> Shakespeare didn't write Old English. He actually wrote modern English.
No, he wrote early English. It *is* English (unlike Old English, which is not the same language at all), but it is most definitely not the modern form thereof.
> Old English is Anglo-Saxon.
Yes, that's right. Actually, "Anglo-Saxon" is a much better name for it, because it's not really anything you would recognize as English. It's much more closely related to Germanic and Scandinavian languages.
> Even Chaucer wrote in English,
Chaucer wrote in Middle English, which is more similar to English than Old English is, but still most definitely not the same language. In fact, English is less similar and less closely related to Middle English than French is to Latin. The relationship to Old English is even more remote.
To get from Old English (Beowulf) to early English (Shakespeare) you have to stir in such generous quantities of loan words (mostly from French, Latin, and Greek) that fewer than 10% of the words in the language trace their ancestry back to Old English. You also have to make considerable adjustments to the morphology of the language, significantly alter the orthography (taking the basic spelling system apart and putting it back together differently), completely change the phonology of all the vowels and several of the consonants, alter the grammar in a number of significant ways, and run through several rounds of vulgarization (i.e., let the street lingo of the common people diverge so substantially from the written form of the language that it essentially becomes a creole, then get enough authors to start writing in the common language of the people that it becomes accepted in educated circles; rinse and repeat several times), among other things.
It's sort of like the relationship between Classical Latin and Haitian Kreyol, except that English has had a larger number of external influences on its vocabulary and grammar.
It depends where you live and what kind of people you hang out with.
I frequently get told that use too many "big words", and at least half a dozen different people have complained specifically about my use of the word "theoretically". Yes, really. If I start using words like "serendipity", I might just about as well start speaking Greek.
(Galion, the city where I currently reside, is not what you would exactly call an educationally enriched environment. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice little town, but the average educational level is frighteningly low, and the local vocabulary can reasonably be described as impoverished.)
If you have an actual reason to do that to a Linux system, you can chmod -x everything in gconf. I actually have a system that I did this to, because it's got a single user account that's used by random members of the public off the street at the rate of a couple dozen users a day. If somebody does manage to dork up the settings, I just hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and let gdm do the autologin thing again, and everything is back to normal.
In my experience, Linux is rather a lot easier to lock down than Windows. If you don't see a lot of third-party custom applications designed to help you do it, it's probably because they aren't necessary. That functionality is all built in.
If you want decent performance, for a workstation, you want at least 2GB of RAM, preferably more, especially if you tend to run multiple applications at once.
Your estimate of how much RAM Windows needs is also low by my reckoning.
Now, for a system that doesn't need a GUI and doesn't run a lot of applications (you know, a dedicated print server or firewall or what have you) you can get away with less. A lot less.
> Of course, I don't consider it "working" > unless it has all the drivers I need. YMMV.
Depends what you want it for. tomsrtbt is not without its uses. Sure, *most* of the time you have a CD drive, in which case you can just use Knoppix.
But quite frankly, for the things you generally need to do in a "can't boot from the hard drive" situation, you don't *need* sound card drivers and webcam drivers and printer drivers and graphics card drivers for X and so on and so forth. You need fsck and fdisk and mkfs and mount and cp and mv and a very small text editor. Network card drivers and ifconfig are nice to have, but you can live without them.
Knoppix, of course, is more than just a rescue disk. But if all you need at any given moment is a rescue disk, then hey, that's all you need. And if you haven't got a CD drive hooked up (a surprisingly common scenario for some of us), then you need it on a floppy.
I'm not sure how this is in any way relevant to Ubuntu's being (or not being) a replacement for Windows 7, though. Nobody, to my knowledge, uses Windows 7 as a rescue disk, so the ability or inability of Linux to fill that role seems unlikely to have much impact on its ability to replace Windows 7. Workstation deployment scenarios seem much more to the point.
Wine: more trouble than it's worth since [whenever the project got started].
It's a neat idea and everything, but ultimately it's easier to just switch to cross-platform applications, or stick the problem app on a terminal server and use SeamlessRDP.
> For netbooks, servers, and small dedicated devices > I don't think Microsoft can compete at all. [...] > Linux [...] can't completely replace Microsoft just yet.
These two statements are at odds (unless you meant for the qualification "for netbooks,..." to apply only to the first statement and meant to imply an opposite qualification "for other kinds of systems" in the second statement).
