You're paying too much for tapes. You can have LTO-3 for $55 in 5-packs, and even a little less if you buy in bulk or refurbished (which may or may not be approrpiate depending on your archive needs). That's where I got my 50% number. A quick google should for something like "LTO-3 tapes" should show you what I mean.
And if you honestly know where I can get a 400+ GB hot-swappable (i.e. SATA or SCSI) drive for $110 I'd be interested. I'm not doubting your numbers, just looking for deals -- I thought the 320 GB for $95 I just bought were a good price.
You're forgetting charcol. There is no recorded case of charcol poisoning in all of medical history. Heavy metals and their ores sure, but not good ole charcol.
Finding a medical case that involves charcol in the bloodstream but not massive trauma (limiting the study to victims of massive trauma would make survival studies complicated), or in finding a study subject willing to be injected with solid charcol is left as an exercise to the reader.
For all the shortcomings of NTSC, backwards compatibility is not one of them -- current color NTSC broadcast signals work with NTSC-compatible televisions from as far back as 1941, and with some televisions from as far back as 1936 (before NTSC existed), so long as you don't mind dropping down to 441 lines.
If Europe was just willing to suffer with reduced chrominance bandwidth and phase error for the last 50 years they could have had backwards compatibility too.
Only until you start making archives. Tape media is easily 50% cheaper on a per-GB basis once you get past the hardware purchase. With hard drives you never get past the hardware purchase.
If all you want it a copy of the current (or the last few) day's disk state, then another disk makes good sense. If you want to be able to restore last December's tape because someone trashed your 1099-processing software in January and no one noticed until today, tapes are definately cheaper.
I personally haven't seen that problem. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, but I don't know about.
I did have a whole office full of old 10 Mbit SMC cards that we found weren't compatible with Auto MDI/MDIX though. After we installed a new 10/100 switch they would link and drop and link and drop continuously. It took me hours to figure out what was wrong with the switch (nothing). We had to buy a switch were we could turn Auto MDI/MDIX off to get them to work.
I don't love 3com in general, just the 3c905. It's got a well-maintained driver in OS X, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, going back to versions of those systems from 1998 or earlier (where applicable). Recent versions (i.e. rev B and later) include the acceleration features you'd expect in a modern NIC (checksuming, segmenting, etc.). And you can buy them used for $7 a pop. It's a hard deal to beat when you just need to add a network card to a box.
I prefer the Intel EE Pro cards for new machines, for the same reasons. Good driver in almost every OS. Available in PCI/PCI-E/PCI-X versions. Available in 10/100 and 10/100/1000 versions. Not terribly expensive.
TCP offloading in consumer chips, not so much. Mostly becuase the drivers are harder to write and while throughput goes up latency doesn't go down (at least not much), and consumer-level users are rarely NIC-bandwidth limited.
But unless you've got like a 3c509 or something, it's got on-board checksumming. It's been an extremely common feature even in cheap cards for several years at least -- even things like the RealTek 8139C+ have buffer-based transfers and on-board checksumming.
Just read at what you just wrote, "consistently behaves the way a knowledgable person expects", WTF is a "knowedgable person"? one that knows how to use the system? if that is, then both systems are "easier to use" to the people that already know how to use it DOH!!
If you actually read what he said instead of just making fun of it, you'll see that he was discussing how "easier to use" was not necessarily limited to your notion of "requires less training". His point was not that linux requires less training, or that someone with know prior knowledge would be able to run linux more easily than windows. What he said was that "behaves consistently" might be a more important part of "easier to use" than "requires less training" for someone who already has knowledge of the system.
You also whine about having to google to find the proper command to enable the driver for your mat. It's a little unfair to ignore the time you spent googling to find PSXPAD. Or to pretend that copying and pasting a search result to run a single command from a prompt is more difficult than downloading and installing a program. They are different tasks, but I have trouble believe that search->copy->terminal->paste is "harder" than search->download->execute->follow prompts.
