Of course this could be Labour spin to try and get people excited about the idea of cheating at mega casinos.
Can somebody tell me what this means? Why would Labour (which I assume to mean the UK Labour Party) want to get people excited about cheating at mega casinos?
On one hand, any publicity is good publicity. But more specifically, letting these people keep the money may give the average person the impression that maybe they can try their hand at a laser-roulette scam, or perhaps maybe a card counting scam, or... etc. But casinos are profitable for a reason, and even if a few people succeed at cheating, the vast majority will lose money -- more than enough to make up for the cheaters.
And more publicity and this sense of "Do YOU want to try your luck?" brings in more business for the casinos, which would mean more revenue for the government through taxing or however they make money off the casinos.
Absolutely true on the logic point. I admit that the point does sort of masquerade as a logical argument when it's really not.
I just found it equally deceptive that the parent poster was using the emotional nature of the Port Arthur event to elicit an illogical anti-gun response.
If you want a black market handgun in Australia, you are looking at a price tag of several thousands of dollars. The same gun in the US would be, $50 perhaps. That price tag is the key - what down and out crim can afford that?... Don't wait for a massacre like out Port Arthur tragedy.
$50 my ass. If you ever buy a gun for $50, you'd better have a good emergency room nearby, because that gun is going to explode in your hand.
Incidentally, in the aforementioned Port Arthur tragedy, the individual possessed an AR-15, and an FN FAL, guns that easily command a price tag over $1000 dollars each (even in the post-ban United States). So much for a thousands-of-dollars price tag deterring crime.
Only shooting for 10%? They should come up with a good slogan to help them hit their goals, like:
Mozilla FireFox -- The Libertarian Candidate of Browsers
Mozilla FireFox -- Shouldn't YOUR computer be on Fire?
Re:Optimizing schmoptimizing
on
Optimizing Perl
·
· Score: 1
Certainly true. But the impression I got from my friend was that the code they wrote was a little bit redundant, and they just didn't bother to remove the redundancies. I think readability and maintainability was not really affected either way.
Optimizing schmoptimizing
on
Optimizing Perl
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have a friend who works at a big company that provides a lot of "utility" to its customers.
They run perl scripts all the time to crunch text files containing lots of data coming in from remote sensors and stuff like that. He told me that the more senior guys have the philosophy is "Optimize? nah, just let it run the extra 20 minutes."
And they're talking about scripts that get run in a cron job DAILY.
The example is flawed; the theory is ok
on
Optimizing Perl
·
· Score: 1
Take his examples with a grain of salt. A number of the examples may be flawed in some cases, mostly because the quantities of data involved are so small that performance bottlenecks are moved to other areas. This is a good lesson for performance benchmarking: Know where your bottlenecks are. The ideas in the article are mostly valid, but they just don't apply when this is not where your bottleneck is.
Incidentally, I am getting a slightly better speed on the singlequote example (as claimed). My times are 12s vs 14s.
The primary bottleneck here is in the IO of the print statement itself. I bet that the string interpolation is probably very fast compared to the buffering slowness induced start/stop-ness of the second print statement. Most likely you have a very fast CPU.
Buffering makes all the difference in the world. From some of the benchmarking I've done previously, I have a hypothesis that "\n" sent to a print statement will trigger a buffer flush after it finishes sending that string off to the print statement.
In other words, an exaggerated version of foreach(1..1000) { print "blah\n";} will be slower than foreach (1..50) { print "blah\ntimes ten" }
I have seriously changed the execution time of one script from 980ms to 98 ms just as a result of bad buffering from the print statement. I think that the process of splitting up the print statements probably made it wait (more often) for the I/O resources.
In my particular case, I had a CGI script running off localhost, that was outputting about 30kb of text, looping through 80 or 90 records of data. Rather than doing the print statements directly, I buffered everything to a string, and then at the end of the loop. As a tradeoff, I think I may have actually settled on flushing my string buffer at the end of each loop cycle.
Just for the record, I think the article is good in the sense that if you didn't realize that what you were doing might be a performance issue, it's a good wakeup call to go and benchmark your code. But don't just follow the advice on faith.
test:
my $trials = 5000000;
PrivoxyWindowOpen(FH, ">testfile.txt"); $startt1 = time; for (1..$trials) {
print FH "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa\n"; } $endt1 = time - $startt1; close FH; print "Elapsed time: $endt1\n";
PrivoxyWindowOpen(FH, ">testfile.txt"); $startt1 = time; for (1..$trials) {
print FH 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa', "\n"; } $endt1 = time - $startt1; close FH; print "Elapsed time: $endt1\n";
kill 'testfile.txt';
A better way to Sort than in the article.
on
Optimizing Perl
·
· Score: 4, Informative
In the article, the author mentions that a faster way of implementing this sort:
So both strings would have a sort value of 111110200, but of course, data object 1 should be sorted before data object 2. Using delimiters in the sprintf statement will ensure that different fields are marked as different, but they will interfere with the sort order.
