The Nevada courts have ruled that counting cards is not cheating. That doesn't mean the casios have to like it, or have to let you play. If they suspect you of counting cards, they can and will ask you to leave the casio. They can't accuse of cheating though, which is a serious offense in Nevada.
In almost all cases, when playing with perfect Basic Strategy but without counting cards, there will still be a slight house advantage, but perhaps less than 1%. With card counting, advantage can be made to slightly favor the player.
Casinos will never eliminate Blackjack because the majority of players do not utilize perfect Basic Strategy, or don't pay attention to the unfavorable rule variations such as 6:5 Blackjack payoffs. These players give an enormous advantage to the house, more than enough to make up for most of the losses imposed by counters eeking out a 1% advantage over the house.
But as you say, casios don't like to lose, so if they can have their cake an eat it too, they will. They can and do take advantage of all means available within (and sometimes outside of) the law to discourage counters.
Anyhow, most DVD copyright theft is probably a straight rip, encryption included. So in effect, the encryption is utterly useless anyhow.
The encryption is not useless. It is true that it is not intended to prevent copies. Its purpose is to ensure that the movie studios have complete control over how you view and otherwise use their products.
And this is exactly the point the good guys should be making. Only DVD player manufacturers that have agreed to follow the rules can license CSS. That means if the movie studio wants you to watch anti-piracy messages, Coke ads, or previews for upcoming releases, and you are watching on a DVD player created by a legitimate licencee of CSS, you have no choice but to play through those messages. Among its other uses, DeCSS would permit the creation of a player that doesn't have to follow the CSS license rules, and allow you to skip "mandatory" content for example.
You say that "chained" encryption is secure as long as you can secretly communicate the the algorithm to the recipient. If you could could communicate secretly with the recipient, why not use that method to send your message?
Also, you say the security of "chained" encryption depends on the secrecy of the altgorithm. That means that if the secrecy of the algorithm is compromised, then all past and future communications using that algorithm are potentially compromised as well. Now you have to come up with a whole new algorithm, rather than just a new key. That is why the security of an encryption system must not depend on the security of the algorithm.
Apple can't make the iBook too good relative to the PowerBook G4, or it's low price would cannibalize sales from their premium laptop. That's why monitor spanning is disabled and they only put 16MB of RAM in it.
Despite Tokyo and Osaka being geographically close, it still takes you at least 3 hours to get to one city from the other. Odd, eh? It took me a while to understand this, considering I can leave San Francisco, take the BART to Oakland Airport in 14 minutes, hop on a Southwest shuttle, and arrive at Los Angeles International in under a hour.
Actually, according to this schedule,
it would take at least 18 minutes on BART from downtown
San Francisco to Oakland airport, and another
15-40 minutes for the shuttle
from BART to the Airport. According to Southwest Airlines,
flights from OAK to LAX take at least an hour and
fifteen minutes. When you take in to account the
time it takes to check-in, go through sececurity
and board the aircraft (at least 30 minutes), that brings to total time to over two hours.
Actually, X can support both the Mac/Windows clipboard paradigm and the traditional X paradigm simultanously. Inexperienced users can just use the cut/copy/paste menu actions and don't even have to know about the other way of doing copy/paste. It is still available as a convenient shortcut for experienced users who want to save a few keystrokes or mouse clicks.
Basically, a few applications, including GNU Emacs 20 and applications based on Qt 2.x follow one interpretation of clipboard behavior where both mouse selection and copy and paste use the PRIMARY clipboard. Most other modern applications, including Netscape, Mozilla, XEmacs, Qt 3.x apps, and some GTK+ apps follow the preferred interpretation, where mouse selections and middle mouse-clicks use the ephemeral PRIMARY clipboard, and explicit cut/copy/paste operations use the CLIPBOARD clipboard. Under the preferred interpretation, Mac and Windows users could use the familiar menu operations, and experienced users could use the traditional select then middle-click paradigm, each without interfering with the other.