Either Linux *can* completely replace Windows, and Microsoft can't compete, or else Windows still has something unique to offer, in which case Microsoft *will* be able to still compete.
In other words, don't worry. If the world still needs Microsoft, enough people will buy their products to keep them in business.
It might depend on what you've been using up to this point. It is *arguable* that if you've been using Windows Vista (perhaps because you bought a new computer that came with it and didn't bother to install anything else yet), Windows 7 might be an improvement.
I personally am not convinced of this. I think the gratuitous UI weirdness in 7, and the inability to turn off some of the unwanted new features, makes it worse than Vista. For instance, why would you want your quicklaunch icons to move around all over the taskbar every time you open or close a window? To me that's a usability disaster.
But many people disagree with me. If you look around on the internet, it's not hard at all to find people claiming that Windows 7 is *vastly* superior to Vista.
And ultimately it doesn't really matter that much what *I* think about 7, because the chances of my ever switching my main workstation to any version of Windows are negligible anyhow. I place too much value on the ability to customize my system and get it working exactly the way I like, and Windows has never been any good for that.
> why do some people think it's a great idea vote people > into office who will tax us to come up with these half-witted > "solutions" that don't even make any noticeable difference?
Because people who are voted into office can also be voted out, and they know it. This has a moderating effect on their behavior. Government officials who don't have to worry about the possibility of losing the next election can be much *more* troublesome, as even the most cursory study of history reveals in graphic detail.
Re:October 18th is also its birthday
on
OpenBSD 4.6 Released
·
· Score: 2, Funny
> Does BSD support "Q" yet?
It always has. You might want to check your keyboard layout settings. I think they're in/usr/local/config someplace. Look around.
> some people don't like vaccines for whatever reason
Okay, a few wackos don't like vaccines in general, but the flu vaccine is different, for several reasons:
First, you have to keep getting it every year. Most vaccines you only need once. Tetanus requires a booster every ten years, and we think that's annoying. Every year? Come on, it's not even worth it.
Second, there are serious questions about whether flu is a sufficiently serious illness to warrant a vaccine (even if we had a really *effective* one, which we don't). On the one hand, yes, if you don't get the vaccine, there's something like a 20% chance you'll get the flu in any given year. On the other hand, it's just the flu. Take a couple of para-acetylaminophenol tablets and quit whining.
Third, *lots* of vaccinated people get the flu anyway, to the point where a double-digit percentage of the population has come to believe that the vaccine is completely worthless -- not because they don't want to prevent sickness, but because they don't believe the flu vaccine prevents sickness to any significant extent. This is not how vaccines are supposed to work.
A vaccine is supposed to *prevent* the recipient from getting the disease. You get the shot as a young child, and you never get the disease, that's how it's supposed to work. No one claims that the flu vaccines work in this manner. Proponents of the vaccine claim that if everyone receives it every year, the illness will be less common.
If it were a serious illness, like cancer, getting a vaccine every year to make the illness somewhat less common might make sense. But we're only talking about the flu. Far from being a life-threatening disease (unless you're already on death's door, in which case *anything* is life-threatening), the flu in the overwhelming majority of cases doesn't even cause severe inconvenience (like, say, a month of lost work). It causes... minor discomfort, for a couple of days. *Yawn*. I'll take my chances.
> From a pure maths perspective, bear in mind that a > random number chosen from the reals in the interval > [0,1], with equal probability for each number, has > 0% chance of being a real number that will ever be > explicitly picked out in any scientific document, > past present or future.
Sure, but that's because of a straightforward cardinality issue. The cardinality of the set of all real numbers between 0 and 1 is a second-order infinity (aleph sub one); the cardinality of the set of all numbers explicitly picked out in scientific documents past present and future is at *most* a first-order infinity (aleph sub naught), and that's if you assume scientific papers will continue being published for an infinite amount of time going forward, which is not necessarily the case.
This is all very interesting if you're into number theory, but it doesn't really have a whole lot to do with statistics as they are commonly used, because statistics deal with *ranges* (e.g., "at least 0.5 but not more than 0.75"), and it is trivial to subdivide the set of all real numbers into a set of such ranges with a first-order infinite cardinality (aleph sub naught) or even, if you allow open-ended ranges at the outer bounds (which in many cases is practical, since the extremes are often a very thin tail), a finite set of such ranges.
It's true that statistics are difficult to interpret properly without some training in doing so, and that most of the time when people quote statistics they don't properly understand what the statistics really imply (or don't imply). But I don't believe the probability of any random real number being published in a scientific paper is relevant to this fact in any significant way.
