves a firearm and go postal, too.
But at least they have the sense to keep such events or inclinations out of the social media sphere.
So yes, I can understand why companies might screen applicants' social media presence.
I do think it's ridiculous and rather invasive (since not everything in the social media sphere is under the applicant/employee's control), however. But there's no way to put that genie back in the bottle.
The rarity is in actually getting to see it. For most of North America, it's on the wrong side of the planet right now.
For large parts of Europe, cloud cover is ruining things.
So while there may be one almost every year, the number that you could see from your location is much lower, and the number that you actually -can- see, due to clouds or fog or whatever, is lower still.
as a co-respondent noted, those assisting may be charged.
However also keep in mind that the legality of suicide, or lack thereof, may affect things like inheritance rights, property rights, what happens with the body, etc. This in addition to more private parties, such as insurance companies, who aren't exactly keen on making good on a life insurance policy if that life was consciously ended by the person themselves.
Although the person committing suicide isn't going to be affected by the above, friends, loved ones, etc. may well be.. at a time when they're (most likely) grieving.
Didn't know that - thanks for clearing that up :) I guess that actually means it was shown in GB before as well? [nokarma]
People need to stop acting like Europe is a single country, first.
You're referring, principally, to France when it comes to 'illegality' of the hijab. This applies to public schools there, and also applies to e.g. wearing a cross. A hijab is still allowed in public, however, as it doesn't cover the face. You might be thinking of a burqa, or other clothing that conceals the face, being banned in public. Note that this also bans the wearing of skimasks, helmets (when not operating a vehicle requiring it), etc.
For euthanasia, you might be referring to Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg and (to lesser extent) Ireland. In all of these there's strict rules to follow. I.e. it's not like a patient can walk up to a doctor and say "kill me" and have the doctor pull out a gun on them and shoot them in the head.
Recent law proposals in other countries to make euthanasia legal have been shot down - see e.g. Spain and Italy.
In other news.. France's parliament today decided that same sex marriage would not be allowed.
The same applies to the United States where each State has its own laws as well.
So yes, they're different.. but by grouping their constituent (nation) states together, the differences may be highlighted with a bias toward the group(s), as your post's subject shows.
It may be "Britain's first televised suicide", but PBS made a documentary on this topic before:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/suicidetourist/
Note that it was widely slammed as being some manner of disguised snuff movie. Watch it and make up your own mind.
Personally I think such statements are more indicative of the taboo that still rests on euthanasia (and death in general) than that they have any basis in the film's content or presentation.
Old post is old, I know - the HexBright story pushed my old comments down and I'm not entirely used to the Slashdot interface for registered users yet. (As an AC, I simply bookmarked my replies and would revisit them every few days or so).
Anyway, just to address what you mention... note that your example cites a case in which the invention that 'a smart person' could easily replicate. In those cases, I agree - in fact, patent law would seem to agree (the whole 'obviousness' clause), but the patent office(s) like ignoring it a whole lot.
My example, however, was of an invention that was non-obvious, but relatively simple to reverse-engineer. I.e. not something that 'a smart person' could replicate with far less effort than that spent by the inventor, but if given the invention, could take it apart, and build a replica in no time with little investment. That's what one of the (grand)parent posters was suggesting - that in such cases, the patent shouldn't hold either as the 'natural' process of reverse engineering applies; the only worthwhile inventions in terms of a 'natural' monopoly no it would rely on how hard it would be to reverse-engineer them. A notion I find both absurd and dangerous - after all, we're already seeing the effects of people trying to prevent reverse-engineering by means of DRM in software and potting (component encapsulation) in hardware - neither of which are desirable by end users.
Actually, I thought the fascination was with the word "rootkit" - it was only somebody else who latched onto the whole "hacked" thing ;)
I know IT fully embraced Patch Tuesday leaving us with up to a month's worth of accumulated crud, but now they've gone too far!
Note that the devil is in the details.
While Apple will
They're still bound to some rules:
In other words.. they can offer the subscription elsewhere, but they're not allowed to make it easy for users to pick up said subscription.