Another problem is that if your sort string is too long, perl may convert it to a floating point number and thus lose the data from the later fields.
The added benefit of this method is that it definitely won't have overflow problems (which may be the case in the above examples, because "<=>" is the numeric compare operator. Had the author used "cmp", there would then be a quantity of numeric comparisons proportional to the length of the sort string.
The other benefit of my sort is that it is more flexible. you can change the "<=>" operator to a "cmp" operator if one of your fields is string data.
The sort that I propose (one I've been using) may or may not be faster than the "faster" sort proposed by the author, but then again, speed is nothing without correctness.
Incidentally, pepperball.net appears to be a manufacturer and seems to be informative in how these may be applied. 350-380 fps is the nominal pepperball muzzle velocity.
[From FAQ] All PepperBall launchers can target accurately at distances up to 30 feet.For PAVA (Capsaicin II) area saturation, projectilescan be broken against a hard surface such as a car or wall at distances up to 150 feet.
In other words, they can still be effective even if you don't aim for the target individual.
[Training FAQ] PepperBall projectiles can be shot at point-blank range, although the kinetic impact will be slightly greater at close range. Suspects can be accurately targeted up to 30 feet away with the enough kinetic impact to shatter the projectile and leave a welt or bruise. PepperBall projectiles should never be aimed at a suspect's eyes, face, throat, and spine. Instead, aim below the neck at the suspect's torso or center of mass area.
There are multiple other statements that the pepperball is safe at point blank range. (what exactly "safe" means, I will leave to the reader's judgement.)
You are probably right; it's only a matter of time before someone bends down and gets hit in the eye. Then again, same thing for rubber bullets. Note that most riot control weapons are called "less lethal weapons," because they always have the potential of causing serious bodily injury if placed (in-)correctly. The difference with pepperballs is that you can still incapacitate your target if you hit the ground in front of them or the wall behind them.
It appears that pepperballs can be considered as a way of saturating the air of the target zone with a strong irritant. This option is completely unavailable in paintball (or with rubber bullets), and so really this method appears no worse than rubber bullets (or even hoses with water [since people will get knocked down].) I would also argue that a misplaced baton to the face would also cause permanent damage.
You will get the Device itself, a case to protect it while traveling, and an instruction manuel
Manuel? Who's manuel? Is that like a grandmaster who helps give you instructions on how to play?
Seriously though, it seems like there wasn't a lot to review here. It's like you state the features, and there's really not much else to tell.
The clasp is interesting. It seems like a magnet, but it is attracted to a small clear plastic strip that is on the bottom portion of the case. I personally didn't know magnets were attracted to plastic. Maybe it has some metal in it.
Hm, good to know. I'll definitely factor that in when I'm thinking about buying it.
The computer will not allow you to make illegal moves, so it is helpful to have all the moves memorized.
If you ask me, all chess computers are expected not to allow you to make illegal moves. If you they don't do that, IT'S NOT CHESS.
What was missing from the review, IMHO: - Pictures. All the descriptions of where buttons and indicators were would have left me more satisfied if I could actually have seen where they were, rather than simply imagining it. - How tough are the levels? Something like, "I've been playing for x years, my rating is yyy (or, I don't have a rating), and I was beaten thoroughly past level zzz." - Are all the computer's moves instantaneous? Does it take longer for the computer to think on higher levels? How much longer? - Battery Life. - What competing products are there? If Saitek won't let you mention competitors, then you're just being an advertising stool pigeon for them.
For some reason, I like this line:
you have to pack a big board and lots of pieces. This makes it very inconvenient to whip it out for a quick game.
Besides having some innuendo, I must say that it is tough to play at a moment's notice. Is carrying a chess board around what's really stopping you from playing all the time? I mean, unless you just go around challenging the guy sitting next to you on the bus, I don't think carrying a chess board around is going to do you any good. Just my opinion. I'm sure there are contradictory examples.
Must have been a slow news day for this to get onto slashdot.
The reason that I didn't address the firearm issue is that I think in most cases that it's wrong and that it is a completely off-topic debate. Firearm possession/ownership and the rights conferred by the second amendment is worthy debate (read:messy can of worms) that doesn't need to be opened up here.