Who are you expecting to deal with "the database area" if not the sysadmin? Who manages the hardware and makes backups? In the case of clustered disk systems, are you expecting the DBA to manage the disk cluster as well as the database? And who installs the database software in the first place? Wouldn't giving the DBA access to install programs and muck with the hardware of production systems be poor "separation of job functions"?
That make sense. I was thinking that your objection was to the technical/mechanical side of things (i.e. direct control of avaition systems) vs. the administrative/decision-making side of things (i.e. control of where and how the plane flies, but not necessarily to the "flaps to 1/2" level of detail). Thanks for the clarification.
I don't mean to troll, but I'm honestly confused. Is there some technical basis for your aversion to computer-controlled flight? I know lots of people feel the way you do, but I honestly cannot figure out why.
With the possible exception of some Star Trek-like scenario where the crew comes up with a solution that has never been tried before -- I don't know about you, but that sort of scenario seems incredibly unlikely to me -- I don't see what you think a human pilot would do better than a computer, and I can name several areas where computers readily beat humans.
And it's not like computer-controlled flight would be something new. Except for situations where precise positioning is required we already let the computer fly most of the time, at least on planes equipped to do so. And I don't just mean stable flight -- on properly equipped aircraft the auto pilot turns *on* when bad things happen, to help the pilot regain control, and to mitigate the risk of pilot error or incapacitation.
So what am I missing here? What makes computer-controlled flight such a bad idea?
Shadows are 3D, you just only see the edge -- I'd include the entire space from the dark side of the light-blocking object to the surface on which you observe the shadow as part of the shadow, as any object in that space would reveal the shadow. You could even argue that shadows continue indefinately beyond the surface on which you observe them, as any objects along that path would similarly be shadowed.
But I'd also agree with others that shadows are no more objects than radio waves.
It's possible that there was an existing battery that would have fit. For all I know they used an existing battery design -- all the pictures I've seen show a pretty standard slab battery. The battery design is really a moot point though, as you don't have to buy replacements from Apple. Several companies sell compatbile batteries at reasonable prices ($30).
More importantly, it's not a trival matter to add a battery door to the iPod without sacrificing some of the aspects that have made it so successful. First, the back cover is not plastic, it's metal, so a standard tabbed-door is not plausible. Second, adding a layer of plastic that's thick enough to be protective actually would increase the size of the iPod, or would significanlty reduce the area available for the battery. That's part of the reason the back is metal in the first place -- to reduce the thickness. Take a look any ABS plastic device that's even moderately sturdy; the plastic is easily 1mm thick, which is nearly 10% the thickness of the entire iPod, including the exterior casing. You're talking about adding 2 layers of such plastic in place of the existing metal back. That's not a minor change.
Finally, it's actually not all that difficult to replace the battery, as other have mentioned. The front plastic cover is joined to the back metal cover with a pretty standard tabs-and-slots arrangement that can be disassembled with any thin tool. It's at least as easy as replacing the backup battery in say, a TI-81 calculator, which uses the same sort of case-closing system (to be fair, the main batteries did have a tabbed door).
It's not that the iPod couldn't have been made with a standard plastic case and a battery door, it's just that it wouldn't have been the iPod if it had such a design. It may even still have been a successful portable music player, but it certainly wouldn't have become a sleek status symbol that it is today.
And how many of those device had A) a large power draw and B) a strict size limitation C) an expected runtime of 6+ hours? That isn't a trivial set of limitations. Cell phones are comparable in size and power requirements, but they don't have anywhere near the runtime requirements of an iPod. Flash-based MP3 players can run forever on a AAA battery, but with no backlight, hard drive, or MPEG-4 capable DSP.
I'm not saying they didn't also take the economics of the situtation into account, but it's silly to pretend that's the only reason for the sealed design and custom battery shape.
