Essentially ignoring copyright laws can be a form of civil disobedience
Sure. And if I ever get nabbed for allegedly violating the GPL, I am going to cry 'civil disobedience' too. And alleged GPL violations of the GPL by, say, the Chinese - that's an entirely valid expression of nationals of a foreign country exercising their own rights to self-determination.
I question that they have any right to teach children what amounts to their views of the law -
the laws on music copryright for example are based manily on the money and power of the RIAA and Recording Companies
The laws on copyright are quite clear about the legality of ripping and redistributing MP3s for the use of others who do not own the product - it is illegal ! You may not agree with the law, but the law is unambiguous here.
You might also think that stealing money from rich people should belegal, and you might justify that by arguing that some rich people do bad things, screw their employees, engage in morally questionable actions, blah blah...but you would be a fool if you believed it was legal.
As for argument that we should stop trying to "teach children morals and a sense of right and wrong"...I suppose you think that educating young people about what rape is, and offering any opinion about, say, forcing non-consensual sex on a drunken teenage girl would be wrong too.
The Slashdot editor had a tone of derision and an almost palpable, smarmy smugness when he describes the prospect that maybe some person on the Net offering you legal advice may actually be a 15-year old boy.
So what ? What if I laughed out loud at the possibility that there could be a 15-year old who could offer half-decent system administration, programming, or hell - even HTML - advice ? Is the latter any more plausible than the former ? Heck, not too long ago people would have laughed at the possibility that a teenager could launch and run a million-dollar company. Now, people not only know it is possible, extreme youth has become almost de rigeur. So why aren't young tech 'gurus ' being laughed at here ?
I think you're reviewing the wrong movie if you didn't expect it to be somewhat confusing to the newbie viewer,
It is not unfair for Katz to point out that a movie has the flaw of assuming familiarity with the FF series. Jeez, if they really did intend requisite familiarity (and I bet you dollars-to-donuts the writers and studios did NOT intend such), why not tell people that ? As far as I am concerned, it is a bad movie indeed if it can only be properly enjoyed by a select few (where 'few' is relative to the movie-going public at large) who have some deep understanding of the games themselves.
Re:Linux appliances I _really_ want
on
Death of a Rebel
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· Score: 2
My guess is probably all of them. Heck just today there is a story about a UK company making a 'cyber toilet' that is voice-activated and has autoflush features and - get this - has the ability to monitor stools and urine for potential health problems. If things are awry, it can contact your GP via the Internet.
I thought the watches have been done by IBM, the PS2 I though also has been reported to run Linux (if not, it is sure to happen). Sprinklers and lawnmowers seem plausible in this world of screwed-up-business-plans-out-of-touch-with-realit y.
And as for the dildo, that will happen if only because I bet guys like Katz and Taco would love to have an eighteen-inch dildo that doesn't run WinCE.
Don't these people realize that services like Napster actually increase their sales? Look at the recording industry and their numbers, I have seen no decrease.
So you can tell by this that Napster is not hurting their sales ? Did you also consider the fact that there are now more people of CD-buying age now than 2 years ago, that there are more people with CD-players now than 2 years ago and that CD players are now more prevalent (Discmans, cars, etc.) than 2 years ago ?
Did it occur to you that maybe those factors explain why CD sales may not have decreased in the face of rising Napster use ?
And besides, even if Napster did increase CD sales, what relevance does that have ? It's the copyright holders' right to enforce their copyright however they choose. If you are correct, then the artists and recording industry might be foolish to oppose Napster, but that is their choice. Maybe GPL'ed software would become more prominent if Microsoft starting selling MS-Emacs or MS-Linux without making source available. Should this fact by itself be enough to allow then to do so, if their violations of copyright ultimately helped the FSF's cause ?
The recording industry can hire programmers and consultants just like anybody else. They know full well there are no more holes. This is just an excuse to
keep Napster shut down.
What do you mean there are no holes ? There is at least one post here today already documenting how easy it is to circumvent Napster's lame filtering (the example given was searching for 'Dave Lee Roth' instead of 'David Lee Roth'). And though it may prove impossible to close every last hole, why should the artists and the recording industry care ? If they want some of the holes, they should want all of them closed.