> The last thing a sick person wants to hear is > "we haven't got a clue what's happening".
Oh, there are much worse things to hear from the doctor than that. Here, how about a top-ten list...
10. We'll put you down for a transplant, but the list is pretty long, so it might be a few months. 9. There's a medication for your condition, but it's not available for oral dosage, so I'm going to write you a script for some suppositories. They might burn a little... 8. I think I can get a really good journal paper out of your case. 7. Have you ever heard of baseball player Lou Gehrig? Well... 6. I remember reading about this condition in medical school. 5. I'm ordering a lower gastrointestinal barium radiology series. 4. Like I said last time you were in, you have Alzheimer's. 3. Congratulations! You're going to have a disease named after you! 2. I'm going to refer you to a very good cancer specialist. 1. You're going to die.
> In my case, up until three years ago I had never had a flu shot.
Yeah, I've never had one either.
> During a typical winter I would be sick at least twice on average,
Wait, you get flu twice per year? Are you immunocompromised, or just incredibly sickly?
> usually missing about four or five days of work in total.
Five days of work twice a year, due to *flu*?
You really ought to, I don't know, eat more fruits and vegetables or something. The only people I know who get sick that often are A) young children whose parents let them eat junk food all the time and never feed them vegetables ever, B) smokers, or C) over eighty years of age and having trouble keeping their weight up due to general frailness. A healthy working-age adult should *not* be getting flu that often or staying down with it for that long.
I missed a day of work due to flu, in the late nineties.
> Also, why would he use a publisher that gave him only > $2 per sale? You'd think that royalties would be driven > up as competing publishers offer more per sale.
Your understanding of the book publication market is... incomplete.
Approximately two thirds of the people in the world have written a book and would like to have it published. (Eh, maybe only one third. Whatever, it's a *lot* of people.)
Because of the costs of publishing (not so much the printing itself as the promotion and everything), and due to the limited market for books, publishers must select for publication only a fraction of a percent of the manuscripts they receive. *Most* of the manuscripts received are summarily rejected after a cursory inspection. Most of the rest are rejected after a more detailed inspection (like, browsing through the whole first chapter). After that, the remaining ones are the books the publisher thinks they *might* want to publish, so then they start thinking about contacting the author...
So when talks open the publisher is negotiating from a position of having lots of manuscripts to choose from, and if this one doesn't work out they can reach into a pile of five hundred similar manuscripts and pick out one of the others. (This is particularly brutal for fiction and popular topics; for Ruby it's probably not quite as bad, but I triple-guarantee you the publisher *can* find another book on Ruby to publish.) The author, on the other hand, is negotiating from a position of having spent the last two years of his life and most of his life's savings trying to get a publisher to actually look at his book, and now that they're finally looking at it, he has a significant investment (both material and emotional, usually) in seeing it published. The publisher's investment to this point is limited to the time they spent looking over the manuscript and deciding it might be worth calling the author in.
So unless the author is a big name with a devoted following (like, you know, Danielle Steel or John Grisham or someone like that), the author has very little leverage and cannot really afford to be choosy about publishers (unless he wants to use a vanity press or just plain self-publish, which is generally not a good way to go in most cases since an author ordinarily doesn't have the kinds of promotional resources that a publisher has).
Again, there are a few rare exceptions. If Damian Conway writes a book on Perl, he can negotiate and credibly threaten to go to another publisher, because he's a recognized name in the Perl community and it's a sure thing *someone* will agree to publish his book, on the theory that it will sell well. The Ruby community probably has a handful of people in this category as well. But *most* would-be authors of Ruby books (or any kind of books) don't have that kind of recognition or the bargaining power that comes with it.
> I say we take on the thermodynamics lobby. Who's with me?
We'd need a working perpetual motion machine (or a free energy device would do in a pinch). Why don't you work on that part, and I'll design a website and some fliers. Let me know when you have your prototype working.
> People like to play Blackjack because they know it can be beaten.
No, people like to play blackjack because they *think* it can be beaten. Whether they're right or wrong about this has little impact on their desire to play.
> Whether they actually will beat the house is another matter entirely
Exactly. It doesn't matter if they *can* win. Frankly it's better if they can't. What matters is that they *think* they can win. Casinos love optimists.
> Having enormous, permanently shuffling decks > completely blows that illusion away.