It's still an improvement (for publishers, for users I'm sure the proposed earlier method was already ideal) as publishers can now at least offset the Apple take through price differentiation - but it still has its idiosyncrasies.
I'd like to start off my reply by saying that although you group together a bunch of countries that share in common a levy on recordable media, the details can differ hugely between those countries.
For example, in point 1 you mention that "nobody on the internet is your friend, so any internet sources are not part of the deal". This, however, does not apply to The Netherlands where it is - for now - completely legal to download music, video and movies even if the rights holders have not given you explicit or implicit permission to do so.
Now to some other finer details, at least as they pertain to The Netherlands:
Yes, there's a levy. That levy doesn't exist because you will be making a particular copy. If it did, they'd make the levy as high as whatever the original material you'd be copying would be. The levy exists because the government at some point realized that people were in fact making copies (on audio tapes, back then), that this was 'unfair' to artists (or business interests, take your pick), but that going after individual infringing parties would be prohibitively expensive and technologies to make this less expensive would be far too invasive. So they went with one of the lesser evils: a levy for all. Even if you were to never record something onto tape - or now CD-R, DVD-R, Blu-Ray recordable - you'd still pay that levy on that medium. Yes, that's 'unfair' to you, but the proposed alternatives wouldn't be very pretty either.
The levy also doesn't exist as a "if you pay 2 cents on this CD-R, it means you can download any $10 album you want, and it would be completely legal" as some have suggested be the case in some other countries. I don't know where people would get that preposterous idea, unless they're applying RIAA/MPAA math in reverse. I.e. the levy is not what gives you 'the right' to make a copy. Other laws deal with that.
Note that this levy in NL is largely pointless. Officially, the levy be â0.60/DVD-R. However, you can get a 25-pack for â6,70 at any store, no fishy deals or ordering from Germany required. If the product is being sold at a price lower than the official levies would amount to, I'd say that levy chain is broken somewhere.
Also note that they're planning on doing away with the levies, but only as part of some measures to make downloading (material from illicit sources) illegal.
So that's as far as levies go, as pertaining to The Netherlands.
Now to move on to your next part involving actually making that copy. You say you have the right to make a copy. we do in The Netherlands as well. However, the Dutch law doesn't state what a copy is. If I take a sheet of notes you have, run it through the ol' photocopier.. do I now have a copy? If I take a show on TV and record it on my PVR, do I now have a copy? In both cases the answer is naturally 'yes' even though I don't have a bit-for-bit perfect copy. And therein lays the foundation for the argument that while you have the right to make a copy, that doesn't mean that the publishers have to make this easy for you. You don't have the right to a copy, you have the right to make one. How you make one is something the law doesn't concern itself with.
In other words, if you pointed an HD video camera at your nice flatscreen, hit record on that, and hit play on your Blu-Ray player to play back that Blu-Ray movie, you're making use of your right to make a copy just as well - and in a way that isn't prohibited by a law regarding disabling of protection techniques as you're not disabling the protection of the bits and bytes. If they wanted to protect the photons coming off of your TV screen they should've gone with that. But as many have stated, you can't close the analog hole.
If you then take captured video and burn it to your CD-R, you still made a copy of the movie onto that CD-R; thus justifying the levy once more.
That's as far as legal bits and pieces go. In practice, hardly anybody even takes these things into account. As I mentioned above, th
rofl
The stuff we put on our French Fries in the stands and such isn't really 'mayo' in the sense of either the Dutch mayonnaise (okay on sandwiches, as a salad dressing base, and often used in the home when eating oven/deep fry French Fries) or the various mayos I've had in the U.S. (which work great on sandwiches).. it has a slightly more sour and fresh flavor to it. As far as I know, that migrated from the Belgians. A more typically Dutch thing to put on Fries in some areas, certainly in the last 5 years, is 'Joppiesaus'.
I'm partial to 'Oorlog' ('war', mayo + peanutsauce + bits of onion), myself.
And yes, stroopwafels are awesome! I was saddened when we finishes the ones I brought (not fresh, but still delicious - 10s nuke in the microwave makes 'm better) and couldn't find anything even remotely similar where I was staying.
I'm curious.. what is the other channel?
