What's the point? You are led to believe you can influence the outcome of the game, but you can't. That's why it's a lie. Who cares if the probabilities are the same? It's got nothing to do with advertised payoffs and everything to do with the mark's perception of the game.
Agreed, it seems deceptive. I find it perplexing that, unless they really are perpetrating fraud in some way, that they wouldn't just make the game give the user an actual choice. As long as the odds are the same, why not?
I tell you that I've picked a number between 1 and 10. If you can guess it correctly, then I give you $5. However, what you don't know is that I've already predetermined whether you'll win or lose.
I understand all of this. What I'm saying is that, without actually disassembling the gambling machine's code, you can't actually know for sure if it's predetermined or not. Maybe *most* of the time you lose, but maybe 1/10000th of the time you don't. All that's required is that the machine eventually pay out at whatever percentage they advertise. If it pays out very rarely, it merely has to have large payouts; if it pays out often, payouts may be that much smaller. But in the end, as long as it pays out N percent on the dollar (or pound), it is legitimate.
Even if the results are predetermined, I'm not even sure that's a bad thing. It simply boils down to whether they generate the random number for success or failure before or after you make your choice. This seems irrelevant to me, so long as there is actually a chance of winning. If you don't know the outcome ahead of time, and you could actually win, then I can't see how it matters if the outcome is predetermined or not. If the game is rigged so that you always lose in a certain situation, of course it's fraud, but I haven't seen proof of that. The only way to know if it's rigged is if you look at the code, short of a sufficiently large set of empirical trials.
In the examples they give on the web site, they've provided a RAM file for you
to put the emulator into a particular state. They claim that when you load the
RAM file and continue the play, you'll always lose. That's supposed to be proof of the fraudulence of the gambling machine. I'm not convinced without more information. Wouldn't it be true that the random number generator's seed would also be in the RAM file? If so, then it clearly follows that you'll get the same outcome every time.
It could be that this particular RAM file just happens to be in a state where you'll always lose, simply due to the current state of the random number generator.
Proof of cheating can only be seen if EVERY time you get to a particular place in the gambling you lose. That's not possible without decompiling the code executing in the gambling machine, because it's quite possible that payouts or other events only happen, say, 1/10000th of the time. It would take an awfully long time to discover the frequency of payout through manual testing in such a case. Even if one were to run through, say, a million plays to empirically determine the frequency of certain events, you'd never actually have complete proof of the machine's behavior. Looking at the code is the only way to be absolutely sure of how the machine actually behaves.
A friend of mine was one of the first 7 (or so) employees at NIC. Beautiful office in Ghirardelli Square in SF. I'd never get any work done there.
In any case, some months ago he quit because Larry basically gave up on NIC and put it in the hands of investors or someone like that. The employees were given the shaft, and the company was (even more) mismanaged from that point on. He quit as a protest.
Seems like it could have been a great company with a great product if it had been given just a little more attention/funding, and if the management hadn't been so inept. I hope someone gets it right some day.
I agree, it's lame that the US does not use metric, or at least the non-scientific community. Having a science background, I'm perfectly comfortable with both English and metric.
But we do have one thing right, at least. We measure the fuel efficiency of cars by miles/gallon (or kilometers/liter, if you like). I couldn't believe it when I first discovered that some countries use liters/100 km as a measure of efficiency. Talk about a bass-ackwards way of describing a car's efficiency. It's completely counterintuitive. Bigger should always be better, not smaller. What's the point of having a wonderful measurement system like the metric system if you can't even apply it usefully?!
Qualcomm is touting an expected 6 million Indian subscribers using CDMA by year end...How does a country where the per capita annual income is $390-$420 (depending on whose number you use) expect people other than the elite to afford mobile phone service
In a country where there almost a billion people, those 6 million *are* the elite. It sounds like they're not actually expecting the non-elite to be able to afford it.
How can music be "open source"? I've never seen music source code before... Perhaps they mean free for personal/noncommercial use? Or even public domain?
We also maintain a threatening lead in Zamboni technology.
