If it's all a game, does the chance of getting sued make it more exciting? I mean, DwnLdrD00d may have more movies than you, but he wasn't careful and got busted, so you win!
Right?
(Personally, I always figured that $20 to own a copy of a movie that cost $100m to make, and the right to see it any time I wanted, was a pretty good deal.)
If you have a system that uses the apt package manager
You've kind of contradicted yourself right there. In fact, it's the word "if" that kind of makes your argument against yourself. Windows patch management by default fetches updates from the server all by itself and only asks you for confirmation to install them. Once you have to start asking "What is it I'm running?" you're already too complicated.
And that's even before we get to "as simple as typing 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade;' at the command line", a statement I find simply hilarious. Only a Linux user would consider typing a 30-character arbitrary mantra "simple".
I shouldn't even have read into this thread; I knew it was just going to be flamebait and I've let myself get sucked into it. I'm really not trying to defend any of the accusations that you're leveling against Windows, which are all true and much worse besides. But I'd like for you to listen to yourself before making statements like "updating in Linux is no more difficult than in Windows". Your conception of "difficult" is very, very different from mine.
Systems like that do have to be integrated with each other, and they need updates. You can either lay brand-new cable (and make sure that nobody physically hacks into it) or you can re-use the existing infrastructure.
The latter is a hell of a lot cheaper. And it's effective if you restrict what sorts of programs are used on the computer. Like there's no reason for these to have had port 445 open in the first place. (It's a hell of a lot easier to control open ports with Linux than with Windows.)
Restrict incoming bits to just the port you're expecting (or even better, make it "pull" and accept no unsolicited bits), and practice good software development, and you shouldn't have this problem.
To clarify: I meant "it's clearly offensive and an excellent example of 'inflammatory'", not to imply that you were being offensive; I took your meaning.
DVDs do explicitly include the warning. If not on the box itself, then on the warning material as soon as you put the disk in. I doubt a court would buy a claim that you didn't know that the DVD you just bought was for "home use only", even if it wasn't on the box, unless you could somehow claim that you'd never seen a DVD before.
That said, it would be really nice if CD manufacturers did put it on the outside of the package. I don't know how well "shrink wrap" licenses will hold up in court, but right now it's not the least clear that they consider you to be buying only the disc, not the music on it.
They got into the habit when there wasn't really a way to duplicate CDs, and they'll try to claim that the courts have made it clear that you didn't have the right to redistribute the music any more than you have a right to make and sell photocopies of books. Books don't include any warnings on their covers, either.
You clearly own full title to the physical book, and to the physical CD. The doubt seems to be ownership of the "content", independent of the physical medium, and different from the books and stereos that you "buy and own" since those CANNOT be duplicated. They'll consider the contract implicit, since it's part of copyright law.
They could, especially if they weren't networks. The networks have a particular reason (economically speaking) to keep the shows private: access to the limited resource of public airwaves and/or cable TV space/satellite space.
These are extremely convenient ways to watch TV, so people prefer them to Internet broadcasts. Also, because of the high barrier-to-entry, there's a perception (true or not) that it's "better" content: it's "what's on TV". There's a considerable amount of simple inertia, too.
So advertisers will pay more for a 30-second commericial on TV than for an overtitle on your web broadcast. (You may well find overlays even more aggravating than commercials.) Or you could put in real commercials and watch the slashdotters scream about the DRM you put on to keep people from skipping them.
You'll find that the expense of producing a TV show, plus the expense of serving up 640x480 video images, rapidly exceeds the budget you get from advertising.
That said, feel free to prove me wrong. Overcome the inertia, make something good enough that people WANT to download it. Or build a set-top box for serving up Internet-based content, and hook it up to a simple remote.
(The remote alone is a big barrier. A TV remote has the simplicity of ten digits because of the limited number of channels. Full URLs are going to be a pain in the ass. Tie it in to full-scale web surfing, perhaps, with a wireless keyboard, preferably for a high-def TV so that you can read the screen...)
I'd love to see the Internet break the barriers that scarce spectrum/cable/satellite bandwiths bring up. It's starting to happen with music, which has lower start-up costs both in production and bandwidth. Video content may be next.
