The original space program was military in its staffing and used military technology. Congress has the power to "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." Which in this particular case allowed it to respond to the threat of being technologically inferior to the USSR, but in general means that Congress is responsible for all those things that are too big for any state to accomplish.
It's also how they got the Interstate Highway system built; buried in the original laws for that are the requirements for the roads to be of a certain form and durability to support heavy military vehicular traffic in wartime.
So, next time you feel the urge to question the powers of Congress, a body built on law and challenged in its authority by professional legal scholars literally every hour of every day, how about you ask the question, instead of insisting you already know the answer.
Insulting NASA engineers didn't make you look smarter than them, either.
Yes I see your point. Let's make what those CEOs did ILLEGAL.
Oh wait, borrowing from each other to make unsecured wagers on other people's debt positions was illegal. Until it wasn't.
(For you amateur politicians: The retraction of the Bucket Shop laws was added onto a spending bill in 2000. Bill Clinton signed it, because it was a couple of lines in a thousand-page bill, but it was the banking industry's paid-for congresscriminals who stuck it there. Moral: Never allow the GOP to hold power in congress again. When they abuse parliamentary tactics, it costs us $700 billion off the top, and millions of jobs.)
If the pulsars are all slowing down, you couldn't use pulsars to detect it.
But there's not likely to be a correlation between the slowing of pulsars and the slowing of a particular Cesium atom's oscillations, so you can probably see the slowing of pulsars really well when you compare pulsars to atomic clocks. Over the million or so years it takes to see either of them drift...
I didn't R this version of TFA, but the version I did read yesterday said that Japanese sushi isn't sterilized the way American sushi is.
The enzymes are being produced by the bacteria themselves, which are thriving in the guts of the Japanese. Americans don't have those bacteria in our guts because we've killed them before the seaweed reaches the restaurant.
We've also likely killed a lot of harmful bacteria in the process, so we're not going to change the process.
BTW, unless you see the fish swimming in a tank when the sushi-ya grabs for it, it isn't "fresh". It's been frozen for a specified time at a specified temperature to kill the eggs of worms that could infect your gut. Especially if it's pacific salmon.
So Americans, in addition to not having the intestinal fauna to deal with raw seaweed in large quantities, aren't eating real Japanese sushi anyway.
Meanwhile, other posts have described how the native stuff has quite a bit more seaweed inolved than does our bastardized version. Which is probaby the reason you don't hear a lot of stories about sushi bars being palaces of indigestion. The thing about the bacteria is a non-issue, because we don't eat enough seaweed to need the extra digestive apparati.
Mark this another scare without a scary basis, slap the media once again, and let's get back to fighting terrorism.
The metrics used to determine the list go a tad-bit beyond counting people you know who use it.
There's a brobdingnagian fuckload of perl code out there being maintained continuously. It's deeply embedded in the installed base of expensively developed custom software. it will decay in importance only slowly.
If you had just one atomic clock and one pulsar, and you tried to measure the period of one against the period of the other, you wouldn't know which was introducing more noise.
But,
You can run your atomic clocks against each other to determine relative accuracy of atomic clocks.
And you can run pulsars against each other to determine relative accuracy of pulsars.
So then you can run pulsars against atomic clocks to determine relative accuracy between them.
Well, no, they said "precision", and then they said "accuracy and stability", two things that combine to imply precision.
And they're talking about precision as a feature of the natural phenomenon being measured, not numerical precision as a mathematical construct used to record the measurements.
2. it's not hard to hide the truth from someone who's got nothing but hand histories to work from.
3. even with millions of hand histories, you're not going to tell which of the other players were real and which were shills. you're not going to find statistical significance on all patterns. and you're probably not going to eliminate all possibility of error in your own analyses.
4. there are always the idiots, but they're not the topic here. they're just fish.
5. "should be completely safe". there's a long way between "should be" and "can be guaranteed to be". as for real-world casinos, the gaming commission keeps people on the inside, and video of the action to spot cheating mechanics, and tightly regulates the games; it also knows who is and isn't a prop or a shill. nobody is regulating online games from outside, that I know of. it's probably a business model waiting to happen, given there's no governmental authority capable of doing it worldwide.