How can Canada possibly hold the lead in Zamboni technology? Zambonis are only made by the "Frank J. Zamboni Co.", which is a US company based in California. Any other ice resurfacing machine is just that - an ice resurfacing machine, not a Zamboni. Sounds like you have Zamboni envy.
I had an nVidia GeForce 2 card in my previous PIII Win2k box. It wasn't the fastest card around, but it did the job. And it seemed to render game video correctly and true to the game vendor's intent. Eventually I was unable to play certain games with big CPU/video requirements, and bought one of those little Shuttle Mini ATX boxes with a nice P4 3Ghz CPU and an ATI Radeon 9700 AIW Pro. The box screams, and I can play games at untold resolutions now. But that Radeon just isn't quite right.
Playing "Jedi Outcast", it seems to omit the sky in outdoor scenes, which is completely lame. Sometimes you can see through the corner of walls, as if there is a crack. It displays severe performance problems in 32-bit mode, as well as some other behavioral quirks. And in at least one popular game (Raven Shield) you have to completely turn off antialiasing or the mouse doesn't work properly (go figure!).
My nVidia card didn't seem to have any issues at all, at least none that I could detect. Certainly nothing as plain as what I've found with my Radeon 9700. I would not be surprised if nVidia has some problems with their latest card, nor would I be surprised if they were consciously cutting corners. But there are enough issues with the products their competitors put out that I have to wonder why nVidia is being singled out here?
I know that this is going to be the most common answer, but just go with NFS.
This is what immediately came to mind for me too. Except for one thing. NFS is not a distributed filesystem. It's merely a network filesystem. The data itself actually resides only in one central place, and is not distributed in any way. Storage is not shared across machines, and therefore NFS is limited, in performance and redundancy, to the levels that single storage point represents. If it's an infinitely scalable, fault-tolerant machine, then the difference approaches academic. Otherwise, the fact that NFS is not really a distributed filesystem is an important distinction.
I have built an extremely small challenge-response system as a procmail script. It's tiny, and has completely eliminated my 200-spams-per-day problem (I have a very well-known email address, unfortunately). You can grab a copy of it for yourself to try out. See my journal for
info.
The reason it went off-course is because it was trying to reach Jupiter, obviously. Why the hell else would it be called TMA-1? It seems to be a couple years behind schedule.:)
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted my own X-Wing. Apparently the makers of Lucas Arts' X-Wing did too. They made me my very own X-Wing, and I couldn't stop flying it. When I first sat down to play the game, I had butterflies in my stomach, because I didn't believe they'd get it right. When I realized they did, I couldn't stop laughing with joy. It was a true nerd experience. All of the subsequent games, like Tie Fighter and so on, were even better.
Games nowadays are vastly superior from a technical standpoint, but none of them approach the inspiration behind this game. Though I have to say, Jedi Outcast is a close second. An incredibly cool game. I've also wanted a light saber since I was a kid, and JO is a good substitute.
Riders may like this, but I don't see how cabbies would like it (at least in places like NYC) if they can't tell what your ethnic origin is beforehand. There needs to be some sort of ethnic identification signal involved here so the cabbies will have a way to tell beforehand whether or not they should bother to come and pick you up. I mean, geez, it could shake up the entire taxi cab industry if you have cabbies actually picking up non-caucasians.
Note to the clueless: this message is tongue-in-cheek.
Plain text ads are the only ones I click through on. Well, okay, I do click through on the occasional Think Geek ad, but I can't recall ever having (purposefully) clicked through on any other banner ad. I do click through on plain text ads on Google, because they're relevant and descriptive. And I find the text easier to parse in realtime in my brain than a stupid banner ad. As for "text box blindness", I haven't experienced that. But my brain is now quite adept at ignoring banner ads.
Tesla's plan was "doomed" to failure because it would have meant power for everyone, not just bill-payers.
I'm sure that's part of it, but from what I recall, his experiments showed major technical problems with this approach. If it was actually a useful medium for transmitting power, why the hell isn't it used *anywhere*? There are certainly situations/places where it would be useful, and where power companies are irrelevant.