It's doesn't protect against man-in-the-middle attacks, nor against phishing, but it doesn't claim to authenticate the other end either, so I don't see why you'd expect it to do so. Luckily you can combine one-time passwords with something like SSL, which can provide bi-directional authentication, to mitigate the risks of a MiM attack.
And some people buy monitors with longer duration phosphors so that they don't have to drive a ridiculously high refresh rate to avoid flicker. What would I do with a 100+ Hz refresh rate anyway?
No, you don't look young, it's just that the guy checking your ID loses his job and the bar and server get fined $750 if he doesn't check and you're underage.
Moreover, in many states there are rules that not only prohibit liquor sales to people under 21, but also require that you check the ID of "anyone who appears to be under 27", and so you can be fined in a sting simply for failing to check an ID, even the the operative is over 21 and legally allowed to purchase liquor.
It's still retarded, but it's not the bar's fault -- it's the law.
I agree that the odds of getting any particular hand change. What I don't understand is why you think they change in the favor of the dealer. Sure, you've got a smaller chance of getting a natural blackjack, but so does the dealer. You onlt have to beat the dealer, not obtain a perfect hand.
Their presence is more then negligable. If for say one person has a 40% chance of winning by themself at blackjack you would assume that when playing 100 games perfectly, you would have won 40 of them. But when another person sits in, He has less of a chance to getting the same cards you could have got. He may still be looking at a 40% chance on his own but wth another person it(the chances) is droped by about a third. But the most interesting thing is that in more than one statistic, the more things effecting the variable (think players) the more games needed to make the number pan out. So, If your guessing off of 1000 games that you would have won 400 of them, I don't see it happening because your chances of getting the same cards have decreased. 40/100 based on 2/52 doen't equal the same odds as ?/100 based on 3 or 4 or 5/52. But I don't want to get into caculating odds at blackjack, I just know that 52 cards divided among more people means less chances of getting the cards you wanted or needed so the odds cannot be the same.
Your analysis assumes that removing a card from play necessarily reduces your chances of winning (and more generally, that specific hands are necessarily more valuable than other specific hands). While this may be true in some games, blackjack is not one of them. Both the dealer and the player have the same goal, so removing "good" cards from play penalizes players and dealers in direct proportion to their original chance of winning -- that is, very nearly equally. Therefore, unless the second player is receiving a non-random set of cards both the player and the house should be equally affected by additional players, and your overall odds of winning should remain largely unaffected.
But as an Oracle user myself, I agree, they make things hard, particularly in the common case where you don't care about the 10,000 different ways to sort dates or whatever mundane setting has bad or no defaults.
First, if you're afraid of command-line work, you aren't running Oracle, or anything else in that class.
Second, unless you're doing something out of the ordinary, simply installing mysql or postgres in the same way you usually install programs (be that apt-get, rpm, MS Installer, etc). is all you need to get the database up and running. The same is true of the GUI tools to manage the database -- the Windows installer for postgres includes PgAdminIII in the same package as the database itself.
I'm not bashing MS SQL Server, but let's not pretend it has some magical ease-of-use that doesn't exist in other packages.
It is more like, I pay you to feed birds for a year (lets say chickens) and You buy dog food and feed your dogs claiming that the chickens will eat the bugs attacked by the spilt dog food. And because I cannot verify that your not feeding my chickens when they don't die but they don't gain wieght and become ill quit often, it makes that scam even worse. You see, offering one thing and delivering another at the benefit of yourself is wrong. Hiding it so you cannot be caught makes it worse.
You're making this much too complicated. If you hired me to keep your chickens healthy and to make them gain weight, then I would have failed to comply. If you simply hired me to feed them without any other obligation, then I would not be defrauding you, I would just not be meeting your expectations. Luckily for me, expectations are not part of legal agreements, and I don't have to meet them to be compliant.