And please, no more of the 'try-before-you buy' and 'people buy more CDs with Napster than without'. Even if true, this is a marketing decision that only the copyright holders should be entitled to make - NOT you or I. What if I decided that maybe people would use and contribute more Free Software if I began distributing binaries of modified pieces of Free Software without making the source available ? How would people here feel if there were networks (say, run by Microsoft), whose obvious main raison d'etre was to traffic GPL-violating binaries ?
There's always going to be something crawling through. That's the nature of pattern recognition.
So just because blocking infringement is hard or impossible to do, the judge should just let Napster continue trafficking in infringing material ? Should she be happy that Napster gave it the old college try ? The difficulty of preventing an illegal act is irrelevant to whether or not Napster should be allowed to continue facilitating that illegal act. To argue in the extreme, someone might be an incorrigible pedophile/rapist/bankrobber/shoplifter. Should that person be free if he is successful in curbing his activities 99.9% of the time ?
Uhh, I haven't bought any new CD since napster started either. Let's face it, why would I pay for music when I can download it for free? Yes, it's probably illegal, no I don't
really care. Yes, the artists are getting screwed. I'm simply being honest.
Ahh...some honesty ! I too have not bought much music since Napster started, but I don't claim it is because I haven't hear or thought of a single song I might want to have. It's because every song I could think of, I could rip off Napster easily. Lots of songs from my youth which would have prompted me to go buy the CD now that I have the money are more economically stolen off Napster. The only CDs I have purchased have been CDs that are obscure enough that I can't grab the tracks off Napster - do you think that is a coincidence ? That's my truth, and I bet it is the truth for more than a few Slashdot readers who so sanctimoniously try to rationalize their behavior as something other than it is.
Are judges going to shut down university computer systems because obviously, some kids somewhere in the system are using their home directories to store
w4r3z?
On most any university system, if the admins find people trafficking in warez they can expunge their accounts, prevent them from getting new accounts and/or monitor their activity later, and possibly subject them to disciplinary action. These are recourses unavailable to Napster because of the essential anonymity - you close my account ? I open a new one, and all the files you hoped to make unavailable are now all available again, and just as easy to find. The judgement is not insane, because Napster provides no good way of preventing piracy. Even though Napster has made an effort at preventing some piracy, effort is not and should not be enough to get it a passing grade in this case.
Why not ? Because most artists believe that Napster is costing them sales and infringing on their rights. Why would they opt in, when most are probably celebrating Napster's imminent demise ?
I can't figure this out - just two days ago everyone was saying how right Adobe were for seeking to protect their trademark on the word Illustrator which they stole from
all the English speaking people of the world - now because it's an open source company trying to protect it's name (BTW MySQL is not a dictionary word) it's suddenly
bad.
Actually, what I can't figure out is how just the other day everyone was jumping on Adobe for trying to protect their trademark, and now because it's an open source company trying to do the same thing, everyone says it's OK.
It is wrong - and we should fight tooth and nail to oppose it. Public education is not a training program to gain a skillset in a meaningless job. Public education teaches ideas,
ideals, concepts and reasoning. Broad based learning to enlighten people. Life is not about the worthless-corporate-work-world.
That's your interpreation of what public education is or should be. It is not everyone's. I think the education system would do its students a huge disservice if the students couldn't even get a crappy entry-level position because they don't know their way around Windows. Your stance would dismiss all sorts of things that get taught in schools now, like Home Economics, Phys Ed, shop, typing, accounting, and more.
Re:Some FAR more interesting underwater structures
on
Pillars Underwater
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· Score: 2
I'm suspicious of the article. The woman quoted describes beautiful structures which are 'obviously' manmade, but indicates that don't have the videotaped evidence...yet. How hard would it be to rig a videocamera to capture their 'high-resolution sonar images' ? Come on, if you have some big scientific discovery, this sounds like it would be the first thing you would do if you were a media whore, which she seems to be.
She also refers to ' limitless, rolling, white sand plains '. Forgetting that 'rolling' suggests something quite different from 'plains', how does she tell what color the sand plains are from a sonar image ? And why haven't these rolling plains been disturbed by detritus/currents/tides ? Why hasn't the color of these plains been distorted by algae/corals/debris ?
Why is it that a genre created entirely by (and almost entirely for) the Japanese features characters that look so very un-Japanese ? I have never understood why every anime character seems to have HUGE saucer-like, blue eyes, even though they are usually identified as Japanese if they are so identified. I can't think of another group of people that seems to so enjoy viewing movies about a group that does not resemble their own.
In real life, the picture of Aki is very realistic.