Upgrading to KDE 3.x would resolve the clipboard problems since it is based on Qt 3.x
Although I do worry about online privacy, I think it is unfair to single out DejaNews like this. By default Sendmail logs the sender and recipient of every piece of email it handles, and Sendmail is on something like 90% of all computers that handle Internet email. This information has valid uses, such as tracking down spammers, and identifying misconfigured mail servers and clients.
Slashdot Mirror
The Nevada courts have ruled that counting cards is not cheating. That doesn't mean the casios have to like it, or have to let you play. If they suspect you of counting cards, they can and will ask you to leave the casio. They can't accuse of cheating though, which is a serious offense in Nevada.
In almost all cases, when playing with perfect Basic Strategy but without counting cards, there will still be a slight house advantage, but perhaps less than 1%. With card counting, advantage can be made to slightly favor the player.
Casinos will never eliminate Blackjack because the majority of players do not utilize perfect Basic Strategy, or don't pay attention to the unfavorable rule variations such as 6:5 Blackjack payoffs. These players give an enormous advantage to the house, more than enough to make up for most of the losses imposed by counters eeking out a 1% advantage over the house.
But as you say, casios don't like to lose, so if they can have their cake an eat it too, they will. They can and do take advantage of all means available within (and sometimes outside of) the law to discourage counters.
The encryption is not useless. It is true that it is not intended to prevent copies. Its purpose is to ensure that the movie studios have complete control over how you view and otherwise use their products.
And this is exactly the point the good guys should be making. Only DVD player manufacturers that have agreed to follow the rules can license CSS. That means if the movie studio wants you to watch anti-piracy messages, Coke ads, or previews for upcoming releases, and you are watching on a DVD player created by a legitimate licencee of CSS, you have no choice but to play through those messages. Among its other uses, DeCSS would permit the creation of a player that doesn't have to follow the CSS license rules, and allow you to skip "mandatory" content for example.
You say that "chained" encryption is secure as long as you can secretly communicate the the algorithm to the recipient. If you could could communicate secretly with the recipient, why not use that method to send your message?
Also, you say the security of "chained" encryption depends on the secrecy of the altgorithm. That means that if the secrecy of the algorithm is compromised, then all past and future communications using that algorithm are potentially compromised as well. Now you have to come up with a whole new algorithm, rather than just a new key. That is why the security of an encryption system must not depend on the security of the algorithm.
Apple can't make the iBook too good relative to the PowerBook G4, or it's low price would cannibalize sales from their premium laptop. That's why monitor spanning is disabled and they only put 16MB of RAM in it.
And although the capability exists in the Newton OS to sync via IR, that feature was never added to the sync software from Apple.
> Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.
:-) As a vi user, and a user of Apple laptops, I don't have any problem with the placement of the Control key.
Not all Unix users use emacs!
Actually, X can support both the Mac/Windows clipboard paradigm and the traditional X paradigm simultanously. Inexperienced users can just use the cut/copy/paste menu actions and don't even have to know about the other way of doing copy/paste. It is still available as a convenient shortcut for experienced users who want to save a few keystrokes or mouse clicks.
For a very good summary of clipboard behavior in the X Window system, see this document on clipboard behavior at FreeDesktop.org.
Basically, a few applications, including GNU Emacs 20 and applications based on Qt 2.x follow one interpretation of clipboard behavior where both mouse selection and copy and paste use the PRIMARY clipboard. Most other modern applications, including Netscape, Mozilla, XEmacs, Qt 3.x apps, and some GTK+ apps follow the preferred interpretation, where mouse selections and middle mouse-clicks use the ephemeral PRIMARY clipboard, and explicit cut/copy/paste operations use the CLIPBOARD clipboard. Under the preferred interpretation, Mac and Windows users could use the familiar menu operations, and experienced users could use the traditional select then middle-click paradigm, each without interfering with the other.
Upgrading to KDE 3.x would resolve the clipboard problems since it is based on Qt 3.x
Although I do worry about online privacy, I think
it is unfair to single out DejaNews like this. By
default Sendmail logs the sender and recipient of
every piece of email it handles, and Sendmail is on
something like 90% of all computers that handle
Internet email. This information has valid uses,
such as tracking down spammers, and identifying
misconfigured mail servers and clients.