They're inflammatory in the sense that they are focused on the poster rather than on the facts. Perhaps the poster wasn't aware of the facts that you're about to present, or missed them, or perhaps even has an interpretation of them different from yours. The poster hasn't had a chance to respond to you yet, so simply present your case without commenting on the intelligence of the poster.
Non sequiturs containing strings of insults are also inflammatory. Just because my definition of "inflammatory" includes things that yours doesn't does not somehow imply that racist slurs aren't also inflammatory. BTW: it's usually spelled "dago", and "wop" is not an acronym.
As for "perspective", I should point out that I only commented on his style of discourse because he had specifically said he wasn't trying to be confrontational. The things I pointed out are far from the most offensive or inflammatory things said on Slashdot, but neither are they particularly helpful to his argument; they're a judgment on the poster rather than the facts. It would have been more polite to leave them out.
If you're trying not to be confrontational, you can try leaving out deliberately inflammatory wordings like "failed to realize", "gross misunderstanding of the facts", and "would rather attach your own mistrust of journalism". Starting with "You are wrong, actually" is a bit humorous, since you're tying into the poster's text, but the trick to being non-confrontational is to point out how the poster can be wrong without it being a personal failing on their part.
Repeating yourself with bold marks, and the rhetorical "Do you see the difference?", don't increase the cogence of your argument, and it makes it look like you think the one you're replying to is stupid. Maybe they're wrong, but you can be wrong without being stupid.
Besides that, if you're going to claim that p2p traffic is the majority of international traffic, you're going to have to back that up. Emails of pictures don't contribute to the HTTP statistics, so if HTTP is still the dominant protocol, your example doesn't match the argument.
Don't get too wrapped up in individual comment moderations. It could be anything from a rogue jackass down-modding you at random to a mere jerk with mod points who disagreed with you.
Down-mods of people with good karma are always suspicious, which is why they tell you that modding up is more important than modding down. I almost never mod down; if you troll at AC it's just not worth my mod points to lower you from zero, and non-ACs are far less likely to troll/flame. But the good news is that one's karma is rarely so fragile, nor the jerks so numerous, that it seriously damages one's rep.
Actually, there were 14, including the pilot. Only four were actually shown before it was cancelled.
Not, in my opinion, the best four, but they were pretty good, especially the pilot. In fact the pilot wasn't shown first, for which a lot of fans blame the show's early demise: without the pilot you miss some backstory.
I do know a bunch of people who stopped watching after the first episode, but in each case I think they just didn't like the mix of Western and sci-fi themes. I think if they'd have stuck with it they'd have gotten over that and gotten into the writing and great performances, but who knows?
Oh, maybe you're the perfect target for this, then. You've just heard about it. I guess it works. I'd assumed everybody on Slashdot had at least heard about it by now.
Firefly was a TV show by the same guy who did Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It didn't last very long (4 episodes) before being cancelled, but it was extremely popular among the geek crowd (who claimed Fox never gave it a chance.) It was wildly popular on DVD, so they're making a movie called Serenity (the name of the spaceship).
The gist: it's a western set in space. It's even more obvious about it's western roots than, say, Star Trek (which was explicitly called "Wagon Train to the Stars"). The leads are veterans from a Confederacy-style rebeliion; the others in the ship are all outlaws of one kind or another (but good-guy outlaws, like Billy the Kid in some westerns). The costumes, props, sets, etc. look like a cross between Old West and sci-fi. Some people find that weird and disturbing. Others (like me) find it neat and well written.
River Tam is the biggest mystery: she acts autistic, but her brother rescued her from some sort of government lab for hyper-gifted children, and they want her back. The strong implication is that she's been trained as a psychic and assassin.
Now you know. The series was brought back from the dead as a movie because the fans think its brilliant. The characters are fun, the writing sharp, the look of the show visually appealing. Or maybe it's just stupid, as some Slashdotters also think. In a month you can go see the film. Assuming you've finished your design doc.
