Ultimately, they were only able to nail the guy because someone on the inside (probably) helped them. Had that not occurred it might never have happened. And they were doing this in the most blatant manner possible for years before they were caught. This does not inspire confidence.
It's a fact of life that there is always someone better than you lurking somewhere. The champions of today will be beat by some pimply faced guy from the internet next year. It would seem that the primary skill of successful professional poker players is avoiding one another and finding tables with suckers on them.
Your logic on the second paragraph is stunning. Do you use that kind of logic to melt the brains of other players? I think it would work.
Theoretically with the stock market, the money you invest in the companies is used to grow the company, meaning there is a chance for everybody to win because you have helped to create wealth by letting the company become more profitable. In gambling no wealth is ever created, in fact it is lost once you consider the house cut.
In Poker all players put X amount of money in, and in the end leave with X - Y money, where Y is the cut. Unless you have some system to guarantee that your opponents will lose, only the house wins in the end.
2) It's profitable. When playing poker, you don't have to beat the house, you just have to beat the other players. The house takes a portion of the winnings but if you can consistently beat the rest of the table then you come out ahead. It's not like other casino games in this respect. You're not playing against the house, you're just paying the house for the privilege of playing against other people. You can, and many people do, make a living playing poker.
This aspect always confuses me. All players together put X amount of money in, and get X - Y amount back out in the end (albeit concentrated on only a few players). Unless you can guarentee that you're going to play against people who are worse than you (I guess the game works on a "sucker born every minute" policy?) then in the end you can't make money over the long term.
There are two possibilities:
1. It was set up like that on purpose because the programmer wanted to write a version of the app that let him cheat.
2. Plain old incompetence.
I don't know which one this is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the second. The other thing I wouldn't be surprised about is if the link wasn't encrypted, or had a flaw in the encryption, that allowed someone with a packet sniffer near the server to watch each hand as it went out.
The article is very weird. First it goes and talks about how the people on the forum were able to track a single account making ridiculously good bets well outside of what chance would suggest is probable, then in the next paragraph it talks about how the perpetrators were creating hundreds of fake accounts and swapping them out constantly to avoid exactly that sort of analysis. The depressing thing is that the take away lesson from the article is: If you have a surefire way to cheat at poker, make sure you do it slowly enough to stay in the statistical noise and don't get too greedy. My suspicion is that this sort of cheating is far more rampant than the industry would like to admit, but most of the people who do it are smart enough to stay under the radar. Gambling online is an even surer way of losing your money than gambling at a casino.
I've looked into that, but the Rube Goldberg setup like that always runs into trouble. Either the BIOS is flaky and doesn't do a good job of keeping it's schedule, or you're working late at night and suddenly your machine powers down because the script told it to.
You know the worst thing? For anybody who has a decent job and not too many obligations, $170 is really not that much money. Compared to people who own second cars, or boats, or virtually any other recreational device and the extra couple of hundred bucks on a video card is downright cheap, especially since it lengthens your upgrade cycle (cheap cards fall below the "acceptable" threshold faster). Granted, a lot of/.'s readers are poor college students (I was one myself once), but eventually when you graduate people start giving you money you can afford to spend a couple hundred bucks every 3 years or so.
I wish you could get an iPhone without the camera.:/
Frankly, some of the places that used to have very strict "no camera" policies are starting to loosen up a bit. Courtrooms won't, but some military bases have made (sometimes informal) exceptions to the no cameras policy just because so many of the people have trouble finding phones that do what they need yet don't have the camera.
For practical considerations as well, it's ridiculously easy to hide a cellphone quality camera on your person, so policies like that were only stopping the honest people anyway. A better policy is to just disallow picture taking (but not cameras) on the base, as that still gives you something to detain a bad guy with (although it's less cut and dry) while not putting people who just need to do their job in an untenable position.
Wow, where have you been getting your phone manuals? All of the ones I've seen have been a pamphlet that says "put the battery in, turn the phone on". You're lucky if they enumerate the menu options or tell you what key to press to put the phone on standby. The only substantial portion is the two or three pages of fine print about what you cannot do with your phone (hint: everything except make a call) without violating the TOS.
Except for the multitude of cards that require you to basically reflash the firmware as part of the initialization? Cheap 802.11 cards are notorious for this, and it's a pain because it means you have to ship a binary blob with the driver and all of the licensing headaches that entails.
I don't know where you get the idea that SMS has anywhere near 0% error rate. As best as I can tell, they get sent on the lowest priority possible, are sometimes delayed for minutes or hours, and occasionally never make it at all.
Who's responsibility though? Should Google have people fact check every news story their bots pick up before putting it up on the aggregator? Should stock companies put fact checkers between the newsfeeds and their stock sale bots? Should online newspapers have fact checkers on every article they put online?
This does show just how fragile a system can be when there is a strong disincentive to going second or third on tasks that one would normally think you should have human interaction.
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Ultimately, they were only able to nail the guy because someone on the inside (probably) helped them. Had that not occurred it might never have happened. And they were doing this in the most blatant manner possible for years before they were caught. This does not inspire confidence.
It may be hard to get invited back to Poker night if you're that stuck up guy who won't even have a beer because it'll mess up his game though.