What is the agreement in gambling? As far as I can tell it's simply that a particular game will be played in a particular way. That particular way should include a definition of your payback; so long as it does you can determine when someone is defrauding you, if you were so inclined. And if the rules don't include a definition of expected payback I don't see how you can possibly be defrauded in terms of insufficient payout.
No, lets look at blackjack. that 40% chance of winning is spread accross the player playing the house. If your the only one at the table, good, if someone sits in, that 40% chance get mixed with them. Now what if you 40% chance of winning at slots were actually 40% of the machines/servers life that day. Saying a Slot machine pays 40% of the time wouldn't mean only when your playing it. So lets say I played it first and won 50% of the time Now you have to build the amount of bet back up in order for it to pay again so your 40% just changed.
First, as I said before, if I have a 40% chance of winning, I have a 40% chance of winning, or the game isn't fair. Games where other players affect the outcome are not ruled by such simple probabilities.
But that being said, your statistical analysis of blackjack is flawed. Other player do affect the cards that are available, but given a sufficiently large sample their effect is negligible, because other players cannot make you lose to the dealer, nor are you competing against them. They do affect the available cards in shoe, but their effect is just as likely to be beneficial as detrimental, since they may just as easily consume card beneficial for the dealer as for the player. Therefore any sample large enough to average their effect should produce the same results as playing by yourself.
For every scenario you can put in place to protect people from being scammed in online gambling, there is an easy way to defeat it. We just don't have the ability yet to stop it from happening.
I wouldn't argue with that at all. I just don't think A) we should expect to entirely stop it from happening B) that such expections, should they exist, could ever be reasonably meet C) that gambling is inherently different than any other financial transactions or D) that the Internet world is significantly different from the non-Internet world with respect to this kind of security.
If you cannot tell it is fraud, then that makes it fraud.
So if you pay me to feed birds for a year, but don't actually watch me do it, it's fraud? If you came back a year later you'd have no way to know if I feed the birds or not. You paid me trusting that I'd feed the birds, and the legal standard is and should be on you to prove that I didn't, rather than on me to prove that I did. I still don't see how gambling is any different.
And a 40% chance of winning wold only count if you were the only person at that table or machine placing the 1000 bets.
No, if I have a 40% chance of winning, I have a 40% chance of winning. Other people playing do no affect my odds in fair games. If I'm playing against other people, rather than a pure game of chance, the odds are already unpredictible, so you'd have to devise another test.
required to pay out... 40% total money taken in and not on totalt bets
This is in fact how most real-world slot machines currently operate, as it removes the risk of overall loss. And this method of payout can be tested just as easily as the 40% of bets method.
Ok. how are you going to enforce it? How are you goign to stop me from rigging a texas holdem game and a dozen of my 20000 slot machines?
How do we enforce it in real-world casinos? I'm still waiting for an explaination of how computers in a rack are different than computers on the gaming floor. Sure, the computers in a rack are on the Internet, which adds some risk. But they have the benefit of not being physically exposed to gamblers. If they are properly managed I see no reason one would be inherently less secure than another.
How will Joe user know I'm a flyby night operations and not a cetified one?
As I suggested, a simple link to http://www.registeredonlinegambling.gov/yourSite would either return "Yes, the specified site is certififed" or "No, the specified site not certified". I never suggested any system that allowed sites to certify themselves, though I could see such a system being used in conjuction with external verification. I also clearly voiced my opinion that it should be up to gamblers to decide how much regulation they want to play under; anything else is just a nanny-state in my opinion.
Is it so hard to spoof the site? Maybe drop some spyware in the machine that redirect the URL to a phishing style site that mimics the governments with my name and stuff on it?
It's not hard at all. But if your local computer is compromised the spyware could steal your credit card information even when you're using legitimate, non-gambling sites. This sort of concern has nothing to do with gambling; using a compromised terminal makes any transaction unsafe.
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You're paying too much for tapes. You can have LTO-3 for $55 in 5-packs, and even a little less if you buy in bulk or refurbished (which may or may not be approrpiate depending on your archive needs). That's where I got my 50% number. A quick google should for something like "LTO-3 tapes" should show you what I mean.