Here's the deal: somebody released a short film onto the P2P networks. It begins with the overtext "R. Tam/Session 416/Second Excerpt" and consists mostly of a man viewed from the back choking to death. After he croaks, River appears, looks directly into the camera, and says "I can see you," (as if to an experimenter behind a one-way mirror). It's in black and white, and the implication is that it's archival footage of one of River's training sessions, wherever she was.
"Viral Marketing" in this case means that it's not explicitly an ad for the movie. It's just released into the wild with the hopes that a lot of people will show it to each other going "What is this? Is it a clip from the movie, or what?"
The gist of "viral marketing" is to use nontraditional advertising (and it's really advertising rather than marketing), usually with something intriguing so that people will talk about the advertisement to each other. You don't spend money getting TV time for your ad or print a lot of materials; you let the people do it. Word of mouth has always been the best advertising, and the best way to get word-of-mouth is to catch people's imaginations. Like this video, which would be mysterious if it weren't obvious to everybody who's already in your target market.
When it works it's actually kind of interesting, but it tends to excite ignorant advertising executives who figure it's the Next Big Thing and promptly turn it into a formula. It works best when the thing you're advertising is interesting in and of itself.
So Serenity would seem to be a good target, but it's not. It only works when people don't immediately see through it. The film has nine kinds of positive buzz among the fans, and the only thing you're going to get is fanboys showing it to each other (like here on Slashdot). But for marketing all buzz is good buzz. The intent is that the clip is kind of mysterious, but there's no mystery, really, since the fanboys all know who R. Tam is already.
Is it a clip from the film? No, it doesn't appear to be. It appears to have been constructed for precisely this purpose: getting buzz.
You want "viral marketing", make a fake bootleg of a clip (from one of the preview screenings) and release that. THAT will get people talking. This will disappear in two days.
In a sense it sounds like they're planning to do that. They realize that they can't protect the low-def signal with existing hardware setups.
If they figure that over time people will be buying mostly the new high-def hardware, they could well be planning to stop prosecuting people for infringing the copyright on the low-def signal. They're not going to "give it away" in the sense of making it easy for you, but it might no longer be worth their effort to stop file sharing of the low-def video feed.
Their efforts are always concentrated on what will make them money. If there are only a few people downloading the low def signal, it won't be worth the effort to sue those who do. That's not making it legal, but it does "decriminalize" it somewhat.
Which would be funny, actually: they'd be figuring that content which is perfectly tolerable today might be unacceptable tomorrow. If it falls out as I'm suggesting, they'll figure that you might as well download the low-def version, because they hope people will spend the money (via cable TV or DVDs or TiVo download or whatever) to buy the real thing.
It's actually an excellent question for Slashdotters of various stripes. Would you be willing to settle for it in low-def, but with the restrictions removed, or would you commit whatever money it takes to get the real thing? (The third option of course is to go to the trouble of breaking the DRM and getting the best of both worlds, at the cost of inconvenience. The answer presumably depends on how inconvenient it is.)
Interesting, that's one thing I hadn't taken into account. I figured that the dealers were counting themselves out of sheer boredom, so they know which players are able to follow the count. But if there is one good counter at the table and three people who know only a little, the good counter will be hiding among the not-so-good ones. He'll be placing big bets when they do, and small bets when they do, and spotting him requires analyzing the marginal bets. That's serious work, and probably not worth it.
(And that's after you've culled out the guy hitting on 15 when the dealer's showing a 6. He could just write you a check and save everybody a lot of grief.)
You are correct: it's not illegal by the law (as far as I know), but it's against the house rules.
I have no idea what laws casino owners were able to buy in Nevada; for all I know it may actually be illegal to use a laser system against a roulette wheel. But it doesn't much matter; once they've discovered you they can kick you out. The only difference would be (a) whether you can keep what you've won so far, and (b) whether the police meet you on the outside.
Basically, they get to throw you out if they catch you counting because it's a private establishment. They can throw you out if they don't like the color of your shirt.
Honestly, I agree with you: it's dumb to throw out players just because they can play better than you allow yourself to. (The percentage comes mostly from the fact that the dealer must hit on 16 and soft 17 no matter what the count looks like. A smart dealer would have a huge advantage, with the player having a chance to bust first, but they don't want to make it a skill vs. skill contest.)