"Even moderate cheating is detectable with the right software, and proof could result in a mass exodus from the casino."
I disagree. Some people are good at poker and win consistently. The crooked operator only needs to make it so that the shills win with a similar consistency; something that is trivially easy to do when you have omniscience over the state of the table. It is impossible to distinguish such a cheater from a good player.
Identifying good players and avoiding their tables, to play only at tables populated by average or poor players, is likewise a guarantee of profit. Again, omniscience over the identities and histories of the players at the table gives the house an undeniable advantage. And in some cases, the shill could adopt the skills of an average player and dominate the winning.
Information is advantage. Attempting a statistical analysis from outside will never win over omniscience on the inside, provided the omniscience is coupled with intelligence. As I said, only the very, very, very stupidest cheaters have been caught, and you will not catch the rest.
If the amount you can win doesn't depend on the amount you pay, then it's not gambling, IMO. You pay for access to the website. You're free to play or not, you get the newsletter (though $20 is a lot for a newsletter), and you can win multiple times without paying any more.
However, the court might see it differently. The $20 is a wager against all the games and your opportunity to play them, and your payout is an aggregate of your performance over the month, not any particular hand or tournament. So you're betting $20 against the combination of those factors. The newsletter is a notion, not a $20 value. The website would have to make the play of the games free to all. They could sell advertising space, or offer premium upgrades (like turning off off the ads), to make money.
Regardless, it's possible for them to cheat at this, too, and impossible to prove they aren't. It's not likely, given the piddling stakes, but not inconceivable.
You don't have a very good grasp as to how online poker works.
That is a stupid assumption.
You sound like the many many people who try online poker, lose badly, and chose to blame the system rather than a lack of skill.
I doubt you've ever met two people who've acted that way, much less "many many".
I write high-zoot software. I play high-stakes poker. I've played poker online since it was done in email*. I've studied the laws of gaming by wire (before Janet Reno did, btw) and the history of online gambling, including the known cases of cheating, by both the operators of the servers and by nefarious employees of the operators of the servers and by organized colluders outside the company. It's clear to me that only the very, very, very stupidest of them have ever been caught. The ones with IQs over 60 are all still out there.
In any business, nobody is ever satisfied with the status quo, and the opportunity to turn the profit margins up by hiding the true odds of the game are far too great to allow for the situation where any gaming server isn't being crocked in some small way. Not enough to punish the customers beyond the implied pleasure they get from the service, just enough to make the operators happy that they're making a bigger killing than they're admitting. And here's where it goes all Kafka: because it's a business, and has competition, it has to spend money to compete. Because the other businesses are crooked, they can spend more, and compete better. That drives up the necessity of being crooked yourself, to stay in business at all. That further drives down the probability that any online gaming server isn't being crocked in at least some small way.
There is no reason for anyone to believe that any particular online gaming server is 100% legit.
* - I've never given a nickel to an online gaming website. Because, as I said, I knew all of this would be possible on the day the first one went live, and I've only ever had my analysis confirmed.
I agree it's mostly stupid. The way most people do it is completely fucking stupid. The way some people do it is addictively self-destructive.
Table games are a losing cause, but the odds are posted and you make your decision with full cognizance of the risks and the way the chances are stacked against your being a winner, much less a big winner. So for people who aren't addicted, it's just stupidly expensive entertainment until you learn your lesson and stop doing that to yourself.
Poker isn't gambling against the house. The cards randomize the action, but they give every player an even chance, leaving the gaming down to a player's ability to present and interpret behaviors, and compute odds in real time. The house gets paid a capped percentage of the pot, which makes it only as expensive as any correctly-played table game.
Putting poker online doesn't alter the odds if the game is constructed properly. But it does create a massive opportunity for the server operator to cheat, massive enough that it is unlikely that any online poker server isn't being used to cheat. The only way to guarantee it's fair is to be the person who creates and operates the server. But that, again, is a massive opportunity for you to cheat, and nobody else can prove you aren't, so it's logical to make it illegal for you to even spread the game that way.
The feds wouldn't blink an eye. Gambling is legal; transmission of gambling information by interstate telecommunications is not (except for the broadcast of horse and dog races; don't ask me why, I don't care).