Only if you have any understanding at all of probability. Granted, we're talking here about extremely elementary prob and stats, but the target demographic for casinos consists of people who think balancing a household checkbook is hard and know even less about probability than they know about finances.
Such people see a shuffling machine and if anything probably think it makes the game more fair, on the theory that a machine would shuffle more randomly, and thus more fairly, than a human. A human can stack the deck, but a machine would be fair, right?
People who know any *math* understand that randomness favors the casino because the odds are stacked that direction. But gamblers don't know that, and even if they're *told* they don't really believe it, because it's counterintuitive if you don't know any math. (If they *did* understand how the odds are stacked, they wouldn't want to gamble. Math geeks don't play casino games.)
> I can see it turning more people away than bringing them in.
People who are turned away by not being able to win don't go to casinos in the first place -- well, not to gamble against the house at any rate.
> In the case of blackjack, they should just cap your bets.
Either that or slightly alter the game rules to negate or marginalize the counters' advantage.
Shuffling the used cards back in after every hand, for example, would solve the card-counting problem absolutely.
However, for purposes of allowing people to hold onto an *illusion* that they could gain an advantage, and also for efficiency (faster game means the casino makes more money per hour), it would probably be better to only shuffle them back in after every N hands; the optimal value for N depends on the number of people at the table and the number of decks used.
Casinos love *occasional* winners, people who spend thirty thousand dollars a year on a gambling habit but get very excited and act like winners when they turn three hundred dollars into a couple thousand dollars on a particular day. Woot!
And if somebody just happens, by pure chance, to win the first time he ever gambles, hey, it's once, no big deal. It all comes out in the wash.
But they don't like *consistent* winners, like card counters for instance. They show those people the door and ask them not to come back.
Slashdot Mirror
> Shakespeare didn't write Old English. He actually wrote modern English.
No, he wrote early English. It *is* English (unlike Old English, which is not the same language at all), but it is most definitely not the modern form thereof.
> Old English is Anglo-Saxon.
Yes, that's right. Actually, "Anglo-Saxon" is a much better name for it, because it's not really anything you would recognize as English. It's much more closely related to Germanic and Scandinavian languages.
> Even Chaucer wrote in English,
Chaucer wrote in Middle English, which is more similar to English than Old English is, but still most definitely not the same language. In fact, English is less similar and less closely related to Middle English than French is to Latin. The relationship to Old English is even more remote.
To get from Old English (Beowulf) to early English (Shakespeare) you have to stir in such generous quantities of loan words (mostly from French, Latin, and Greek) that fewer than 10% of the words in the language trace their ancestry back to Old English. You also have to make considerable adjustments to the morphology of the language, significantly alter the orthography (taking the basic spelling system apart and putting it back together differently), completely change the phonology of all the vowels and several of the consonants, alter the grammar in a number of significant ways, and run through several rounds of vulgarization (i.e., let the street lingo of the common people diverge so substantially from the written form of the language that it essentially becomes a creole, then get enough authors to start writing in the common language of the people that it becomes accepted in educated circles; rinse and repeat several times), among other things.
It's sort of like the relationship between Classical Latin and Haitian Kreyol, except that English has had a larger number of external influences on its vocabulary and grammar.
It depends where you live and what kind of people you hang out with.
I frequently get told that use too many "big words", and at least half a dozen different people have complained specifically about my use of the word "theoretically". Yes, really. If I start using words like "serendipity", I might just about as well start speaking Greek.
(Galion, the city where I currently reside, is not what you would exactly call an educationally enriched environment. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice little town, but the average educational level is frighteningly low, and the local vocabulary can reasonably be described as impoverished.)
If you have an actual reason to do that to a Linux system, you can chmod -x everything in gconf. I actually have a system that I did this to, because it's got a single user account that's used by random members of the public off the street at the rate of a couple dozen users a day. If somebody does manage to dork up the settings, I just hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and let gdm do the autologin thing again, and everything is back to normal.
In my experience, Linux is rather a lot easier to lock down than Windows. If you don't see a lot of third-party custom applications designed to help you do it, it's probably because they aren't necessary. That functionality is all built in.
> Ubuntu needs 256 MB RAM
If you want decent performance, for a workstation, you want at least 2GB of RAM, preferably more, especially if you tend to run multiple applications at once.
Your estimate of how much RAM Windows needs is also low by my reckoning.
Now, for a system that doesn't need a GUI and doesn't run a lot of applications (you know, a dedicated print server or firewall or what have you) you can get away with less. A lot less.
