Oh, and as for Visa/Mastercard, they are already under the thumb of the government for international online gaming. No major credit card company now will accept charges from international gaming companies.
In order for the credit card processor to get its money from a person whose money is in the U.S., it has to go to a U.S. bank, and the banks are all tied into the same system for transferring funds, and if you believe the myth that only transactions over $9999 are tracked by the feds, then I'd like to play poker against you.
As I said, if the person has to resort to offshore accounts and moving cash across the border, the usual means of detecting money laundering come into play.
They don't ban the commerce, they ban the communication.
The feds have already banned interestate and international gambling online.
It was banned over the telephone and telegraph decades ago; in fact, having read that law and knowing how the Internet works, I didn't see a need for any new laws to ban it for internet traffic, but legislators like to show up on C-SPAN.
Massachusetts legislators are no different, so tacking a redundant ban onto a bill legalizing in-state gambling is either a no-op, or adds some twist that the feds didn't consider. Like banning in-state internet gambling as well.
You identify the gambling company to the credit-card company and say "if you want to do business in this state you will block transactions to these companies".
If that drives people to mail cash around, you wait for the usual money-laundering detection mechanisms to kick in.
Difficulty in policing something isn't a reason to allow a crime to be legal.
How can you call this a victimless crime when you've already been victimized by your own ignorance of the ease with which online gambling becomes online fleecing of the player?
You, as a participant in online gambling, have ZERO ability to determine if you are being cheated.
I would go so far as to say it is almost a 100% certainty that you are being cheated, systematically, in a way you can never detect.
And I don't mean by the ordinary odds against you. I mean by the fact that the server you are interacting with has full information and control of every aspect of the game, and can thus modify the play of the game and the odds against you at will.
It is not necessary for them to kill you in every hand. Only to ensure that their shills win at a slightly elevated rate.
You are a complete retard if you let them take you for that ride.
I have no problem at all with banning online gambling worldwide.
The idea of "10 W/m^2" is utterly naff. The walls, floor, and ceiling of my office are about 60 m^2 total, and they're lit to near daylight by about 50 W of fluorescent tubes. Way more light than is necessary for this effect, at a small power expense.
To see a blinking light you need to paint a pupil with a few dozen photons. Sirius, one of the brightest stars in the sky, hits the Earth in about 0.1 microwatt/m^2, and a square meter is about 10^4 pupils in size. A laser can direct its entire beam into a smaller area, meaning you can light up a single pupil with a 10^-11 Watt beam. Diffuse it slightly to make it easier to scan, say, to a 1 m^2 incident beam, and your laser needs again a total output power of 0.1 microwatt; then it's as bright as Sirius.
If you want it to be showy, ramp it up to 10 watts. You can get that from solar panels continuously.
There are lots of reasons the light-in-space idea doesn't fly, but power consumption isn't one of them.
It's apple. You have to change to fit its model of the interface between a human and a computer. Losing 40 lbs and putting on a turtleneck sweater wouldn't hurt.
The stories of a toad like Franklin being a "ladies man" while in France mirror the stories of Henry Kissinger flying hotties on dates to Paris, which was later admitted to be a cover for Kissinger attending secret peace talks there with the Viet Namese.
So, while your sarcastic reply is not likely to be true, it's also not impossible.
Franklin didn't invent the postal service, and Postmaster General is titular gloss, at best.
Just as those who vote control elections, those who deliver the mail control information.
And none of this changes the fact that there's no good reason for the government to be directly involved in the system in any way other than to tax and regulate it as for other businesses, except that it gives the government temporary, secluded possession of the materials being delivered. And the only reasons for wanting to have that capability are to inspect the content of the mail, or to covertly transport mail you don't want anyone else to track.
Making you pay exhorbitant fees for snacks at the movies is a form of bundling.
It's perfectly reasonable to regulate that. But putting a price-cap on it is short-sighted, as prices should be allowed to change over time, and no law specifying the price can adequately ensure that it's done fairly.
The right thing to do would be to pass a law guaranteeing the rights of street vendors to sell popcorn out front fo the theather and the rights of patrons to bring their own food into the theater.
Or the Chinese government is going after the Dalai Lama in a crudely obsessive way to make you think it's someone going after the Dalai Lama to implicate the Chinese government.
Business does think long-term. At least at the top. But middle management, clawing at each other for raises, promotions, power, recognition, and whatever other forms of selfishness are inculcated into them at B-school, acts on every "opportunity" that is observable and, putatively, controllable. This is what they have the power to do, and they take the opportunity as their mandate.
So this isn't a lack of long-term vision. It's merely a lack of consideration for society. It's the inherent sociopathy of the corporation. Money is not thought, is not feeling, is not speech, but it is an attractor and driver of mindless action. And it is the only concrete thing that a business accounts for as when determining success or failure.
And any business that attempts to institute a policy of consideration for society will find that there is a competing business willing to forego that policy in order to take advantage of the short-sighted, opportunitistic, anti-social actions the policy would prohibit.