The medical marijuana thing is still an ongoing tussle between the states and the feds.
They'd stay out of it if MA wanted to allow its casinos to hook up its citizens online. They'd get mighty pissed if those casinos colocated their servers in Connecticut.
That makes no sense. They can regulate and tax online, intrastate gambling as easily they do a brick-and-mortar casino. But ensuring the games aren't skimmed, and preventing gambling addiction, is far more expensive and difficult online.
This law doesn't change interstate or international law one bit. It is redundant with them. It is, however, banning intrastate internet gaming, while at the same time legalizing gaming in the state.
If in the future someone finds a way to prevent compulsive gambling, or to ensure 100% compliance of internet systems to tracking rules, then maybe the law can be changed. I don't blame the state for not wanting to go down that road right now, though.
Person A gambles away every penny he has, aided by the con game being run by the online poker service.
Person A then goes on welfare, taking even more of your money than it would have cost to stop his online gambling.
The only hypocrisy in this is that Person A will probably end up broke at the Wewannafuckyu Casino on Rte 128. But far fewer will, and they won't be cheated in the process, just ground into meaningless flesh by their own stupidity.
See, stupid is a victimless crime. Conning someone out of their money is not. Knowingly committing an act deemed to have deleterious implications to the welfare of the community, also is not.
Slashdot Mirror
You might want to check your employement agreement. I'm willing to bet it says that you can't publicly question your bosses, either.
Bolden, meanwhile, likes this plan. Don't insult him by pretending he's as dumb as you are.
The original space program was military in its staffing and used military technology. Congress has the power to "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." Which in this particular case allowed it to respond to the threat of being technologically inferior to the USSR, but in general means that Congress is responsible for all those things that are too big for any state to accomplish.
It's also how they got the Interstate Highway system built; buried in the original laws for that are the requirements for the roads to be of a certain form and durability to support heavy military vehicular traffic in wartime.
So, next time you feel the urge to question the powers of Congress, a body built on law and challenged in its authority by professional legal scholars literally every hour of every day, how about you ask the question, instead of insisting you already know the answer.
Insulting NASA engineers didn't make you look smarter than them, either.
Yes I see your point. Let's make what those CEOs did ILLEGAL.
Oh wait, borrowing from each other to make unsecured wagers on other people's debt positions was illegal. Until it wasn't.
(For you amateur politicians: The retraction of the Bucket Shop laws was added onto a spending bill in 2000. Bill Clinton signed it, because it was a couple of lines in a thousand-page bill, but it was the banking industry's paid-for congresscriminals who stuck it there. Moral: Never allow the GOP to hold power in congress again. When they abuse parliamentary tactics, it costs us $700 billion off the top, and millions of jobs.)
Is this the dude who put that "This bank charges a $3 fee for you to get your own money" exploit on there?
I hate that.
Hang him.
The mores of society do not include stealing whatever you can right-click, no matter what the mores of socially inept online society want to believe.
If the pulsars are all slowing down, you couldn't use pulsars to detect it.
But there's not likely to be a correlation between the slowing of pulsars and the slowing of a particular Cesium atom's oscillations, so you can probably see the slowing of pulsars really well when you compare pulsars to atomic clocks. Over the million or so years it takes to see either of them drift...
Not all corporations are public.
But the Internet should not be an anonymizer for criminals, either.
Ever think that it's the way you treat them online that convinces them to let out their inner demons?
I didn't R this version of TFA, but the version I did read yesterday said that Japanese sushi isn't sterilized the way American sushi is.
The enzymes are being produced by the bacteria themselves, which are thriving in the guts of the Japanese. Americans don't have those bacteria in our guts because we've killed them before the seaweed reaches the restaurant.
We've also likely killed a lot of harmful bacteria in the process, so we're not going to change the process.
BTW, unless you see the fish swimming in a tank when the sushi-ya grabs for it, it isn't "fresh". It's been frozen for a specified time at a specified temperature to kill the eggs of worms that could infect your gut. Especially if it's pacific salmon.
So Americans, in addition to not having the intestinal fauna to deal with raw seaweed in large quantities, aren't eating real Japanese sushi anyway.