In Atlantic City, it's actually getting harder to find a straight 21 game. They have a lot of variants of it, and although I haven't done the math I bet they eliminate your percentage in the game. Your percentage is small and it's not that hard to eliminate it with a few rule changes. But I guess the Vegas houses feel strongly about the traditional game.
Still, it would be a lot cheaper to change the game than to try to catch people based on what's in their heads. (Or in their shoes, if they're using an illegal computer. At least there they're trying to restrict the game to skill, including memory, although again a rules change could eliminate the advantage of having a computer.)
I suspect that they like the fact that people know that there's a percentage to the player in 21, even though most people don't know how to get it. And unless you're playing on a team it's hard to make money fast at it. (If you can play well enough to get a 1% advantage, you win an average of $1 per hand at the $100 table, which comes out to perhaps $30 an hour. Real money, certainly, but a lot of work for it.)
So if there are 6 players at the table and 5 of them are losing because they don't play the game very well, and they can catch you if you're making the big money playing on a team, it may still be to their advantage to leave the rules as they are. I've never heard of them messing with a small-time card counter, even though it's obvious they're counting.
Sounds dumb to me. There's a lot more vigorous cheating going on (stealing chips when people aren't looking, for example) that's easier to catch.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say I didn't understand. Of course I understand why people would rather pay $0 than $10 for a movie ticket.
I'm pointing out the irony: maybe if they'd gone to see it in the theater, it wouldn't have been such a flop.
Or, from the other side: "Hey, why not download it rather than pay for it? It was crap anyway! The fact that nobody paid to see it proves it."
If it's all a game, does the chance of getting sued make it more exciting? I mean, DwnLdrD00d may have more movies than you, but he wasn't careful and got busted, so you win!
Right?
(Personally, I always figured that $20 to own a copy of a movie that cost $100m to make, and the right to see it any time I wanted, was a pretty good deal.)
without having to even make new films that might flop
I can't help but find it a bit ironic that people might be downloading movies which were in fact box office flops.
"Well, I didn't think it was going to be good enough to see in a theater, but for FREE, well..."
If you have a system that uses the apt package manager
You've kind of contradicted yourself right there. In fact, it's the word "if" that kind of makes your argument against yourself. Windows patch management by default fetches updates from the server all by itself and only asks you for confirmation to install them. Once you have to start asking "What is it I'm running?" you're already too complicated.
And that's even before we get to "as simple as typing 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade;' at the command line", a statement I find simply hilarious. Only a Linux user would consider typing a 30-character arbitrary mantra "simple".
I shouldn't even have read into this thread; I knew it was just going to be flamebait and I've let myself get sucked into it. I'm really not trying to defend any of the accusations that you're leveling against Windows, which are all true and much worse besides. But I'd like for you to listen to yourself before making statements like "updating in Linux is no more difficult than in Windows". Your conception of "difficult" is very, very different from mine.
Spotted dick has a funny name, but the ingredients are actually pretty innocuous, and it's pretty tasty.
"Liver and lights", on the other hand...yeek. Can't say as I've ever had it, but I'd try it. Once.
who the hell uses the term 'screen moniker'??
COM programmers, perhaps?
Systems like that do have to be integrated with each other, and they need updates. You can either lay brand-new cable (and make sure that nobody physically hacks into it) or you can re-use the existing infrastructure.
The latter is a hell of a lot cheaper. And it's effective if you restrict what sorts of programs are used on the computer. Like there's no reason for these to have had port 445 open in the first place. (It's a hell of a lot easier to control open ports with Linux than with Windows.)
Restrict incoming bits to just the port you're expecting (or even better, make it "pull" and accept no unsolicited bits), and practice good software development, and you shouldn't have this problem.
To clarify: I meant "it's clearly offensive and an excellent example of 'inflammatory'", not to imply that you were being offensive; I took your meaning.
Many web sites call that an urban legend.
Whatever the etymology, it's clearly offensive.