> I mean, it's custom compiled, right? So we can
> assume it only runs on one hardware config, right?
Depends what you want it for.
> Of course, I don't consider it "working"
> unless it has all the drivers I need. YMMV.
Depends what you want it for. tomsrtbt is not without its uses. Sure, *most* of the time you have a CD drive, in which case you can just use Knoppix.
But quite frankly, for the things you generally need to do in a "can't boot from the hard drive" situation, you don't *need* sound card drivers and webcam drivers and printer drivers and graphics card drivers for X and so on and so forth. You need fsck and fdisk and mkfs and mount and cp and mv and a very small text editor. Network card drivers and ifconfig are nice to have, but you can live without them.
Knoppix, of course, is more than just a rescue disk. But if all you need at any given moment is a rescue disk, then hey, that's all you need. And if you haven't got a CD drive hooked up (a surprisingly common scenario for some of us), then you need it on a floppy.
I'm not sure how this is in any way relevant to Ubuntu's being (or not being) a replacement for Windows 7, though. Nobody, to my knowledge, uses Windows 7 as a rescue disk, so the ability or inability of Linux to fill that role seems unlikely to have much impact on its ability to replace Windows 7. Workstation deployment scenarios seem much more to the point.
Wine: more trouble than it's worth since [whenever the project got started].
It's a neat idea and everything, but ultimately it's easier to just switch to cross-platform applications, or stick the problem app on a terminal server and use SeamlessRDP.
> For netbooks, servers, and small dedicated devices
..." to apply only to the first statement and meant to imply an opposite qualification "for other kinds of systems" in the second statement).
> I don't think Microsoft can compete at all. [...]
> Linux [...] can't completely replace Microsoft just yet.
These two statements are at odds (unless you meant for the qualification "for netbooks,
Either Linux *can* completely replace Windows, and Microsoft can't compete, or else Windows still has something unique to offer, in which case Microsoft *will* be able to still compete.
In other words, don't worry. If the world still needs Microsoft, enough people will buy their products to keep them in business.
> you shut out some people from the market
> and trample others with your behemoth size.
Yeah, poor little Microsoft, how can they survive a trampling like that from a big company like IBM?
> Windows 7. Benefit. How is that a benefit?
It might depend on what you've been using up to this point. It is *arguable* that if you've been using Windows Vista (perhaps because you bought a new computer that came with it and didn't bother to install anything else yet), Windows 7 might be an improvement.
I personally am not convinced of this. I think the gratuitous UI weirdness in 7, and the inability to turn off some of the unwanted new features, makes it worse than Vista. For instance, why would you want your quicklaunch icons to move around all over the taskbar every time you open or close a window? To me that's a usability disaster.
But many people disagree with me. If you look around on the internet, it's not hard at all to find people claiming that Windows 7 is *vastly* superior to Vista.
And ultimately it doesn't really matter that much what *I* think about 7, because the chances of my ever switching my main workstation to any version of Windows are negligible anyhow. I place too much value on the ability to customize my system and get it working exactly the way I like, and Windows has never been any good for that.
> why do some people think it's a great idea vote people
> into office who will tax us to come up with these half-witted
> "solutions" that don't even make any noticeable difference?
Because people who are voted into office can also be voted out, and they know it. This has a moderating effect on their behavior. Government officials who don't have to worry about the possibility of losing the next election can be much *more* troublesome, as even the most cursory study of history reveals in graphic detail.
> Does BSD support "Q" yet?
/usr/local/config someplace. Look around.
It always has. You might want to check your keyboard layout settings. I think they're in
> IOW, the point of the vaccine is to prevent the pandemic
You seriously think the flu vaccine is going to prevent the flu from spreading through the population and thus stop people from being exposed to it?
Man, have I got a few things to sell you.
> some people don't like vaccines for whatever reason
Okay, a few wackos don't like vaccines in general, but the flu vaccine is different, for several reasons:
First, you have to keep getting it every year. Most vaccines you only need once. Tetanus requires a booster every ten years, and we think that's annoying. Every year? Come on, it's not even worth it.
Second, there are serious questions about whether flu is a sufficiently serious illness to warrant a vaccine (even if we had a really *effective* one, which we don't). On the one hand, yes, if you don't get the vaccine, there's something like a 20% chance you'll get the flu in any given year. On the other hand, it's just the flu. Take a couple of para-acetylaminophenol tablets and quit whining.