And if you honestly know where I can get a 400+ GB hot-swappable (i.e. SATA or SCSI) drive for $110 I'd be interested. I'm not doubting your numbers, just looking for deals -- I thought the 320 GB for $95 I just bought were a good price.
You're forgetting charcol. There is no recorded case of charcol poisoning in all of medical history. Heavy metals and their ores sure, but not good ole charcol.
Finding a medical case that involves charcol in the bloodstream but not massive trauma (limiting the study to victims of massive trauma would make survival studies complicated), or in finding a study subject willing to be injected with solid charcol is left as an exercise to the reader.
For all the shortcomings of NTSC, backwards compatibility is not one of them -- current color NTSC broadcast signals work with NTSC-compatible televisions from as far back as 1941, and with some televisions from as far back as 1936 (before NTSC existed), so long as you don't mind dropping down to 441 lines.
If Europe was just willing to suffer with reduced chrominance bandwidth and phase error for the last 50 years they could have had backwards compatibility too.
Only until you start making archives. Tape media is easily 50% cheaper on a per-GB basis once you get past the hardware purchase. With hard drives you never get past the hardware purchase.
If all you want it a copy of the current (or the last few) day's disk state, then another disk makes good sense. If you want to be able to restore last December's tape because someone trashed your 1099-processing software in January and no one noticed until today, tapes are definately cheaper.
I personally haven't seen that problem. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, but I don't know about.
I did have a whole office full of old 10 Mbit SMC cards that we found weren't compatible with Auto MDI/MDIX though. After we installed a new 10/100 switch they would link and drop and link and drop continuously. It took me hours to figure out what was wrong with the switch (nothing). We had to buy a switch were we could turn Auto MDI/MDIX off to get them to work.
I haven't run in to that yet. Lucky me I guess. Thanks for the warning.
I don't love 3com in general, just the 3c905. It's got a well-maintained driver in OS X, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, going back to versions of those systems from 1998 or earlier (where applicable). Recent versions (i.e. rev B and later) include the acceleration features you'd expect in a modern NIC (checksuming, segmenting, etc.). And you can buy them used for $7 a pop. It's a hard deal to beat when you just need to add a network card to a box.
I prefer the Intel EE Pro cards for new machines, for the same reasons. Good driver in almost every OS. Available in PCI/PCI-E/PCI-X versions. Available in 10/100 and 10/100/1000 versions. Not terribly expensive.
TCP offloading in consumer chips, not so much. Mostly becuase the drivers are harder to write and while throughput goes up latency doesn't go down (at least not much), and consumer-level users are rarely NIC-bandwidth limited.
But unless you've got like a 3c509 or something, it's got on-board checksumming. It's been an extremely common feature even in cheap cards for several years at least -- even things like the RealTek 8139C+ have buffer-based transfers and on-board checksumming.
Just read at what you just wrote, "consistently behaves the way a knowledgable person expects", WTF is a "knowedgable person"? one that knows how to use the system? if that is, then both systems are "easier to use" to the people that already know how to use it DOH!!
If you actually read what he said instead of just making fun of it, you'll see that he was discussing how "easier to use" was not necessarily limited to your notion of "requires less training". His point was not that linux requires less training, or that someone with know prior knowledge would be able to run linux more easily than windows. What he said was that "behaves consistently" might be a more important part of "easier to use" than "requires less training" for someone who already has knowledge of the system.
You also whine about having to google to find the proper command to enable the driver for your mat. It's a little unfair to ignore the time you spent googling to find PSXPAD. Or to pretend that copying and pasting a search result to run a single command from a prompt is more difficult than downloading and installing a program. They are different tasks, but I have trouble believe that search->copy->terminal->paste is "harder" than search->download->execute->follow prompts.