Meanwhile, other posts have described how the native stuff has quite a bit more seaweed inolved than does our bastardized version. Which is probaby the reason you don't hear a lot of stories about sushi bars being palaces of indigestion. The thing about the bacteria is a non-issue, because we don't eat enough seaweed to need the extra digestive apparati.
Mark this another scare without a scary basis, slap the media once again, and let's get back to fighting terrorism.
The metrics used to determine the list go a tad-bit beyond counting people you know who use it.
There's a brobdingnagian fuckload of perl code out there being maintained continuously. It's deeply embedded in the installed base of expensively developed custom software. it will decay in importance only slowly.
And whoever digitized it without the right to do so, or forwarded copies without the right to do so, will pay. That is the law.
If you had just one atomic clock and one pulsar, and you tried to measure the period of one against the period of the other, you wouldn't know which was introducing more noise.
But,
You can run your atomic clocks against each other to determine relative accuracy of atomic clocks.
And you can run pulsars against each other to determine relative accuracy of pulsars.
So then you can run pulsars against atomic clocks to determine relative accuracy between them.
Well, no, they said "precision", and then they said "accuracy and stability", two things that combine to imply precision.
And they're talking about precision as a feature of the natural phenomenon being measured, not numerical precision as a mathematical construct used to record the measurements.
1. "as far as I know". As far as you know.
2. it's not hard to hide the truth from someone who's got nothing but hand histories to work from.
3. even with millions of hand histories, you're not going to tell which of the other players were real and which were shills. you're not going to find statistical significance on all patterns. and you're probably not going to eliminate all possibility of error in your own analyses.
4. there are always the idiots, but they're not the topic here. they're just fish.
5. "should be completely safe". there's a long way between "should be" and "can be guaranteed to be". as for real-world casinos, the gaming commission keeps people on the inside, and video of the action to spot cheating mechanics, and tightly regulates the games; it also knows who is and isn't a prop or a shill. nobody is regulating online games from outside, that I know of. it's probably a business model waiting to happen, given there's no governmental authority capable of doing it worldwide.
"Anyone running too far ahead of expectation"
It doesn't take "too far ahead" to turn a consistent profit. You can hide a hundred shills behind the statistics.
As I said, only the very, very, very stupidest online cheaters have been caught.
"Even moderate cheating is detectable with the right software, and proof could result in a mass exodus from the casino."
I disagree. Some people are good at poker and win consistently. The crooked operator only needs to make it so that the shills win with a similar consistency; something that is trivially easy to do when you have omniscience over the state of the table. It is impossible to distinguish such a cheater from a good player.
Identifying good players and avoiding their tables, to play only at tables populated by average or poor players, is likewise a guarantee of profit. Again, omniscience over the identities and histories of the players at the table gives the house an undeniable advantage. And in some cases, the shill could adopt the skills of an average player and dominate the winning.
Information is advantage. Attempting a statistical analysis from outside will never win over omniscience on the inside, provided the omniscience is coupled with intelligence. As I said, only the very, very, very stupidest cheaters have been caught, and you will not catch the rest.
As far as I know, the transmission of bets and winnings via carrier pigeon is still legal.
Betting on the pigeons, however, is illegal.
Ask their lawyer.
If the amount you can win doesn't depend on the amount you pay, then it's not gambling, IMO. You pay for access to the website. You're free to play or not, you get the newsletter (though $20 is a lot for a newsletter), and you can win multiple times without paying any more.
However, the court might see it differently. The $20 is a wager against all the games and your opportunity to play them, and your payout is an aggregate of your performance over the month, not any particular hand or tournament. So you're betting $20 against the combination of those factors. The newsletter is a notion, not a $20 value. The website would have to make the play of the games free to all. They could sell advertising space, or offer premium upgrades (like turning off off the ads), to make money.
Regardless, it's possible for them to cheat at this, too, and impossible to prove they aren't. It's not likely, given the piddling stakes, but not inconceivable.
Obviously you don't know what "shill" means.
Keeping the appearance of keeping the game fair is in the "best interest" of the house.
Since you are unlikely to be any good at poker, it doesn't matter much how fast you lose.
But even someone who is good at poker has his self-doubts, and won't notice an extra 1-2% per-hand disadvantage over time.