I am no physicist, but I have to presume that it's a lot more efficient and easy to just use power lines.
Tesla was pushing "broadcast power". It was doomed to failure because of the
problems inherent in charging the atmosphere. What they are proposing here is
quite different. Haven't read the article, but I'm slightly familiar with the concept here. You simply convert electricity into microwave radiation and transmit it in a tight beam to a receiving station. No problem, old hat. Doing it on this scale might be a challenge, though. On the other end you have a receiver that converts that radiation back to usable electricity. Quite a different problem. I suspect that's what they're pioneering here. I think it has actually been done before, but not in any practical way. Powering a few lightbulbs isn't exactly practical either, but it would be if you could power a small town, or even just several buildings.
But keep out of the way of the beam!! I have to wonder about the environmental damage of birds/insects flying through it and getting cooked.
I remember reading about a proposal to send power to the earth this way. By having a massive solar cell array in space transmitting microwaves to a giant
receiver on earth, you could gather lots of energy. The thought of this thing getting off track and aiming at, say, NYC seems a little too scary, though.
Yes, the possible ill effects of microscopically small particles are chilling. I propose a moratorium on them. In particular, I propose that we ban 02. This extremely volatile microscopic substance is easily inhaled, and is largely responsible for fires (perhaps even spontaneous human combustion!) and explosions, is associated in part with aging, and causes materials of all sorts to oxidize and deteriorate. It's clear to me that 02 is one of the most insidious and dangerous nanosized particles known to science, and must be banned forthwith!
I spoke at length with this guy at CES this year, and his products are quite cool (no pun intended). Not only do they make a microwave, but also an oven with the same functionality (i.e. refrigeration and networked control. Pretty amazing stuff. Keeps your food cool until cooking starts, and you can tell remotely when
the oven has been opened (as the CEO of the company told me, that's so he can tell that his aged mother is actually eating the food w/o having to physically check in with her). I want one of each.
Re:No Post is Too Late: Send the Iraqis to Allah
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
·
· Score: 1
The 'oil for food' programme is the killer -- "we wan't your oil, but we need to keep you economically castrated, here have some crumbs"
And the problem with that is...? That was the intention with the program in the first place, so Hussein wouldn't develop his military. Of course, the program was a failure, because the UN didn't do anything about enforcing how the money was spent. Recall that this wasn't done idly, and Hussein agreed to it (with no intention of actually adhering to the agreement). The alternative was continued war, a war that Hussein started by invading a neighboring sovereign country without provocation. But I guess that part was all okay with you.
So why do astronomers always compare the size of meteors to Volkswagen bugs?
For the same reason the size of hail is always compared to golf balls. Which leads one to wonder how people described hail before there were golf balls.
Re:No Post is Too Late: Send the Iraqis to Allah
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Believe me they do regularly publish stories about all the Iraqi children dying because of the impacts of UN sanction on Iraq.
You mean the Iraqi children who die because funds from the "oil for food" program are misappropriated and diverted to Swiss bank accounts, military development, and nonessentials? Iraq is allowed to sell enough oil to supply its people with sufficient food, clothing, medical care, etc., but do you suppose the Iraqi government actually cares about the Kurds and Shiites, or even those people who are "ethnically acceptable"?
So who was it who kept our team out the the World Cup the time before last? Was that the other Iraq?
They didn't win the world cup, did they?
Can you tell me the fate they suffered as a result? Why not read about it. I'd rather not repeat what happened to members of Iraq's soccer team. Needless to say, recruits are not flocking to Iraq's athletic programs.
But all you are doing is simply rabbiting US propaganda
That would be parroting. But you have some valid points. The US is extremely guilty of supporting nasty dictators and other unsavory types. And they come back to bite us often. For example, the Mujaheddin, Manuel Noriega, Saddam, and so on. We never learn. Or rather, the US government never learns. And yes, the US media is twisted in its own way, and is of course very biased. But that doesn't mean Al Jazeera isn't worse, and I think evidence shows that it surpasses the US media in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point? You are led to believe you can influence the outcome of the game, but you can't. That's why it's a lie. Who cares if the probabilities are the same? It's got nothing to do with advertised payoffs and everything to do with the mark's perception of the game.