How is shrinking the image/a bad scan going to make it look less realistic ? If anything, it should make it MORE realistic by obscuring any flaws. Certainly the unnatural skin tone is going to look better the more and more you shrink the image. And who cares if you can see "individual freckles and hairs"...most people are going to be looking at the poster at distance where such details would be invisble.
Mea culpa. I forgot, this is Slashdot, and a lot of people here are going to be looking at it real close up, most probably with tissues in hand.
You know, I just cannot understand how people can find Futurama funny. I have watched it several times, most recently this past weekend (it was an episode with the Harlem Globetrotters), each time promising myself to give it a chance. Each time I found myself gagging and thinking Futurama made the Dilbert TV cartoon look good. Now 'King of the Hill', *that* show is funny.
You go to school to learn. You might as well learn how to be self-sufficient
By this argument students should not be allowed to use computers or even calculators...they should have only a writing tablet and do all the calculations by hand. In fact if they really want to learn how to be self-sufficient (and I am not sure where it says that's what kids go to school for anyways), we should get rid of all the teachers and just send the students the year's required reading and let them figure it out themselves. And hell, let's forget about students learning Java or Perl or C++, and make students learn assembly language. Hell - make 'em learn machine language. If they really want to be self-sufficient, they should know all the hex opcodes, rights ? IMO, Students go to school so that they can learn how to get around in their world - and right or wrong, this is a world with jobs requiring Microsoft expertise. If the open-source zealots don't like it, they should focus on making the world one where jobs require open-source skills, instead of pushing a (partly, not entirely) irrelevant education on students. Who gives a damn whether a student knows what the root account is, or how to use Emacs, if they likely will never need to use that information once they get out of school ?
Sure, maybe pushing Linux on students now will make the open-source world better years from now, but that is a payoff that will take a while to be harvested. In the meantime, students will be without the requisite MS skills (unless they pay to get it elsewhere), making it harder for them to find work now, and it is unfair to charge the students with those costs.
Imagine how much you'd learn about computers from setting up a network of Linux machine, setting up web servers and setting up some usefull cool apps (like a web site
on which homework assigments are posted daily by the teachers).
Sure. Now imagine just how much they would learn if they tried to do the same thing using, say IIS. They would learn nearly as much. And while some students may well learn a lot about hacking around with Unix (perhaps largely because they would have to do so !), I find it hard to argue that this (by itself) is a good reason to install Linux. Let's face it, most people are NOT going to be sysadmins when they grow up, most people are NOT going to use Emacs at work, most people do NOT care whether or not you learn Perl.
Right or wrong, it is HUGELY important these days that people learn to use MS applications. There are far more jobs for high school students and college students that require people who know Word and Excel than there are jobs that require people to know StartOffice or Gnumeric.
The problem with this stems from the fact that not everyone assigns the same value to content.
And how, exactly, does that differ from selling anything ? Almost everything has or can have different values to different people, yet that does NOT present an insurmountable problem to selling. No, dear Slashdot editor, the problem lies in that 1) there are plenty of free alternatives available on the web - start (explicitly) charging for Slashdot and see how fast your readership goes elsewhere, and 2) people expect to get things for free on the web.
Yeah, but I would have laughed harder if this guy had a copy of Office XP sent to Richard Stallman. Or if he sent a framed copy of choice pieces of Transmeta class action documents sent to Linus Torvalds. Or if he had a few copies of FreeBSD (or BeOs, or Windows, or Solaris, or any other OS *not* Linux), sent to CmdrTaco, neatly wrapped with VA Linux share certificates.
Could it be a coincidence that Google runs Linux ?
Moreover, you have to wonder how Slashdot itself is mining their own database. You know they are almost certainly selling advertising space based on the total number of 'unique visitors', or impressions, or whatever aggregate statistic they choose to use. What other kinds of statistics would be valuable to advertisers ? Would Slashdot sell stats on the number of subpages users followed for different types of stories (Linux, Windows, etc.) ? Would they charge advertisers more or less to show ads to high-karma users ? If they're smart businessmen maybe they would, but if they are consistent maybe they wouldn't.
When I read this post, and then the referred-to article, I couldn't help but wonder how they are going to allow DMs to create their own worlds, create their own magic items, and interact with players, while still allowing the players and items to transfer to other worlds. How are they going to prevent me from setting up an easy scenario with lots of easy booty and experience points just to jack up my friends' characters ?