This is why we regulate business. Because businesses that regulate themselves are driven out of business by competition that does not regulate themselves. We create homogeneous rules so that heterogeneity does not kill those corporations that try to be fair to the rest of us.
just to explain your comment: correlation can occur without causation. causation can't occur without correlation. in order to tell the difference you conduct a controlled experiment with cases that include the hypothesized cause and other cases that include the control, a situation without the hypothesized cause. when you observe the effect in the cases with the hypothesized cause, you have not disproved the hypothesis. when you do not observe the hypothesized effect in the control cases, you have differentiated the cause from random chance. this method isn't without its susceptibility to obfuscatory results. the control may include some other cause that prevents the effect, or the effect may occur due to other causes inseperable from the cases with the hypothesized cause. it takes some careful inspection to ensure that these unintended causes are not present in any of the cases. also, measurement and analysis errors may propagate in the experiments, but these can usually be averaged-out by statistical reliance on the "Law of Large Numbers" (which has its own caveats, P=0.002)
"I'd hoped that at least here on Slashdot folks would be cleverer than that"
clearly, you haven't run that experiment nearly long enough to determine such a correlation
Security through obscurity. A bullet has to hit certain critical points in order to be fatal. Most of the body is a decoy. And it's covered by an opaque curtain. You have to have specific, inside information about anatomy, or have been clued by experienced hackers, to know where to aim your bullets. But, like all matters of security through obscurity, once the truth is out there it's like no security at all. Even swapping your heart for your brain won't make you more secure.
If the mail is scanned at the receiving mail sorting facility, it will reduce aggregate tonnage of mail transferred to and from central sorting facilities by a lot. It won't reduce trips by much, but it should reduce fuel usage per trip, and thus reduce emission poundage. The next logical step, once the practice is dominant and hardcopy flow becomes a trickle, will be to aggregate mail from slow days, thus reducing trips, too.
And it makes sense. I only check my mailbox once a week, sometimes twice a month. Maybe a little more frequently if I'm chain-watching the Netflix. No reason the postie should be there every day, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Some say it's a socialist republic.
They are trying to make a point they don't understand.
Oh, and as for Visa/Mastercard, they are already under the thumb of the government for international online gaming. No major credit card company now will accept charges from international gaming companies.
In order for the credit card processor to get its money from a person whose money is in the U.S., it has to go to a U.S. bank, and the banks are all tied into the same system for transferring funds, and if you believe the myth that only transactions over $9999 are tracked by the feds, then I'd like to play poker against you.
As I said, if the person has to resort to offshore accounts and moving cash across the border, the usual means of detecting money laundering come into play.
No, the 4th amendment was designed to make sedition legal, by banning laws against it.
It's effectively impossible to prosecute it because it's not legal to prosecute it.
Seriously, did you really see that any other way?
They don't ban the commerce, they ban the communication.
The feds have already banned interestate and international gambling online.
It was banned over the telephone and telegraph decades ago; in fact, having read that law and knowing how the Internet works, I didn't see a need for any new laws to ban it for internet traffic, but legislators like to show up on C-SPAN.
Massachusetts legislators are no different, so tacking a redundant ban onto a bill legalizing in-state gambling is either a no-op, or adds some twist that the feds didn't consider. Like banning in-state internet gambling as well.
None. You idiot.
You identify the gambling company to the credit-card company and say "if you want to do business in this state you will block transactions to these companies".
If that drives people to mail cash around, you wait for the usual money-laundering detection mechanisms to kick in.
Difficulty in policing something isn't a reason to allow a crime to be legal.
How can you call this a victimless crime when you've already been victimized by your own ignorance of the ease with which online gambling becomes online fleecing of the player?
You, as a participant in online gambling, have ZERO ability to determine if you are being cheated.
I would go so far as to say it is almost a 100% certainty that you are being cheated, systematically, in a way you can never detect.
And I don't mean by the ordinary odds against you. I mean by the fact that the server you are interacting with has full information and control of every aspect of the game, and can thus modify the play of the game and the odds against you at will.
It is not necessary for them to kill you in every hand. Only to ensure that their shills win at a slightly elevated rate.
You are a complete retard if you let them take you for that ride.
I have no problem at all with banning online gambling worldwide.
The idea of "10 W/m^2" is utterly naff. The walls, floor, and ceiling of my office are about 60 m^2 total, and they're lit to near daylight by about 50 W of fluorescent tubes. Way more light than is necessary for this effect, at a small power expense.
To see a blinking light you need to paint a pupil with a few dozen photons. Sirius, one of the brightest stars in the sky, hits the Earth in about 0.1 microwatt/m^2, and a square meter is about 10^4 pupils in size. A laser can direct its entire beam into a smaller area, meaning you can light up a single pupil with a 10^-11 Watt beam. Diffuse it slightly to make it easier to scan, say, to a 1 m^2 incident beam, and your laser needs again a total output power of 0.1 microwatt; then it's as bright as Sirius.
If you want it to be showy, ramp it up to 10 watts. You can get that from solar panels continuously.