Agreed, it seems deceptive. I find it perplexing that, unless they really are perpetrating fraud in some way, that they wouldn't just make the game give the user an actual choice. As long as the odds are the same, why not?
I tell you that I've picked a number between 1 and 10. If you can guess it correctly, then I give you $5. However, what you don't know is that I've already predetermined whether you'll win or lose.
I understand all of this. What I'm saying is that, without actually disassembling the gambling machine's code, you can't actually know for sure if it's predetermined or not. Maybe *most* of the time you lose, but maybe 1/10000th of the time you don't. All that's required is that the machine eventually pay out at whatever percentage they advertise. If it pays out very rarely, it merely has to have large payouts; if it pays out often, payouts may be that much smaller. But in the end, as long as it pays out N percent on the dollar (or pound), it is legitimate.
Even if the results are predetermined, I'm not even sure that's a bad thing. It simply boils down to whether they generate the random number for success or failure before or after you make your choice. This seems irrelevant to me, so long as there is actually a chance of winning. If you don't know the outcome ahead of time, and you could actually win, then I can't see how it matters if the outcome is predetermined or not. If the game is rigged so that you always lose in a certain situation, of course it's fraud, but I haven't seen proof of that. The only way to know if it's rigged is if you look at the code, short of a sufficiently large set of empirical trials.
In the examples they give on the web site, they've provided a RAM file for you to put the emulator into a particular state. They claim that when you load the RAM file and continue the play, you'll always lose. That's supposed to be proof of the fraudulence of the gambling machine. I'm not convinced without more information. Wouldn't it be true that the random number generator's seed would also be in the RAM file? If so, then it clearly follows that you'll get the same outcome every time.
It could be that this particular RAM file just happens to be in a state where you'll always lose, simply due to the current state of the random number generator. Proof of cheating can only be seen if EVERY time you get to a particular place in the gambling you lose. That's not possible without decompiling the code executing in the gambling machine, because it's quite possible that payouts or other events only happen, say, 1/10000th of the time. It would take an awfully long time to discover the frequency of payout through manual testing in such a case. Even if one were to run through, say, a million plays to empirically determine the frequency of certain events, you'd never actually have complete proof of the machine's behavior. Looking at the code is the only way to be absolutely sure of how the machine actually behaves.
A friend of mine was one of the first 7 (or so) employees at NIC. Beautiful office in Ghirardelli Square in SF. I'd never get any work done there.
In any case, some months ago he quit because Larry basically gave up on NIC and put it in the hands of investors or someone like that. The employees were given the shaft, and the company was (even more) mismanaged from that point on. He quit as a protest.
Seems like it could have been a great company with a great product if it had been given just a little more attention/funding, and if the management hadn't been so inept. I hope someone gets it right some day.
I agree, it's lame that the US does not use metric, or at least the non-scientific community. Having a science background, I'm perfectly comfortable with both English and metric.
:)
But we do have one thing right, at least. We measure the fuel efficiency of cars by miles/gallon (or kilometers/liter, if you like). I couldn't believe it when I first discovered that some countries use liters/100 km as a measure of efficiency. Talk about a bass-ackwards way of describing a car's efficiency. It's completely counterintuitive. Bigger should always be better, not smaller. What's the point of having a wonderful measurement system like the metric system if you can't even apply it usefully?!
Qualcomm is touting an expected 6 million Indian subscribers using CDMA by year end...How does a country where the per capita annual income is $390-$420 (depending on whose number you use) expect people other than the elite to afford mobile phone service
In a country where there almost a billion people, those 6 million *are* the elite. It sounds like they're not actually expecting the non-elite to be able to afford it.
How can music be "open source"? I've never seen music source code before... Perhaps they mean free for personal/noncommercial use? Or even public domain?
We also maintain a threatening lead in Zamboni technology.