DVDs do explicitly include the warning. If not on the box itself, then on the warning material as soon as you put the disk in. I doubt a court would buy a claim that you didn't know that the DVD you just bought was for "home use only", even if it wasn't on the box, unless you could somehow claim that you'd never seen a DVD before.
That said, it would be really nice if CD manufacturers did put it on the outside of the package. I don't know how well "shrink wrap" licenses will hold up in court, but right now it's not the least clear that they consider you to be buying only the disc, not the music on it.
They got into the habit when there wasn't really a way to duplicate CDs, and they'll try to claim that the courts have made it clear that you didn't have the right to redistribute the music any more than you have a right to make and sell photocopies of books. Books don't include any warnings on their covers, either.
You clearly own full title to the physical book, and to the physical CD. The doubt seems to be ownership of the "content", independent of the physical medium, and different from the books and stereos that you "buy and own" since those CANNOT be duplicated. They'll consider the contract implicit, since it's part of copyright law.
I concur. I did consider retracting the use of the word when I responded to you. "Impolite" would have been a better word choice.
Now, I wouldn't go so far as to call it a GROSS misuse...
(that's a joke.)
They could, especially if they weren't networks. The networks have a particular reason (economically speaking) to keep the shows private: access to the limited resource of public airwaves and/or cable TV space/satellite space.
These are extremely convenient ways to watch TV, so people prefer them to Internet broadcasts. Also, because of the high barrier-to-entry, there's a perception (true or not) that it's "better" content: it's "what's on TV". There's a considerable amount of simple inertia, too.
So advertisers will pay more for a 30-second commericial on TV than for an overtitle on your web broadcast. (You may well find overlays even more aggravating than commercials.) Or you could put in real commercials and watch the slashdotters scream about the DRM you put on to keep people from skipping them.
You'll find that the expense of producing a TV show, plus the expense of serving up 640x480 video images, rapidly exceeds the budget you get from advertising.
That said, feel free to prove me wrong. Overcome the inertia, make something good enough that people WANT to download it. Or build a set-top box for serving up Internet-based content, and hook it up to a simple remote.
(The remote alone is a big barrier. A TV remote has the simplicity of ten digits because of the limited number of channels. Full URLs are going to be a pain in the ass. Tie it in to full-scale web surfing, perhaps, with a wireless keyboard, preferably for a high-def TV so that you can read the screen...)
I'd love to see the Internet break the barriers that scarce spectrum/cable/satellite bandwiths bring up. It's starting to happen with music, which has lower start-up costs both in production and bandwidth. Video content may be next.
Or birthday suit.
Who knows what's going on under those robes?
They're inflammatory in the sense that they are focused on the poster rather than on the facts. Perhaps the poster wasn't aware of the facts that you're about to present, or missed them, or perhaps even has an interpretation of them different from yours. The poster hasn't had a chance to respond to you yet, so simply present your case without commenting on the intelligence of the poster.
Non sequiturs containing strings of insults are also inflammatory. Just because my definition of "inflammatory" includes things that yours doesn't does not somehow imply that racist slurs aren't also inflammatory. BTW: it's usually spelled "dago", and "wop" is not an acronym.
As for "perspective", I should point out that I only commented on his style of discourse because he had specifically said he wasn't trying to be confrontational. The things I pointed out are far from the most offensive or inflammatory things said on Slashdot, but neither are they particularly helpful to his argument; they're a judgment on the poster rather than the facts. It would have been more polite to leave them out.
If you're trying not to be confrontational, you can try leaving out deliberately inflammatory wordings like "failed to realize", "gross misunderstanding of the facts", and "would rather attach your own mistrust of journalism". Starting with "You are wrong, actually" is a bit humorous, since you're tying into the poster's text, but the trick to being non-confrontational is to point out how the poster can be wrong without it being a personal failing on their part.
Repeating yourself with bold marks, and the rhetorical "Do you see the difference?", don't increase the cogence of your argument, and it makes it look like you think the one you're replying to is stupid. Maybe they're wrong, but you can be wrong without being stupid.