Who are you expecting to deal with "the database area" if not the sysadmin? Who manages the hardware and makes backups? In the case of clustered disk systems, are you expecting the DBA to manage the disk cluster as well as the database? And who installs the database software in the first place? Wouldn't giving the DBA access to install programs and muck with the hardware of production systems be poor "separation of job functions"?
That make sense. I was thinking that your objection was to the technical/mechanical side of things (i.e. direct control of avaition systems) vs. the administrative/decision-making side of things (i.e. control of where and how the plane flies, but not necessarily to the "flaps to 1/2" level of detail). Thanks for the clarification.
I don't mean to troll, but I'm honestly confused. Is there some technical basis for your aversion to computer-controlled flight? I know lots of people feel the way you do, but I honestly cannot figure out why.
With the possible exception of some Star Trek-like scenario where the crew comes up with a solution that has never been tried before -- I don't know about you, but that sort of scenario seems incredibly unlikely to me -- I don't see what you think a human pilot would do better than a computer, and I can name several areas where computers readily beat humans.
And it's not like computer-controlled flight would be something new. Except for situations where precise positioning is required we already let the computer fly most of the time, at least on planes equipped to do so. And I don't just mean stable flight -- on properly equipped aircraft the auto pilot turns *on* when bad things happen, to help the pilot regain control, and to mitigate the risk of pilot error or incapacitation.
So what am I missing here? What makes computer-controlled flight such a bad idea?
Shadows are 3D, you just only see the edge -- I'd include the entire space from the dark side of the light-blocking object to the surface on which you observe the shadow as part of the shadow, as any object in that space would reveal the shadow. You could even argue that shadows continue indefinately beyond the surface on which you observe them, as any objects along that path would similarly be shadowed.
But I'd also agree with others that shadows are no more objects than radio waves.
I think if you were taught base-12 as a child rather than base-10 you wouldn't have any trouble counting that way.
It's possible that there was an existing battery that would have fit. For all I know they used an existing battery design -- all the pictures I've seen show a pretty standard slab battery. The battery design is really a moot point though, as you don't have to buy replacements from Apple. Several companies sell compatbile batteries at reasonable prices ($30).
More importantly, it's not a trival matter to add a battery door to the iPod without sacrificing some of the aspects that have made it so successful. First, the back cover is not plastic, it's metal, so a standard tabbed-door is not plausible. Second, adding a layer of plastic that's thick enough to be protective actually would increase the size of the iPod, or would significanlty reduce the area available for the battery. That's part of the reason the back is metal in the first place -- to reduce the thickness. Take a look any ABS plastic device that's even moderately sturdy; the plastic is easily 1mm thick, which is nearly 10% the thickness of the entire iPod, including the exterior casing. You're talking about adding 2 layers of such plastic in place of the existing metal back. That's not a minor change.
Finally, it's actually not all that difficult to replace the battery, as other have mentioned. The front plastic cover is joined to the back metal cover with a pretty standard tabs-and-slots arrangement that can be disassembled with any thin tool. It's at least as easy as replacing the backup battery in say, a TI-81 calculator, which uses the same sort of case-closing system (to be fair, the main batteries did have a tabbed door).
It's not that the iPod couldn't have been made with a standard plastic case and a battery door, it's just that it wouldn't have been the iPod if it had such a design. It may even still have been a successful portable music player, but it certainly wouldn't have become a sleek status symbol that it is today.
And how many of those device had A) a large power draw and B) a strict size limitation C) an expected runtime of 6+ hours? That isn't a trivial set of limitations. Cell phones are comparable in size and power requirements, but they don't have anywhere near the runtime requirements of an iPod. Flash-based MP3 players can run forever on a AAA battery, but with no backlight, hard drive, or MPEG-4 capable DSP.
I'm not saying they didn't also take the economics of the situtation into account, but it's silly to pretend that's the only reason for the sealed design and custom battery shape.