How can Canada possibly hold the lead in Zamboni technology? Zambonis are only made by the "Frank J. Zamboni Co.", which is a US company based in California. Any other ice resurfacing machine is just that - an ice resurfacing machine, not a Zamboni. Sounds like you have Zamboni envy.
I had an nVidia GeForce 2 card in my previous PIII Win2k box. It wasn't the fastest card around, but it did the job. And it seemed to render game video correctly and true to the game vendor's intent. Eventually I was unable to play certain games with big CPU/video requirements, and bought one of those little Shuttle Mini ATX boxes with a nice P4 3Ghz CPU and an ATI Radeon 9700 AIW Pro. The box screams, and I can play games at untold resolutions now. But that Radeon just isn't quite right.
Playing "Jedi Outcast", it seems to omit the sky in outdoor scenes, which is completely lame. Sometimes you can see through the corner of walls, as if there is a crack. It displays severe performance problems in 32-bit mode, as well as some other behavioral quirks. And in at least one popular game (Raven Shield) you have to completely turn off antialiasing or the mouse doesn't work properly (go figure!).
My nVidia card didn't seem to have any issues at all, at least none that I could detect. Certainly nothing as plain as what I've found with my Radeon 9700. I would not be surprised if nVidia has some problems with their latest card, nor would I be surprised if they were consciously cutting corners. But there are enough issues with the products their competitors put out that I have to wonder why nVidia is being singled out here?
I know that this is going to be the most common answer, but just go with NFS.
This is what immediately came to mind for me too. Except for one thing. NFS is not a distributed filesystem. It's merely a network filesystem. The data itself actually resides only in one central place, and is not distributed in any way. Storage is not shared across machines, and therefore NFS is limited, in performance and redundancy, to the levels that single storage point represents. If it's an infinitely scalable, fault-tolerant machine, then the difference approaches academic. Otherwise, the fact that NFS is not really a distributed filesystem is an important distinction.
I have built an extremely small challenge-response system as a procmail script. It's tiny, and has completely eliminated my 200-spams-per-day problem (I have a very well-known email address, unfortunately). You can grab a copy of it for yourself to try out. See my journal for info.
The reason it went off-course is because it was trying to reach Jupiter, obviously. Why the hell else would it be called TMA-1? It seems to be a couple years behind schedule. :)
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted my own X-Wing. Apparently the makers of Lucas Arts' X-Wing did too. They made me my very own X-Wing, and I couldn't stop flying it. When I first sat down to play the game, I had butterflies in my stomach, because I didn't believe they'd get it right. When I realized they did, I couldn't stop laughing with joy. It was a true nerd experience. All of the subsequent games, like Tie Fighter and so on, were even better.
Games nowadays are vastly superior from a technical standpoint, but none of them approach the inspiration behind this game. Though I have to say, Jedi Outcast is a close second. An incredibly cool game. I've also wanted a light saber since I was a kid, and JO is a good substitute.
Riders may like this, but I don't see how cabbies would like it (at least in places like NYC) if they can't tell what your ethnic origin is beforehand. There needs to be some sort of ethnic identification signal involved here so the cabbies will have a way to tell beforehand whether or not they should bother to come and pick you up. I mean, geez, it could shake up the entire taxi cab industry if you have cabbies actually picking up non-caucasians.
Note to the clueless: this message is tongue-in-cheek.
Plain text ads are the only ones I click through on. Well, okay, I do click through on the occasional Think Geek ad, but I can't recall ever having (purposefully) clicked through on any other banner ad. I do click through on plain text ads on Google, because they're relevant and descriptive. And I find the text easier to parse in realtime in my brain than a stupid banner ad. As for "text box blindness", I haven't experienced that. But my brain is now quite adept at ignoring banner ads.
This is a new thing?
Tesla's plan was "doomed" to failure because it would have meant power for everyone, not just bill-payers.
I'm sure that's part of it, but from what I recall, his experiments showed major technical problems with this approach. If it was actually a useful medium for transmitting power, why the hell isn't it used *anywhere*? There are certainly situations/places where it would be useful, and where power companies are irrelevant.
I am no physicist, but I have to presume that it's a lot more efficient and easy to just use power lines.