The only things I can thing of that might work:
1) you make the DM pay for stuff with real money...maybe as more people who play his scenario, he gets credits to create more stuff. 2) The game restricts how much stuff (treasure, etc) can be awarded for a given amount of monsters that must be slain. But it seems like it would be nearly impossible for the game to effectively enforce such a policy.
The truly troubling result of this is that those people, who were not conclusively found breaking any rules, are probably now indexed around the world as undesirable gamblers.
So what ? Casinos have long reserved the right, AFAIK, to kick anyone they want out, if they have even the slightest suspicion that someone may be cheating. Note this is suspicion, NOT proof. You can get kicked out for using a cell phone in a casino. You can get kicked out for taking a photo. And yes, you can get kicked out if they think you are counting cards, or otherwise cheating. If people aren't comfortable with being tracked, then they should not get the cards.
One of the casinos had larger than expected losses on their table games last year. They got some consultants (with loose lips) to run some statistical analysis
Given the sheer amount of money casinos pull in from table games, these 'few' and 'lucky' individuals would have to pull in a HUGE amount to noticeably skew a table game's results (which, BTW, were almost CERTAINLY gains and not losses). If these were indeed high rollers, the casinos would be folly to ban them unless they were quite certain they were cheating - because casino operators are smart enough to know that if they are not cheating, the high rollers will make the casino money almost every time. Trust them to make the decisions that will help their bottom line.
And by the way, cheating at one casino is only likely to get someone barred at one group's casinos - as the article points out, casinos have a strong disincentive to share information.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. And if I ever get nabbed for allegedly violating the GPL, I am going to cry 'civil disobedience' too. And alleged GPL violations of the GPL by, say, the Chinese - that's an entirely valid expression of nationals of a foreign country exercising their own rights to self-determination.
The laws on copyright are quite clear about the legality of ripping and redistributing MP3s for the use of others who do not own the product - it is illegal ! You may not agree with the law, but the law is unambiguous here.
You might also think that stealing money from rich people should belegal, and you might justify that by arguing that some rich people do bad things, screw their employees, engage in morally questionable actions, blah blah...but you would be a fool if you believed it was legal.
As for argument that we should stop trying to "teach children morals and a sense of right and wrong"...I suppose you think that educating young people about what rape is, and offering any opinion about, say, forcing non-consensual sex on a drunken teenage girl would be wrong too.
So what ? What if I laughed out loud at the possibility that there could be a 15-year old who could offer half-decent system administration, programming, or hell - even HTML - advice ? Is the latter any more plausible than the former ? Heck, not too long ago people would have laughed at the possibility that a teenager could launch and run a million-dollar company. Now, people not only know it is possible, extreme youth has become almost de rigeur. So why aren't young tech 'gurus ' being laughed at here ?
It is not unfair for Katz to point out that a movie has the flaw of assuming familiarity with the FF series. Jeez, if they really did intend requisite familiarity (and I bet you dollars-to-donuts the writers and studios did NOT intend such), why not tell people that ? As far as I am concerned, it is a bad movie indeed if it can only be properly enjoyed by a select few (where 'few' is relative to the movie-going public at large) who have some deep understanding of the games themselves.
I thought the watches have been done by IBM, the PS2 I though also has been reported to run Linux (if not, it is sure to happen). Sprinklers and lawnmowers seem plausible in this world of screwed-up-business-plans-out-of-touch-with-realit y.
And as for the dildo, that will happen if only because I bet guys like Katz and Taco would love to have an eighteen-inch dildo that doesn't run WinCE.
So you can tell by this that Napster is not hurting their sales ? Did you also consider the fact that there are now more people of CD-buying age now than 2 years ago, that there are more people with CD-players now than 2 years ago and that CD players are now more prevalent (Discmans, cars, etc.) than 2 years ago ?
Did it occur to you that maybe those factors explain why CD sales may not have decreased in the face of rising Napster use ?
And besides, even if Napster did increase CD sales, what relevance does that have ? It's the copyright holders' right to enforce their copyright however they choose. If you are correct, then the artists and recording industry might be foolish to oppose Napster, but that is their choice. Maybe GPL'ed software would become more prominent if Microsoft starting selling MS-Emacs or MS-Linux without making source available. Should this fact by itself be enough to allow then to do so, if their violations of copyright ultimately helped the FSF's cause ?