Here in NL there's two major forms of online banking authorization (separate from the account login, of course), both are a challenge/response type, and both perform the challenge in the browser.
The first one, the response is either on a paper sheet you have (which you can then move to a computer file or whatever if you want to spend some time typing it in) or is sent to your cellphone along with the amount (so that no transactions can sneak in without it being shown in the same text).
The other one, the response is something generated on an external device - looks like a little calculator - after entering the challenge.
In both cases, the response is also entered into the browser.
Despite these more-or-less two-factor authorizations, I'd consider this to be a single channel.
I'm not sure what other channel could exist either... a custom application that communicates over an SSL'd connection or secure FTP or whatever could just as well be targeted by malware authors.. perhaps even moreso considering its focused purpose.
A true separate channel would probably be a modification of the aforementioned challenge-via-text method to also send the response via text. Or calling the bank and checking with an employee that the order as you see it on your screen is indeed the order pending and then proceed to provide the response to the presented challenge. The former could be automated, the latter.. not so much?
So I'm curious what the 2nd channel in your banking situation is.
I've seen some people say they wanted to move to NL. Probably in jest, but one good place to check if NL is right for you would be to dig into the stories and forums here:
http://www.expatica.com/nl/main.html
Note that you will find many, many bitter 'expats' there. The majority of which were really just hoping to be an American living like an American, while living in NL, rather than adapting to Dutch ways. ( Note that I say 'adapting', not 'conforming'.. we're not the Borg. )
You'll also find quite a few positive posts, however.
Having read posts there occasionally for the last 8 years or so, I can say that it's a fairly reasonable resource for learning about NL, particular regions, what to expect, what you might love, what you might hate, etc.
It also has a few small sections set up to get you on your way with actually travelling to NL and migrating to NL, but the general recommendation is that you speak to an emigration handler in your home country as they know the legal rigmarole du jour.
Here's one tip.. The Dutch know English quite well, and they're not averse to speaking it as much as people in some of the other European countries. However, unless you find yourself in an international community (e.g. the British area, Polish neighborhood or China Town of one of the major cities), you're not going to find a whole lot helping you out in English - quite unlike the plethora of Spanish signs/etc. in the southern U.S., say - so take some time and effort and learn Dutch. ( I think for official immigration you're actually required to take a short Dutch exam, but a recent advisory from a commission suggested to do away with that. )
This. (I hate using that, but apparently it's the only way to get the idea across in this day and age that I agree with your post and find it rings very true.)
However, I don't generally mind. So I'm a little 'left out' because people have to ask me what I've been up to. Big deal, I can tell them right there and then. If that means they stare in boredom until finally something I did interests them (which otherwise they would have filtered from status updates), so be it. If nothing else, maybe it'll open them up to my other interests as well and not just the ones that overlap with theirs in the venn diagram of life.
What I do mind is when they come to rely on those status updates as some sort of legitimate form of communication for the things that really, really matter.
I.e. asking what you believe to be a reasonably close friend - albeit from a distance since they moved to a different town - how they're doing, and they respond that they missed you at the wedding. Once you regain your traction of thought from the bafflement, you congratulate him and then ask what happened to the wedding date 2 months from now. They reply by saying that they decided to just do a more informal wedding because the costs for the big wedding were just too high after his now-wife lost her job etc. etc. so they relocated the wedding an opening was available a few days ago and "I posted this on facebook - didn't you read it?".
Well, no, of course you didn't read it, you don't really keep up with people's facebook status messages and honestly you thought you were close enough a friend that you would be told these things directly.. an e-mail, an IM, a text message, a phone call, anything.
And the ridiculous thing is... once you realize that they didn't do that for anyone, i.e. not even for their best man, their family, etc. as long as they were on facebook... you can't even really fault them.
You can still think it's completely inane to use facebook in such a manner, but that doesn't change the fact that out of all of the people, you were the no-show.
Pretty soon people won't even bother with e-mails anymore and tell their friends to just use facebook (or twitter or whatever) because it's just so much more convenient (and, let's be honest, it is.. with all the integration into smartphones that e-mail typically lacks).