There are lots of reasons the light-in-space idea doesn't fly, but power consumption isn't one of them.
It's apple. You have to change to fit its model of the interface between a human and a computer. Losing 40 lbs and putting on a turtleneck sweater wouldn't hurt.
Eh. A random ID any 12-year-old with a cheat sheet can get.
I'd rather have a vanity tail number.
Isn't it ironic that Ham Radio is meant to be a communications system for amateurs?
>> And yet Lucas keeps on living and living. If there is a Chthulhu--wait, no, i mean, AIEEEEEEE!
> Fixed that for you ;)
And yours.
Consider it matched, gamed, and set upon:
http://www.blancscreencinema.com/redlettermedia/plinkett.html
The review of Episode II is widely considered to be much better than the $120-million production it is based upon.
The stories of a toad like Franklin being a "ladies man" while in France mirror the stories of Henry Kissinger flying hotties on dates to Paris, which was later admitted to be a cover for Kissinger attending secret peace talks there with the Viet Namese.
So, while your sarcastic reply is not likely to be true, it's also not impossible.
Franklin didn't invent the postal service, and Postmaster General is titular gloss, at best.
Just as those who vote control elections, those who deliver the mail control information.
And none of this changes the fact that there's no good reason for the government to be directly involved in the system in any way other than to tax and regulate it as for other businesses, except that it gives the government temporary, secluded possession of the materials being delivered. And the only reasons for wanting to have that capability are to inspect the content of the mail, or to covertly transport mail you don't want anyone else to track.
Making you pay exhorbitant fees for snacks at the movies is a form of bundling.
It's perfectly reasonable to regulate that. But putting a price-cap on it is short-sighted, as prices should be allowed to change over time, and no law specifying the price can adequately ensure that it's done fairly.
The right thing to do would be to pass a law guaranteeing the rights of street vendors to sell popcorn out front fo the theather and the rights of patrons to bring their own food into the theater.
Or the Chinese government is going after the Dalai Lama in a crudely obsessive way to make you think it's someone going after the Dalai Lama to implicate the Chinese government.
Business does think long-term. At least at the top. But middle management, clawing at each other for raises, promotions, power, recognition, and whatever other forms of selfishness are inculcated into them at B-school, acts on every "opportunity" that is observable and, putatively, controllable. This is what they have the power to do, and they take the opportunity as their mandate.
So this isn't a lack of long-term vision. It's merely a lack of consideration for society. It's the inherent sociopathy of the corporation. Money is not thought, is not feeling, is not speech, but it is an attractor and driver of mindless action. And it is the only concrete thing that a business accounts for as when determining success or failure.
And any business that attempts to institute a policy of consideration for society will find that there is a competing business willing to forego that policy in order to take advantage of the short-sighted, opportunitistic, anti-social actions the policy would prohibit.
This is why we regulate business. Because businesses that regulate themselves are driven out of business by competition that does not regulate themselves. We create homogeneous rules so that heterogeneity does not kill those corporations that try to be fair to the rest of us.
Yes, it will.
Provided you consider punching a mad scientist in the face to prevent being the subject of ill-conceived experiments part of the immune system.
just to explain your comment: correlation can occur without causation. causation can't occur without correlation. in order to tell the difference you conduct a controlled experiment with cases that include the hypothesized cause and other cases that include the control, a situation without the hypothesized cause. when you observe the effect in the cases with the hypothesized cause, you have not disproved the hypothesis. when you do not observe the hypothesized effect in the control cases, you have differentiated the cause from random chance. this method isn't without its susceptibility to obfuscatory results. the control may include some other cause that prevents the effect, or the effect may occur due to other causes inseperable from the cases with the hypothesized cause. it takes some careful inspection to ensure that these unintended causes are not present in any of the cases. also, measurement and analysis errors may propagate in the experiments, but these can usually be averaged-out by statistical reliance on the "Law of Large Numbers" (which has its own caveats, P=0.002)
"I'd hoped that at least here on Slashdot folks would be cleverer than that"
clearly, you haven't run that experiment nearly long enough to determine such a correlation
what profit a man to gain living to 150 if he be turned to stone?
no, but a "+1" will appear in the lower-left corner of your house
Security through obscurity. A bullet has to hit certain critical points in order to be fatal. Most of the body is a decoy. And it's covered by an opaque curtain. You have to have specific, inside information about anatomy, or have been clued by experienced hackers, to know where to aim your bullets. But, like all matters of security through obscurity, once the truth is out there it's like no security at all. Even swapping your heart for your brain won't make you more secure.
If the mail is scanned at the receiving mail sorting facility, it will reduce aggregate tonnage of mail transferred to and from central sorting facilities by a lot. It won't reduce trips by much, but it should reduce fuel usage per trip, and thus reduce emission poundage. The next logical step, once the practice is dominant and hardcopy flow becomes a trickle, will be to aggregate mail from slow days, thus reducing trips, too.
And it makes sense. I only check my mailbox once a week, sometimes twice a month. Maybe a little more frequently if I'm chain-watching the Netflix. No reason the postie should be there every day, either.