But that 1-2% is an extra 10-20% increase in revenue for the house. Any CEO would kill his own dog to get a 10% revenue pop that is 100% margin.
You don't have a very good grasp as to how online poker works.
That is a stupid assumption.
You sound like the many many people who try online poker, lose badly, and chose to blame the system rather than a lack of skill.
I doubt you've ever met two people who've acted that way, much less "many many".
I write high-zoot software. I play high-stakes poker. I've played poker online since it was done in email*. I've studied the laws of gaming by wire (before Janet Reno did, btw) and the history of online gambling, including the known cases of cheating, by both the operators of the servers and by nefarious employees of the operators of the servers and by organized colluders outside the company. It's clear to me that only the very, very, very stupidest of them have ever been caught. The ones with IQs over 60 are all still out there.
In any business, nobody is ever satisfied with the status quo, and the opportunity to turn the profit margins up by hiding the true odds of the game are far too great to allow for the situation where any gaming server isn't being crocked in some small way. Not enough to punish the customers beyond the implied pleasure they get from the service, just enough to make the operators happy that they're making a bigger killing than they're admitting. And here's where it goes all Kafka: because it's a business, and has competition, it has to spend money to compete. Because the other businesses are crooked, they can spend more, and compete better. That drives up the necessity of being crooked yourself, to stay in business at all. That further drives down the probability that any online gaming server isn't being crocked in at least some small way.
There is no reason for anyone to believe that any particular online gaming server is 100% legit.
* - I've never given a nickel to an online gaming website. Because, as I said, I knew all of this would be possible on the day the first one went live, and I've only ever had my analysis confirmed.
I agree it's mostly stupid. The way most people do it is completely fucking stupid. The way some people do it is addictively self-destructive.
Table games are a losing cause, but the odds are posted and you make your decision with full cognizance of the risks and the way the chances are stacked against your being a winner, much less a big winner. So for people who aren't addicted, it's just stupidly expensive entertainment until you learn your lesson and stop doing that to yourself.
Poker isn't gambling against the house. The cards randomize the action, but they give every player an even chance, leaving the gaming down to a player's ability to present and interpret behaviors, and compute odds in real time. The house gets paid a capped percentage of the pot, which makes it only as expensive as any correctly-played table game.
Putting poker online doesn't alter the odds if the game is constructed properly. But it does create a massive opportunity for the server operator to cheat, massive enough that it is unlikely that any online poker server isn't being used to cheat. The only way to guarantee it's fair is to be the person who creates and operates the server. But that, again, is a massive opportunity for you to cheat, and nobody else can prove you aren't, so it's logical to make it illegal for you to even spread the game that way.
That only works as a mockery of the sort of bizarre illogic that leads to the argument that rapists would be displaced to jail gamblers.
The feds wouldn't blink an eye. Gambling is legal; transmission of gambling information by interstate telecommunications is not (except for the broadcast of horse and dog races; don't ask me why, I don't care).
The medical marijuana thing is still an ongoing tussle between the states and the feds.
They'd stay out of it if MA wanted to allow its casinos to hook up its citizens online. They'd get mighty pissed if those casinos colocated their servers in Connecticut.
That makes no sense. They can regulate and tax online, intrastate gambling as easily they do a brick-and-mortar casino. But ensuring the games aren't skimmed, and preventing gambling addiction, is far more expensive and difficult online.
This law doesn't change interstate or international law one bit. It is redundant with them. It is, however, banning intrastate internet gaming, while at the same time legalizing gaming in the state.
If in the future someone finds a way to prevent compulsive gambling, or to ensure 100% compliance of internet systems to tracking rules, then maybe the law can be changed. I don't blame the state for not wanting to go down that road right now, though.
Person A gambles away every penny he has, aided by the con game being run by the online poker service.
Person A then goes on welfare, taking even more of your money than it would have cost to stop his online gambling.
The only hypocrisy in this is that Person A will probably end up broke at the Wewannafuckyu Casino on Rte 128. But far fewer will, and they won't be cheated in the process, just ground into meaningless flesh by their own stupidity.
See, stupid is a victimless crime. Conning someone out of their money is not. Knowingly committing an act deemed to have deleterious implications to the welfare of the community, also is not.