Regarding "exclusive jurisdiction" and private contracts, sure. Point made. The State of Texas may not make such restrictions, but perhaps two consenting parties may.
Based on the footnotes, it seems like there might contain some applicable precedent in cases between private entities. Since I didn't bother to research it (being only/.), I say this more as a comment than an argument.
The difference between regulating 2.4GHz and regulating smoking, and firearm ownership is in that the government does not claim exclusive jurisdiction. Also, the hotplate issue is a safety issue, which incidentally, is an acceptable reason to ban the use of a 2.4 GHz device. Interference, however, is not.
From the FCC pdf:
In addition, Section 302 has granted the Commission express authority to adopt regulations "governing the interference potential of devices which in their operation are capable of emitting radio frequency energy by radiation... in sufficient degree to cause harmful interference to radio communications." As the Conference Report to the 1982 Amendments to the Act stated, the Act reserves "exclusive jurisdiction to the Federal Communications Commission over matters involving RFI [and provides] that regulation of RFI phenomena shall be imposed only by the Commission."
Exclusive. In this case, a provision prohibiting the use of a 2.4 GHz device directly contradicts a federal law.
Not really. There are already a lot of people who believe that the RH is likely to be true.
Just because the hypothesis hasn't been proven doesn't mean someone can't start working on an application that only works if it is true. I'm pretty sure there's guys already working under this assumption. Don't know anyone personally, but that's what I'm told.
Quantum computing is a nice, related example. When Shor came up with a factoring algorithm, no one had proven that quantum computing was possible. But that didn't stop him from working on his algorithm.
I think the article's intro is a sensational piece of crap. Until someone justifies the author's introduction paragraph, he (Tim Radford) has lost my respect.
I hate the inane chatter as much as you do, and so often I wish I could turn on a jammer.
The FCC may think cell phones are safe for use, but have they considered whether passengers will be safe from the likes of people who are stupid enough to engage their cell phone jammers on the plane...:-S
Technically it's not GIF that's losing the image data. Actually it's Photoshop (or image manipulation program of choice) that's implementing the dithering and quantization of the colors (and therefore "losing" data.) This all happens well before the GIF encoding is executed.
What about my time machine?
on
Banana Power!
·
· Score: 3, Funny
When will they perfect a way to use these bananas to power the flux capacitor in my Delorean?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course this could be Labour spin to try and get people excited about the idea of cheating at mega casinos.
Can somebody tell me what this means? Why would Labour (which I assume to mean the UK Labour Party) want to get people excited about cheating at mega casinos?
On one hand, any publicity is good publicity. But more specifically, letting these people keep the money may give the average person the impression that maybe they can try their hand at a laser-roulette scam, or perhaps maybe a card counting scam, or... etc. But casinos are profitable for a reason, and even if a few people succeed at cheating, the vast majority will lose money -- more than enough to make up for the cheaters.
And more publicity and this sense of "Do YOU want to try your luck?" brings in more business for the casinos, which would mean more revenue for the government through taxing or however they make money off the casinos.
You misunderstand the point. The point is that a $50 gun is likely to be a piece of crap.
Which is exactly why it's pointless to raise the price of a guns.
Absolutely true on the logic point. I admit that the point does sort of masquerade as a logical argument when it's really not.
I just found it equally deceptive that the parent poster was using the emotional nature of the Port Arthur event to elicit an illogical anti-gun response.
If you want a black market handgun in Australia, you are looking at a price tag of several thousands of dollars. The same gun in the US would be, $50 perhaps. That price tag is the key - what down and out crim can afford that? ... Don't wait for a massacre like out Port Arthur tragedy.
$50 my ass. If you ever buy a gun for $50, you'd better have a good emergency room nearby, because that gun is going to explode in your hand.
Incidentally, in the aforementioned Port Arthur tragedy, the individual possessed an AR-15, and an FN FAL, guns that easily command a price tag over $1000 dollars each (even in the post-ban United States). So much for a thousands-of-dollars price tag deterring crime.
What's to say you couldn't ask Seth a math question and that he wouldn't give you an answer?
You think that's nerdy? Check out this picture I dug up of this guy I know. He went as a TI-85, back when they were "new."
TI-85 Front
TI-85 Back
ha! beat that!
Just for the record, my name is not Seth.
(original article)
Only shooting for 10%? They should come up with a good slogan to help them hit their goals, like:
Mozilla FireFox -- The Libertarian Candidate of Browsers
Mozilla FireFox -- Shouldn't YOUR computer be on Fire?