Besides that, if you're going to claim that p2p traffic is the majority of international traffic, you're going to have to back that up. Emails of pictures don't contribute to the HTTP statistics, so if HTTP is still the dominant protocol, your example doesn't match the argument.
Don't get too wrapped up in individual comment moderations. It could be anything from a rogue jackass down-modding you at random to a mere jerk with mod points who disagreed with you.
Down-mods of people with good karma are always suspicious, which is why they tell you that modding up is more important than modding down. I almost never mod down; if you troll at AC it's just not worth my mod points to lower you from zero, and non-ACs are far less likely to troll/flame. But the good news is that one's karma is rarely so fragile, nor the jerks so numerous, that it seriously damages one's rep.
Actually, there were 14, including the pilot. Only four were actually shown before it was cancelled.
Not, in my opinion, the best four, but they were pretty good, especially the pilot. In fact the pilot wasn't shown first, for which a lot of fans blame the show's early demise: without the pilot you miss some backstory.
I do know a bunch of people who stopped watching after the first episode, but in each case I think they just didn't like the mix of Western and sci-fi themes. I think if they'd have stuck with it they'd have gotten over that and gotten into the writing and great performances, but who knows?
Oh, maybe you're the perfect target for this, then. You've just heard about it. I guess it works. I'd assumed everybody on Slashdot had at least heard about it by now.
Firefly was a TV show by the same guy who did Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It didn't last very long (4 episodes) before being cancelled, but it was extremely popular among the geek crowd (who claimed Fox never gave it a chance.) It was wildly popular on DVD, so they're making a movie called Serenity (the name of the spaceship).
The gist: it's a western set in space. It's even more obvious about it's western roots than, say, Star Trek (which was explicitly called "Wagon Train to the Stars"). The leads are veterans from a Confederacy-style rebeliion; the others in the ship are all outlaws of one kind or another (but good-guy outlaws, like Billy the Kid in some westerns). The costumes, props, sets, etc. look like a cross between Old West and sci-fi. Some people find that weird and disturbing. Others (like me) find it neat and well written.
River Tam is the biggest mystery: she acts autistic, but her brother rescued her from some sort of government lab for hyper-gifted children, and they want her back. The strong implication is that she's been trained as a psychic and assassin.
Now you know. The series was brought back from the dead as a movie because the fans think its brilliant. The characters are fun, the writing sharp, the look of the show visually appealing. Or maybe it's just stupid, as some Slashdotters also think. In a month you can go see the film. Assuming you've finished your design doc.
Here's the deal: somebody released a short film onto the P2P networks. It begins with the overtext "R. Tam/Session 416/Second Excerpt" and consists mostly of a man viewed from the back choking to death. After he croaks, River appears, looks directly into the camera, and says "I can see you," (as if to an experimenter behind a one-way mirror). It's in black and white, and the implication is that it's archival footage of one of River's training sessions, wherever she was.
"Viral Marketing" in this case means that it's not explicitly an ad for the movie. It's just released into the wild with the hopes that a lot of people will show it to each other going "What is this? Is it a clip from the movie, or what?"
The gist of "viral marketing" is to use nontraditional advertising (and it's really advertising rather than marketing), usually with something intriguing so that people will talk about the advertisement to each other. You don't spend money getting TV time for your ad or print a lot of materials; you let the people do it. Word of mouth has always been the best advertising, and the best way to get word-of-mouth is to catch people's imaginations. Like this video, which would be mysterious if it weren't obvious to everybody who's already in your target market.
When it works it's actually kind of interesting, but it tends to excite ignorant advertising executives who figure it's the Next Big Thing and promptly turn it into a formula. It works best when the thing you're advertising is interesting in and of itself.
So Serenity would seem to be a good target, but it's not. It only works when people don't immediately see through it. The film has nine kinds of positive buzz among the fans, and the only thing you're going to get is fanboys showing it to each other (like here on Slashdot). But for marketing all buzz is good buzz. The intent is that the clip is kind of mysterious, but there's no mystery, really, since the fanboys all know who R. Tam is already.
Is it a clip from the film? No, it doesn't appear to be. It appears to have been constructed for precisely this purpose: getting buzz.