Tesla was pushing "broadcast power". It was doomed to failure because of the problems inherent in charging the atmosphere. What they are proposing here is quite different. Haven't read the article, but I'm slightly familiar with the concept here. You simply convert electricity into microwave radiation and transmit it in a tight beam to a receiving station. No problem, old hat. Doing it on this scale might be a challenge, though. On the other end you have a receiver that converts that radiation back to usable electricity. Quite a different problem. I suspect that's what they're pioneering here. I think it has actually been done before, but not in any practical way. Powering a few lightbulbs isn't exactly practical either, but it would be if you could power a small town, or even just several buildings.
But keep out of the way of the beam!! I have to wonder about the environmental damage of birds/insects flying through it and getting cooked.
I remember reading about a proposal to send power to the earth this way. By having a massive solar cell array in space transmitting microwaves to a giant receiver on earth, you could gather lots of energy. The thought of this thing getting off track and aiming at, say, NYC seems a little too scary, though.
Given a midsize cardboard box, a large garbage bag and a hacksaw, I think I can package him appropriately.
Yes, the possible ill effects of microscopically small particles are chilling. I propose a moratorium on them. In particular, I propose that we ban 02. This extremely volatile microscopic substance is easily inhaled, and is largely responsible for fires (perhaps even spontaneous human combustion!) and explosions, is associated in part with aging, and causes materials of all sorts to oxidize and deteriorate. It's clear to me that 02 is one of the most insidious and dangerous nanosized particles known to science, and must be banned forthwith!
Note to moderators: funny, not troll, please.
we can't very well afford to go ahead and get a static IP, business DSL line
I have business DSL and I'm screwed anyway. AOL is apparently not discriminating.
I spoke at length with this guy at CES this year, and his products are quite cool (no pun intended). Not only do they make a microwave, but also an oven with the same functionality (i.e. refrigeration and networked control. Pretty amazing stuff. Keeps your food cool until cooking starts, and you can tell remotely when the oven has been opened (as the CEO of the company told me, that's so he can tell that his aged mother is actually eating the food w/o having to physically check in with her). I want one of each.
The 'oil for food' programme is the killer -- "we wan't your oil, but we need to keep you economically castrated, here have some crumbs"
And the problem with that is...? That was the intention with the program in the first place, so Hussein wouldn't develop his military. Of course, the program was a failure, because the UN didn't do anything about enforcing how the money was spent. Recall that this wasn't done idly, and Hussein agreed to it (with no intention of actually adhering to the agreement). The alternative was continued war, a war that Hussein started by invading a neighboring sovereign country without provocation. But I guess that part was all okay with you.
So why do astronomers always compare the size of meteors to Volkswagen bugs?
For the same reason the size of hail is always compared to golf balls. Which leads one to wonder how people described hail before there were golf balls.
Believe me they do regularly publish stories about all the Iraqi children dying because of the impacts of UN sanction on Iraq.
You mean the Iraqi children who die because funds from the "oil for food" program are misappropriated and diverted to Swiss bank accounts, military development, and nonessentials? Iraq is allowed to sell enough oil to supply its people with sufficient food, clothing, medical care, etc., but do you suppose the Iraqi government actually cares about the Kurds and Shiites, or even those people who are "ethnically acceptable"?
So who was it who kept our team out the the World Cup the time before last? Was that the other Iraq?
They didn't win the world cup, did they? Can you tell me the fate they suffered as a result? Why not read about it. I'd rather not repeat what happened to members of Iraq's soccer team. Needless to say, recruits are not flocking to Iraq's athletic programs.
But all you are doing is simply rabbiting US propaganda
That would be parroting. But you have some valid points. The US is extremely guilty of supporting nasty dictators and other unsavory types. And they come back to bite us often. For example, the Mujaheddin, Manuel Noriega, Saddam, and so on. We never learn. Or rather, the US government never learns. And yes, the US media is twisted in its own way, and is of course very biased. But that doesn't mean Al Jazeera isn't worse, and I think evidence shows that it surpasses the US media in this regard.