It's a fact of life that there is always someone better than you lurking somewhere. The champions of today will be beat by some pimply faced guy from the internet next year. It would seem that the primary skill of successful professional poker players is avoiding one another and finding tables with suckers on them.
Your logic on the second paragraph is stunning. Do you use that kind of logic to melt the brains of other players? I think it would work.
Theoretically with the stock market, the money you invest in the companies is used to grow the company, meaning there is a chance for everybody to win because you have helped to create wealth by letting the company become more profitable. In gambling no wealth is ever created, in fact it is lost once you consider the house cut.
In Poker all players put X amount of money in, and in the end leave with X - Y money, where Y is the cut. Unless you have some system to guarantee that your opponents will lose, only the house wins in the end.
This aspect always confuses me. All players together put X amount of money in, and get X - Y amount back out in the end (albeit concentrated on only a few players). Unless you can guarentee that you're going to play against people who are worse than you (I guess the game works on a "sucker born every minute" policy?) then in the end you can't make money over the long term.
I'd be pretty pissed if my bank was taking my mortgage out to Vegas and losing it.
There are two possibilities:
1. It was set up like that on purpose because the programmer wanted to write a version of the app that let him cheat.
2. Plain old incompetence.
I don't know which one this is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the second. The other thing I wouldn't be surprised about is if the link wasn't encrypted, or had a flaw in the encryption, that allowed someone with a packet sniffer near the server to watch each hand as it went out.
The article is very weird. First it goes and talks about how the people on the forum were able to track a single account making ridiculously good bets well outside of what chance would suggest is probable, then in the next paragraph it talks about how the perpetrators were creating hundreds of fake accounts and swapping them out constantly to avoid exactly that sort of analysis. The depressing thing is that the take away lesson from the article is: If you have a surefire way to cheat at poker, make sure you do it slowly enough to stay in the statistical noise and don't get too greedy. My suspicion is that this sort of cheating is far more rampant than the industry would like to admit, but most of the people who do it are smart enough to stay under the radar. Gambling online is an even surer way of losing your money than gambling at a casino.
There is only one way to make money gambling: Make sure you are "the house". In the long run, only the house wins.
I've looked into that, but the Rube Goldberg setup like that always runs into trouble. Either the BIOS is flaky and doesn't do a good job of keeping it's schedule, or you're working late at night and suddenly your machine powers down because the script told it to.
But night time is when the backups run! Not to mention all of those system maintenance scripts.
I think it's more that the creator is out doing a national book promotion tour. That's how you normally get slots like this on these shows.
So if you don't go anywhere and live like a college student you can save money? Wow. Who would have thought.
Actually, it's not even a hot topic in the US, just the handful of nuts that want to make a big deal of it know how to get on TV.
The grandparent was probably referring to Edwards v. Aguillard.
You know the worst thing? For anybody who has a decent job and not too many obligations, $170 is really not that much money. Compared to people who own second cars, or boats, or virtually any other recreational device and the extra couple of hundred bucks on a video card is downright cheap, especially since it lengthens your upgrade cycle (cheap cards fall below the "acceptable" threshold faster). Granted, a lot of /.'s readers are poor college students (I was one myself once), but eventually when you graduate people start giving you money you can afford to spend a couple hundred bucks every 3 years or so.
I wish you could get an iPhone without the camera. :/
Frankly, some of the places that used to have very strict "no camera" policies are starting to loosen up a bit. Courtrooms won't, but some military bases have made (sometimes informal) exceptions to the no cameras policy just because so many of the people have trouble finding phones that do what they need yet don't have the camera.
For practical considerations as well, it's ridiculously easy to hide a cellphone quality camera on your person, so policies like that were only stopping the honest people anyway. A better policy is to just disallow picture taking (but not cameras) on the base, as that still gives you something to detain a bad guy with (although it's less cut and dry) while not putting people who just need to do their job in an untenable position.
Wow, where have you been getting your phone manuals? All of the ones I've seen have been a pamphlet that says "put the battery in, turn the phone on". You're lucky if they enumerate the menu options or tell you what key to press to put the phone on standby. The only substantial portion is the two or three pages of fine print about what you cannot do with your phone (hint: everything except make a call) without violating the TOS.
The only thing that would save it is if they make the DRM stuff an optional module you have to download.
Except for the multitude of cards that require you to basically reflash the firmware as part of the initialization? Cheap 802.11 cards are notorious for this, and it's a pain because it means you have to ship a binary blob with the driver and all of the licensing headaches that entails.
I don't know where you get the idea that SMS has anywhere near 0% error rate. As best as I can tell, they get sent on the lowest priority possible, are sometimes delayed for minutes or hours, and occasionally never make it at all.
Who's responsibility though? Should Google have people fact check every news story their bots pick up before putting it up on the aggregator? Should stock companies put fact checkers between the newsfeeds and their stock sale bots? Should online newspapers have fact checkers on every article they put online?
This does show just how fragile a system can be when there is a strong disincentive to going second or third on tasks that one would normally think you should have human interaction.
I was thinking I played that game on my 2600 back in the day.
I've never seen a similar sized NiMH battery with less capacity than a NiCad.