No, it's one-time passwords, a concept which has been around for a while. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_password http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2289
It's doesn't protect against man-in-the-middle attacks, nor against phishing, but it doesn't claim to authenticate the other end either, so I don't see why you'd expect it to do so. Luckily you can combine one-time passwords with something like SSL, which can provide bi-directional authentication, to mitigate the risks of a MiM attack.
And some people buy monitors with longer duration phosphors so that they don't have to drive a ridiculously high refresh rate to avoid flicker. What would I do with a 100+ Hz refresh rate anyway?
No, you don't look young, it's just that the guy checking your ID loses his job and the bar and server get fined $750 if he doesn't check and you're underage.
Moreover, in many states there are rules that not only prohibit liquor sales to people under 21, but also require that you check the ID of "anyone who appears to be under 27", and so you can be fined in a sting simply for failing to check an ID, even the the operative is over 21 and legally allowed to purchase liquor.
It's still retarded, but it's not the bar's fault -- it's the law.
I agree that the odds of getting any particular hand change. What I don't understand is why you think they change in the favor of the dealer. Sure, you've got a smaller chance of getting a natural blackjack, but so does the dealer. You onlt have to beat the dealer, not obtain a perfect hand.
Their presence is more then negligable. If for say one person has a 40% chance of winning by themself at blackjack you would assume that when playing 100 games perfectly, you would have won 40 of them. But when another person sits in, He has less of a chance to getting the same cards you could have got. He may still be looking at a 40% chance on his own but wth another person it(the chances) is droped by about a third. But the most interesting thing is that in more than one statistic, the more things effecting the variable (think players) the more games needed to make the number pan out. So, If your guessing off of 1000 games that you would have won 400 of them, I don't see it happening because your chances of getting the same cards have decreased. 40/100 based on 2/52 doen't equal the same odds as ?/100 based on 3 or 4 or 5/52. But I don't want to get into caculating odds at blackjack, I just know that 52 cards divided among more people means less chances of getting the cards you wanted or needed so the odds cannot be the same.
Your analysis assumes that removing a card from play necessarily reduces your chances of winning (and more generally, that specific hands are necessarily more valuable than other specific hands). While this may be true in some games, blackjack is not one of them. Both the dealer and the player have the same goal, so removing "good" cards from play penalizes players and dealers in direct proportion to their original chance of winning -- that is, very nearly equally. Therefore, unless the second player is receiving a non-random set of cards both the player and the house should be equally affected by additional players, and your overall odds of winning should remain largely unaffected.
Well then I'll revise that to clarify my point:
command line != wasting time
But as an Oracle user myself, I agree, they make things hard, particularly in the common case where you don't care about the 10,000 different ways to sort dates or whatever mundane setting has bad or no defaults.
First, if you're afraid of command-line work, you aren't running Oracle, or anything else in that class.
Second, unless you're doing something out of the ordinary, simply installing mysql or postgres in the same way you usually install programs (be that apt-get, rpm, MS Installer, etc). is all you need to get the database up and running. The same is true of the GUI tools to manage the database -- the Windows installer for postgres includes PgAdminIII in the same package as the database itself.
I'm not bashing MS SQL Server, but let's not pretend it has some magical ease-of-use that doesn't exist in other packages.
It is more like, I pay you to feed birds for a year (lets say chickens) and You buy dog food and feed your dogs claiming that the chickens will eat the bugs attacked by the spilt dog food. And because I cannot verify that your not feeding my chickens when they don't die but they don't gain wieght and become ill quit often, it makes that scam even worse. You see, offering one thing and delivering another at the benefit of yourself is wrong. Hiding it so you cannot be caught makes it worse.
You're making this much too complicated. If you hired me to keep your chickens healthy and to make them gain weight, then I would have failed to comply. If you simply hired me to feed them without any other obligation, then I would not be defrauding you, I would just not be meeting your expectations. Luckily for me, expectations are not part of legal agreements, and I don't have to meet them to be compliant.