Third, *lots* of vaccinated people get the flu anyway, to the point where a double-digit percentage of the population has come to believe that the vaccine is completely worthless -- not because they don't want to prevent sickness, but because they don't believe the flu vaccine prevents sickness to any significant extent. This is not how vaccines are supposed to work.
A vaccine is supposed to *prevent* the recipient from getting the disease. You get the shot as a young child, and you never get the disease, that's how it's supposed to work. No one claims that the flu vaccines work in this manner. Proponents of the vaccine claim that if everyone receives it every year, the illness will be less common.
If it were a serious illness, like cancer, getting a vaccine every year to make the illness somewhat less common might make sense. But we're only talking about the flu. Far from being a life-threatening disease (unless you're already on death's door, in which case *anything* is life-threatening), the flu in the overwhelming majority of cases doesn't even cause severe inconvenience (like, say, a month of lost work). It causes... minor discomfort, for a couple of days. *Yawn*. I'll take my chances.
> From a pure maths perspective, bear in mind that a
> random number chosen from the reals in the interval
> [0,1], with equal probability for each number, has
> 0% chance of being a real number that will ever be
> explicitly picked out in any scientific document,
> past present or future.
Sure, but that's because of a straightforward cardinality issue. The cardinality of the set of all real numbers between 0 and 1 is a second-order infinity (aleph sub one); the cardinality of the set of all numbers explicitly picked out in scientific documents past present and future is at *most* a first-order infinity (aleph sub naught), and that's if you assume scientific papers will continue being published for an infinite amount of time going forward, which is not necessarily the case.
This is all very interesting if you're into number theory, but it doesn't really have a whole lot to do with statistics as they are commonly used, because statistics deal with *ranges* (e.g., "at least 0.5 but not more than 0.75"), and it is trivial to subdivide the set of all real numbers into a set of such ranges with a first-order infinite cardinality (aleph sub naught) or even, if you allow open-ended ranges at the outer bounds (which in many cases is practical, since the extremes are often a very thin tail), a finite set of such ranges.
It's true that statistics are difficult to interpret properly without some training in doing so, and that most of the time when people quote statistics they don't properly understand what the statistics really imply (or don't imply). But I don't believe the probability of any random real number being published in a scientific paper is relevant to this fact in any significant way.
> The last thing a sick person wants to hear is
> "we haven't got a clue what's happening".
Oh, there are much worse things to hear from the doctor than that. Here, how about a top-ten list...
10. We'll put you down for a transplant, but the list is pretty long, so it might be a few months.
9. There's a medication for your condition, but it's not available for oral dosage, so I'm going to write you a script for some suppositories. They might burn a little...
8. I think I can get a really good journal paper out of your case.
7. Have you ever heard of baseball player Lou Gehrig? Well...
6. I remember reading about this condition in medical school.
5. I'm ordering a lower gastrointestinal barium radiology series.
4. Like I said last time you were in, you have Alzheimer's.
3. Congratulations! You're going to have a disease named after you!
2. I'm going to refer you to a very good cancer specialist.
1. You're going to die.
> In my case, up until three years ago I had never had a flu shot.
Yeah, I've never had one either.
> During a typical winter I would be sick at least twice on average,
Wait, you get flu twice per year? Are you immunocompromised, or just incredibly sickly?
> usually missing about four or five days of work in total.
Five days of work twice a year, due to *flu*?
You really ought to, I don't know, eat more fruits and vegetables or something. The only people I know who get sick that often are A) young children whose parents let them eat junk food all the time and never feed them vegetables ever, B) smokers, or C) over eighty years of age and having trouble keeping their weight up due to general frailness. A healthy working-age adult should *not* be getting flu that often or staying down with it for that long.
I missed a day of work due to flu, in the late nineties.
> Also, why would he use a publisher that gave him only
> $2 per sale? You'd think that royalties would be driven
> up as competing publishers offer more per sale.
Your understanding of the book publication market is... incomplete.
Approximately two thirds of the people in the world have written a book and would like to have it published. (Eh, maybe only one third. Whatever, it's a *lot* of people.)
Because of the costs of publishing (not so much the printing itself as the promotion and everything), and due to the limited market for books, publishers must select for publication only a fraction of a percent of the manuscripts they receive. *Most* of the manuscripts received are summarily rejected after a cursory inspection. Most of the rest are rejected after a more detailed inspection (like, browsing through the whole first chapter). After that, the remaining ones are the books the publisher thinks they *might* want to publish, so then they start thinking about contacting the author...