What do you mean there are no holes ? There is at least one post here today already documenting how easy it is to circumvent Napster's lame filtering (the example given was searching for 'Dave Lee Roth' instead of 'David Lee Roth'). And though it may prove impossible to close every last hole, why should the artists and the recording industry care ? If they want some of the holes, they should want all of them closed.
And please, no more of the 'try-before-you buy' and 'people buy more CDs with Napster than without'. Even if true, this is a marketing decision that only the copyright holders should be entitled to make - NOT you or I. What if I decided that maybe people would use and contribute more Free Software if I began distributing binaries of modified pieces of Free Software without making the source available ? How would people here feel if there were networks (say, run by Microsoft), whose obvious main raison d'etre was to traffic GPL-violating binaries ?
So just because blocking infringement is hard or impossible to do, the judge should just let Napster continue trafficking in infringing material ? Should she be happy that Napster gave it the old college try ? The difficulty of preventing an illegal act is irrelevant to whether or not Napster should be allowed to continue facilitating that illegal act. To argue in the extreme, someone might be an incorrigible pedophile/rapist/bankrobber/shoplifter. Should that person be free if he is successful in curbing his activities 99.9% of the time ?
Ahh...some honesty ! I too have not bought much music since Napster started, but I don't claim it is because I haven't hear or thought of a single song I might want to have. It's because every song I could think of, I could rip off Napster easily. Lots of songs from my youth which would have prompted me to go buy the CD now that I have the money are more economically stolen off Napster. The only CDs I have purchased have been CDs that are obscure enough that I can't grab the tracks off Napster - do you think that is a coincidence ? That's my truth, and I bet it is the truth for more than a few Slashdot readers who so sanctimoniously try to rationalize their behavior as something other than it is.
On most any university system, if the admins find people trafficking in warez they can expunge their accounts, prevent them from getting new accounts and/or monitor their activity later, and possibly subject them to disciplinary action. These are recourses unavailable to Napster because of the essential anonymity - you close my account ? I open a new one, and all the files you hoped to make unavailable are now all available again, and just as easy to find. The judgement is not insane, because Napster provides no good way of preventing piracy. Even though Napster has made an effort at preventing some piracy, effort is not and should not be enough to get it a passing grade in this case.
Why not ? Because most artists believe that Napster is costing them sales and infringing on their rights. Why would they opt in, when most are probably celebrating Napster's imminent demise ?
Actually, what I can't figure out is how just the other day everyone was jumping on Adobe for trying to protect their trademark, and now because it's an open source company trying to do the same thing, everyone says it's OK.
That's your interpreation of what public education is or should be. It is not everyone's. I think the education system would do its students a huge disservice if the students couldn't even get a crappy entry-level position because they don't know their way around Windows. Your stance would dismiss all sorts of things that get taught in schools now, like Home Economics, Phys Ed, shop, typing, accounting, and more.
She also refers to ' limitless, rolling, white sand plains '. Forgetting that 'rolling' suggests something quite different from 'plains', how does she tell what color the sand plains are from a sonar image ? And why haven't these rolling plains been disturbed by detritus/currents/tides ? Why hasn't the color of these plains been distorted by algae/corals/debris ?
Why is it that a genre created entirely by (and almost entirely for) the Japanese features characters that look so very un-Japanese ? I have never understood why every anime character seems to have HUGE saucer-like, blue eyes, even though they are usually identified as Japanese if they are so identified. I can't think of another group of people that seems to so enjoy viewing movies about a group that does not resemble their own.
How is shrinking the image/a bad scan going to make it look less realistic ? If anything, it should make it MORE realistic by obscuring any flaws. Certainly the unnatural skin tone is going to look better the more and more you shrink the image. And who cares if you can see "individual freckles and hairs"...most people are going to be looking at the poster at distance where such details would be invisble.
Mea culpa. I forgot, this is Slashdot, and a lot of people here are going to be looking at it real close up, most probably with tissues in hand.
You know, I just cannot understand how people can find Futurama funny. I have watched it several times, most recently this past weekend (it was an episode with the Harlem Globetrotters), each time promising myself to give it a chance. Each time I found myself gagging and thinking Futurama made the Dilbert TV cartoon look good. Now 'King of the Hill', *that* show is funny.