You want "viral marketing", make a fake bootleg of a clip (from one of the preview screenings) and release that. THAT will get people talking. This will disappear in two days.
Since you're already modded up as far as you're gonna get, I'll just say "Thanks." That's a great article.
In a sense it sounds like they're planning to do that. They realize that they can't protect the low-def signal with existing hardware setups.
If they figure that over time people will be buying mostly the new high-def hardware, they could well be planning to stop prosecuting people for infringing the copyright on the low-def signal. They're not going to "give it away" in the sense of making it easy for you, but it might no longer be worth their effort to stop file sharing of the low-def video feed.
Their efforts are always concentrated on what will make them money. If there are only a few people downloading the low def signal, it won't be worth the effort to sue those who do. That's not making it legal, but it does "decriminalize" it somewhat.
Which would be funny, actually: they'd be figuring that content which is perfectly tolerable today might be unacceptable tomorrow. If it falls out as I'm suggesting, they'll figure that you might as well download the low-def version, because they hope people will spend the money (via cable TV or DVDs or TiVo download or whatever) to buy the real thing.
It's actually an excellent question for Slashdotters of various stripes. Would you be willing to settle for it in low-def, but with the restrictions removed, or would you commit whatever money it takes to get the real thing? (The third option of course is to go to the trouble of breaking the DRM and getting the best of both worlds, at the cost of inconvenience. The answer presumably depends on how inconvenient it is.)
I've been waiting for it to index Thunderbird mail, because Thunderbird's search is pretty slow. It claims to do that now. Yay!
Interesting, that's one thing I hadn't taken into account. I figured that the dealers were counting themselves out of sheer boredom, so they know which players are able to follow the count. But if there is one good counter at the table and three people who know only a little, the good counter will be hiding among the not-so-good ones. He'll be placing big bets when they do, and small bets when they do, and spotting him requires analyzing the marginal bets. That's serious work, and probably not worth it.
(And that's after you've culled out the guy hitting on 15 when the dealer's showing a 6. He could just write you a check and save everybody a lot of grief.)
You are correct: it's not illegal by the law (as far as I know), but it's against the house rules.
I have no idea what laws casino owners were able to buy in Nevada; for all I know it may actually be illegal to use a laser system against a roulette wheel. But it doesn't much matter; once they've discovered you they can kick you out. The only difference would be (a) whether you can keep what you've won so far, and (b) whether the police meet you on the outside.
Basically, they get to throw you out if they catch you counting because it's a private establishment. They can throw you out if they don't like the color of your shirt.
Honestly, I agree with you: it's dumb to throw out players just because they can play better than you allow yourself to. (The percentage comes mostly from the fact that the dealer must hit on 16 and soft 17 no matter what the count looks like. A smart dealer would have a huge advantage, with the player having a chance to bust first, but they don't want to make it a skill vs. skill contest.)
In Atlantic City, it's actually getting harder to find a straight 21 game. They have a lot of variants of it, and although I haven't done the math I bet they eliminate your percentage in the game. Your percentage is small and it's not that hard to eliminate it with a few rule changes. But I guess the Vegas houses feel strongly about the traditional game.
Still, it would be a lot cheaper to change the game than to try to catch people based on what's in their heads. (Or in their shoes, if they're using an illegal computer. At least there they're trying to restrict the game to skill, including memory, although again a rules change could eliminate the advantage of having a computer.)
I suspect that they like the fact that people know that there's a percentage to the player in 21, even though most people don't know how to get it. And unless you're playing on a team it's hard to make money fast at it. (If you can play well enough to get a 1% advantage, you win an average of $1 per hand at the $100 table, which comes out to perhaps $30 an hour. Real money, certainly, but a lot of work for it.)
So if there are 6 players at the table and 5 of them are losing because they don't play the game very well, and they can catch you if you're making the big money playing on a team, it may still be to their advantage to leave the rules as they are. I've never heard of them messing with a small-time card counter, even though it's obvious they're counting.
Sounds dumb to me. There's a lot more vigorous cheating going on (stealing chips when people aren't looking, for example) that's easier to catch.