So when talks open the publisher is negotiating from a position of having lots of manuscripts to choose from, and if this one doesn't work out they can reach into a pile of five hundred similar manuscripts and pick out one of the others. (This is particularly brutal for fiction and popular topics; for Ruby it's probably not quite as bad, but I triple-guarantee you the publisher *can* find another book on Ruby to publish.) The author, on the other hand, is negotiating from a position of having spent the last two years of his life and most of his life's savings trying to get a publisher to actually look at his book, and now that they're finally looking at it, he has a significant investment (both material and emotional, usually) in seeing it published. The publisher's investment to this point is limited to the time they spent looking over the manuscript and deciding it might be worth calling the author in.
So unless the author is a big name with a devoted following (like, you know, Danielle Steel or John Grisham or someone like that), the author has very little leverage and cannot really afford to be choosy about publishers (unless he wants to use a vanity press or just plain self-publish, which is generally not a good way to go in most cases since an author ordinarily doesn't have the kinds of promotional resources that a publisher has).
Again, there are a few rare exceptions. If Damian Conway writes a book on Perl, he can negotiate and credibly threaten to go to another publisher, because he's a recognized name in the Perl community and it's a sure thing *someone* will agree to publish his book, on the theory that it will sell well. The Ruby community probably has a handful of people in this category as well. But *most* would-be authors of Ruby books (or any kind of books) don't have that kind of recognition or the bargaining power that comes with it.
> I say we take on the thermodynamics lobby. Who's with me?
We'd need a working perpetual motion machine (or a free energy device would do in a pinch). Why don't you work on that part, and I'll design a website and some fliers. Let me know when you have your prototype working.
> they're taking their ball and going home.
Actually, they are still there, playing with their ball and the other kids. They're sending *you* home.
Meh. It's a non-story as far as I'm concerned. They can only kick you out if you're dumb enough to go to a casino in the first place.
> People like to play Blackjack because they know it can be beaten.
No, people like to play blackjack because they *think* it can be beaten. Whether they're right or wrong about this has little impact on their desire to play.
> Whether they actually will beat the house is another matter entirely
Exactly. It doesn't matter if they *can* win. Frankly it's better if they can't. What matters is that they *think* they can win. Casinos love optimists.
> Having enormous, permanently shuffling decks
> completely blows that illusion away.
Only if you have any understanding at all of probability. Granted, we're talking here about extremely elementary prob and stats, but the target demographic for casinos consists of people who think balancing a household checkbook is hard and know even less about probability than they know about finances.
Such people see a shuffling machine and if anything probably think it makes the game more fair, on the theory that a machine would shuffle more randomly, and thus more fairly, than a human. A human can stack the deck, but a machine would be fair, right?
People who know any *math* understand that randomness favors the casino because the odds are stacked that direction. But gamblers don't know that, and even if they're *told* they don't really believe it, because it's counterintuitive if you don't know any math. (If they *did* understand how the odds are stacked, they wouldn't want to gamble. Math geeks don't play casino games.)
> I can see it turning more people away than bringing them in.
People who are turned away by not being able to win don't go to casinos in the first place -- well, not to gamble against the house at any rate.
> In the case of blackjack, they should just cap your bets.
Either that or slightly alter the game rules to negate or marginalize the counters' advantage.
Shuffling the used cards back in after every hand, for example, would solve the card-counting problem absolutely.
However, for purposes of allowing people to hold onto an *illusion* that they could gain an advantage, and also for efficiency (faster game means the casino makes more money per hour), it would probably be better to only shuffle them back in after every N hands; the optimal value for N depends on the number of people at the table and the number of decks used.
> They are taking peoples money, not offering a fair game.
Well, duh. These are *casinos* we're talking about, not Milton Bradley.
The only reliable strategy for winning casino games is to run the casino. Anybody who hasn't figured that out is an idiot and deserves to lose.
> Casino's love a few winners.
Casinos love *occasional* winners, people who spend thirty thousand dollars a year on a gambling habit but get very excited and act like winners when they turn three hundred dollars into a couple thousand dollars on a particular day. Woot!
And if somebody just happens, by pure chance, to win the first time he ever gambles, hey, it's once, no big deal. It all comes out in the wash.
But they don't like *consistent* winners, like card counters for instance. They show those people the door and ask them not to come back.