By this argument students should not be allowed to use computers or even calculators...they should have only a writing tablet and do all the calculations by hand. In fact if they really want to learn how to be self-sufficient (and I am not sure where it says that's what kids go to school for anyways), we should get rid of all the teachers and just send the students the year's required reading and let them figure it out themselves. And hell, let's forget about students learning Java or Perl or C++, and make students learn assembly language. Hell - make 'em learn machine language. If they really want to be self-sufficient, they should know all the hex opcodes, rights ? IMO, Students go to school so that they can learn how to get around in their world - and right or wrong, this is a world with jobs requiring Microsoft expertise. If the open-source zealots don't like it, they should focus on making the world one where jobs require open-source skills, instead of pushing a (partly, not entirely) irrelevant education on students. Who gives a damn whether a student knows what the root account is, or how to use Emacs, if they likely will never need to use that information once they get out of school ?
Sure, maybe pushing Linux on students now will make the open-source world better years from now, but that is a payoff that will take a while to be harvested. In the meantime, students will be without the requisite MS skills (unless they pay to get it elsewhere), making it harder for them to find work now, and it is unfair to charge the students with those costs.
Sure. Now imagine just how much they would learn if they tried to do the same thing using, say IIS. They would learn nearly as much. And while some students may well learn a lot about hacking around with Unix (perhaps largely because they would have to do so !), I find it hard to argue that this (by itself) is a good reason to install Linux. Let's face it, most people are NOT going to be sysadmins when they grow up, most people are NOT going to use Emacs at work, most people do NOT care whether or not you learn Perl.
Right or wrong, it is HUGELY important these days that people learn to use MS applications. There are far more jobs for high school students and college students that require people who know Word and Excel than there are jobs that require people to know StartOffice or Gnumeric.
And how, exactly, does that differ from selling anything ? Almost everything has or can have different values to different people, yet that does NOT present an insurmountable problem to selling. No, dear Slashdot editor, the problem lies in that 1) there are plenty of free alternatives available on the web - start (explicitly) charging for Slashdot and see how fast your readership goes elsewhere, and 2) people expect to get things for free on the web.
Given the choice between flight, invisibility, and the strength of 100 men, which would you choose ?
Yeah, but I would have laughed harder if this guy had a copy of Office XP sent to Richard Stallman. Or if he sent a framed copy of choice pieces of Transmeta class action documents sent to Linus Torvalds. Or if he had a few copies of FreeBSD (or BeOs, or Windows, or Solaris, or any other OS *not* Linux), sent to CmdrTaco, neatly wrapped with VA Linux share certificates.
Could it be a coincidence that Google runs Linux ? Moreover, you have to wonder how Slashdot itself is mining their own database. You know they are almost certainly selling advertising space based on the total number of 'unique visitors', or impressions, or whatever aggregate statistic they choose to use. What other kinds of statistics would be valuable to advertisers ? Would Slashdot sell stats on the number of subpages users followed for different types of stories (Linux, Windows, etc.) ? Would they charge advertisers more or less to show ads to high-karma users ? If they're smart businessmen maybe they would, but if they are consistent maybe they wouldn't.
The only things I can thing of that might work: 1) you make the DM pay for stuff with real money...maybe as more people who play his scenario, he gets credits to create more stuff. 2) The game restricts how much stuff (treasure, etc) can be awarded for a given amount of monsters that must be slain. But it seems like it would be nearly impossible for the game to effectively enforce such a policy.
So what ? Casinos have long reserved the right, AFAIK, to kick anyone they want out, if they have even the slightest suspicion that someone may be cheating. Note this is suspicion, NOT proof. You can get kicked out for using a cell phone in a casino. You can get kicked out for taking a photo. And yes, you can get kicked out if they think you are counting cards, or otherwise cheating. If people aren't comfortable with being tracked, then they should not get the cards.
One of the casinos had larger than expected losses on their table games last year. They got some consultants (with loose lips) to run some statistical analysis
Given the sheer amount of money casinos pull in from table games, these 'few' and 'lucky' individuals would have to pull in a HUGE amount to noticeably skew a table game's results (which, BTW, were almost CERTAINLY gains and not losses). If these were indeed high rollers, the casinos would be folly to ban them unless they were quite certain they were cheating - because casino operators are smart enough to know that if they are not cheating, the high rollers will make the casino money almost every time. Trust them to make the decisions that will help their bottom line.
And by the way, cheating at one casino is only likely to get someone barred at one group's casinos - as the article points out, casinos have a strong disincentive to share information.