Certainly true. But the impression I got from my friend was that the code they wrote was a little bit redundant, and they just didn't bother to remove the redundancies. I think readability and maintainability was not really affected either way.
I have a friend who works at a big company that provides a lot of "utility" to its customers.
They run perl scripts all the time to crunch text files containing lots of data coming in from remote sensors and stuff like that. He told me that the more senior guys have the philosophy is "Optimize? nah, just let it run the extra 20 minutes."
And they're talking about scripts that get run in a cron job DAILY.
Incidentally, I am getting a slightly better speed on the singlequote example (as claimed). My times are 12s vs 14s.
The primary bottleneck here is in the IO of the print statement itself. I bet that the string interpolation is probably very fast compared to the buffering slowness induced start/stop-ness of the second print statement. Most likely you have a very fast CPU.
Buffering makes all the difference in the world. From some of the benchmarking I've done previously, I have a hypothesis that "\n" sent to a print statement will trigger a buffer flush after it finishes sending that string off to the print statement.
In other words, an exaggerated version of foreach(1..1000) { print "blah\n";} will be slower than foreach (1..50) { print "blah\ntimes ten" }
I have seriously changed the execution time of one script from 980ms to 98 ms just as a result of bad buffering from the print statement. I think that the process of splitting up the print statements probably made it wait (more often) for the I/O resources.
In my particular case, I had a CGI script running off localhost, that was outputting about 30kb of text, looping through 80 or 90 records of data. Rather than doing the print statements directly, I buffered everything to a string, and then at the end of the loop. As a tradeoff, I think I may have actually settled on flushing my string buffer at the end of each loop cycle.
Just for the record, I think the article is good in the sense that if you didn't realize that what you were doing might be a performance issue, it's a good wakeup call to go and benchmark your code. But don't just follow the advice on faith.
test:
Data object 1: upddate = 111, updtime = 1100, itemid = 200
Data object 2: upddate = 1111, updtime = 100, itemid = 200
So both strings would have a sort value of 111110200, but of course, data object 1 should be sorted before data object 2. Using delimiters in the sprintf statement will ensure that different fields are marked as different, but they will interfere with the sort order.
Another problem is that if your sort string is too long, perl may convert it to a floating point number and thus lose the data from the later fields.
The more correct way to do this sort isThe added benefit of this method is that it definitely won't have overflow problems (which may be the case in the above examples, because "<=>" is the numeric compare operator. Had the author used "cmp", there would then be a quantity of numeric comparisons proportional to the length of the sort string.
The other benefit of my sort is that it is more flexible. you can change the "<=>" operator to a "cmp" operator if one of your fields is string data.
The sort that I propose (one I've been using) may or may not be faster than the "faster" sort proposed by the author, but then again, speed is nothing without correctness.
Incidentally, pepperball.net appears to be a manufacturer and seems to be informative in how these may be applied. 350-380 fps is the nominal pepperball muzzle velocity.
[From FAQ] All PepperBall launchers can target accurately at distances up to 30 feet.For PAVA (Capsaicin II) area saturation, projectilescan be broken against a hard surface such as a car or wall at distances up to 150 feet.
In other words, they can still be effective even if you don't aim for the target individual.
[Training FAQ] PepperBall projectiles can be shot at point-blank range, although the kinetic impact will be slightly greater at close range. Suspects can be accurately targeted up to 30 feet away with the enough kinetic impact to shatter the projectile and leave a welt or bruise. PepperBall projectiles should never be aimed at a suspect's eyes, face, throat, and spine. Instead, aim below the neck at the suspect's torso or center of mass area.
There are multiple other statements that the pepperball is safe at point blank range. (what exactly "safe" means, I will leave to the reader's judgement.)
You are probably right; it's only a matter of time before someone bends down and gets hit in the eye. Then again, same thing for rubber bullets. Note that most riot control weapons are called "less lethal weapons," because they always have the potential of causing serious bodily injury if placed (in-)correctly. The difference with pepperballs is that you can still incapacitate your target if you hit the ground in front of them or the wall behind them.
It appears that pepperballs can be considered as a way of saturating the air of the target zone with a strong irritant. This option is completely unavailable in paintball (or with rubber bullets), and so really this method appears no worse than rubber bullets (or even hoses with water [since people will get knocked down].) I would also argue that a misplaced baton to the face would also cause permanent damage.
They had a picture in the upper left of the article, but it was a little small.
I dunno, it seems more like a gift you'd give to your local chess fanatic or young child.