What is the agreement in gambling? As far as I can tell it's simply that a particular game will be played in a particular way. That particular way should include a definition of your payback; so long as it does you can determine when someone is defrauding you, if you were so inclined. And if the rules don't include a definition of expected payback I don't see how you can possibly be defrauded in terms of insufficient payout.
No, lets look at blackjack. that 40% chance of winning is spread accross the player playing the house. If your the only one at the table, good, if someone sits in, that 40% chance get mixed with them. Now what if you 40% chance of winning at slots were actually 40% of the machines/servers life that day. Saying a Slot machine pays 40% of the time wouldn't mean only when your playing it. So lets say I played it first and won 50% of the time Now you have to build the amount of bet back up in order for it to pay again so your 40% just changed.
First, as I said before, if I have a 40% chance of winning, I have a 40% chance of winning, or the game isn't fair. Games where other players affect the outcome are not ruled by such simple probabilities.
But that being said, your statistical analysis of blackjack is flawed. Other player do affect the cards that are available, but given a sufficiently large sample their effect is negligible, because other players cannot make you lose to the dealer, nor are you competing against them. They do affect the available cards in shoe, but their effect is just as likely to be beneficial as detrimental, since they may just as easily consume card beneficial for the dealer as for the player. Therefore any sample large enough to average their effect should produce the same results as playing by yourself.
For every scenario you can put in place to protect people from being scammed in online gambling, there is an easy way to defeat it. We just don't have the ability yet to stop it from happening.
I wouldn't argue with that at all. I just don't think A) we should expect to entirely stop it from happening B) that such expections, should they exist, could ever be reasonably meet C) that gambling is inherently different than any other financial transactions or D) that the Internet world is significantly different from the non-Internet world with respect to this kind of security.
If you cannot tell it is fraud, then that makes it fraud.
So if you pay me to feed birds for a year, but don't actually watch me do it, it's fraud? If you came back a year later you'd have no way to know if I feed the birds or not. You paid me trusting that I'd feed the birds, and the legal standard is and should be on you to prove that I didn't, rather than on me to prove that I did. I still don't see how gambling is any different.
And a 40% chance of winning wold only count if you were the only person at that table or machine placing the 1000 bets.
No, if I have a 40% chance of winning, I have a 40% chance of winning. Other people playing do no affect my odds in fair games. If I'm playing against other people, rather than a pure game of chance, the odds are already unpredictible, so you'd have to devise another test.
required to pay out ... 40% total money taken in and not on totalt bets
This is in fact how most real-world slot machines currently operate, as it removes the risk of overall loss. And this method of payout can be tested just as easily as the 40% of bets method.
Ok. how are you going to enforce it? How are you goign to stop me from rigging a texas holdem game and a dozen of my 20000 slot machines?
How do we enforce it in real-world casinos? I'm still waiting for an explaination of how computers in a rack are different than computers on the gaming floor. Sure, the computers in a rack are on the Internet, which adds some risk. But they have the benefit of not being physically exposed to gamblers. If they are properly managed I see no reason one would be inherently less secure than another.
How will Joe user know I'm a flyby night operations and not a cetified one?
As I suggested, a simple link to http://www.registeredonlinegambling.gov/yourSite would either return "Yes, the specified site is certififed" or "No, the specified site not certified". I never suggested any system that allowed sites to certify themselves, though I could see such a system being used in conjuction with external verification. I also clearly voiced my opinion that it should be up to gamblers to decide how much regulation they want to play under; anything else is just a nanny-state in my opinion.
Is it so hard to spoof the site? Maybe drop some spyware in the machine that redirect the URL to a phishing style site that mimics the governments with my name and stuff on it?
It's not hard at all. But if your local computer is compromised the spyware could steal your credit card information even when you're using legitimate, non-gambling sites. This sort of concern has nothing to do with gambling; using a compromised terminal makes any transaction unsafe.