You will get the Device itself, a case to protect it while traveling, and an instruction manuel
Manuel? Who's manuel? Is that like a grandmaster who helps give you instructions on how to play?
Seriously though, it seems like there wasn't a lot to review here. It's like you state the features, and there's really not much else to tell.
The clasp is interesting. It seems like a magnet, but it is attracted to a small clear plastic strip that is on the bottom portion of the case. I personally didn't know magnets were attracted to plastic. Maybe it has some metal in it.
Hm, good to know. I'll definitely factor that in when I'm thinking about buying it.
The computer will not allow you to make illegal moves, so it is helpful to have all the moves memorized.
If you ask me, all chess computers are expected not to allow you to make illegal moves. If you they don't do that, IT'S NOT CHESS.
What was missing from the review, IMHO:
- Pictures. All the descriptions of where buttons and indicators were would have left me more satisfied if I could actually have seen where they were, rather than simply imagining it.
- How tough are the levels? Something like, "I've been playing for x years, my rating is yyy (or, I don't have a rating), and I was beaten thoroughly past level zzz."
- Are all the computer's moves instantaneous? Does it take longer for the computer to think on higher levels? How much longer?
- Battery Life.
- What competing products are there? If Saitek won't let you mention competitors, then you're just being an advertising stool pigeon for them.
For some reason, I like this line:
you have to pack a big board and lots of pieces. This makes it very inconvenient to whip it out for a quick game.
Besides having some innuendo, I must say that it is tough to play at a moment's notice. Is carrying a chess board around what's really stopping you from playing all the time? I mean, unless you just go around challenging the guy sitting next to you on the bus, I don't think carrying a chess board around is going to do you any good. Just my opinion. I'm sure there are contradictory examples.
Must have been a slow news day for this to get onto slashdot.
Thank goodness they don't poll people with cell phones. I'm perfectly happy not getting solicitation calls on my cell phone.
Find some other way to handle this demographic.
The reason that I didn't address the firearm issue is that I think in most cases that it's wrong and that it is a completely off-topic debate. Firearm possession/ownership and the rights conferred by the second amendment is worthy debate (read:messy can of worms) that doesn't need to be opened up here.
/.), I say this more as a comment than an argument.
Regarding "exclusive jurisdiction" and private contracts, sure. Point made. The State of Texas may not make such restrictions, but perhaps two consenting parties may.
Based on the footnotes, it seems like there might contain some applicable precedent in cases between private entities. Since I didn't bother to research it (being only
The difference between regulating 2.4GHz and regulating smoking, and firearm ownership is in that the government does not claim exclusive jurisdiction. Also, the hotplate issue is a safety issue, which incidentally, is an acceptable reason to ban the use of a 2.4 GHz device. Interference, however, is not.
... in sufficient degree to cause harmful interference to radio communications." As the Conference Report to the 1982 Amendments to the Act stated, the Act reserves "exclusive jurisdiction to the Federal Communications Commission over matters involving RFI [and provides] that regulation of RFI phenomena shall be imposed only by the Commission."
From the FCC pdf:
In addition, Section 302 has granted the Commission express authority to adopt regulations "governing the interference potential of devices which in their operation are capable of emitting radio frequency energy by radiation
Exclusive. In this case, a provision prohibiting the use of a 2.4 GHz device directly contradicts a federal law.
Not really. There are already a lot of people who believe that the RH is likely to be true.
Just because the hypothesis hasn't been proven doesn't mean someone can't start working on an application that only works if it is true. I'm pretty sure there's guys already working under this assumption. Don't know anyone personally, but that's what I'm told.
Quantum computing is a nice, related example. When Shor came up with a factoring algorithm, no one had proven that quantum computing was possible. But that didn't stop him from working on his algorithm.
I think the article's intro is a sensational piece of crap. Until someone justifies the author's introduction paragraph, he (Tim Radford) has lost my respect.
I hate the inane chatter as much as you do, and so often I wish I could turn on a jammer.
:-S
The FCC may think cell phones are safe for use, but have they considered whether passengers will be safe from the likes of people who are stupid enough to engage their cell phone jammers on the plane...
I like to make containers to hold my chips out of my old wireless antennas. I also like to cook my noodles with some of the other old computer parts.
somehow I didn't see the AC post above me.
Technically it's not GIF that's losing the image data. Actually it's Photoshop (or image manipulation program of choice) that's implementing the dithering and quantization of the colors (and therefore "losing" data.) This all happens well before the GIF encoding is executed.
When will they perfect a way to use these bananas to power the flux capacitor in my Delorean?
For example, you could assign every address a random but calculatable value
You mean like say, a hash function?