You don't... recognize... You mean you don't know who I am?
Surely then you would have gotten the joke. Despite TrollKore members' reputations (esp. Dessimator), they are not completely devoid of humor.
The post is, in fact, the opening lyrics to "Neon Genesis Evangelion", which I can attest is Rob Limo's favorite Anime as he jacks off to me all the time.
I CAN SEE YOU ROB! EVEN WHEN YOU COVER YOURSELF WITH A BLANKET
The title of this article is "Platform Evangelism", for which Evangelion is a close derivative word from German. It means Gospel, roughly. Evangelism means to preach Gospel, IE, the "Microsoft Way". The Gospel in the Japanese anime Shin Seiiki Evangelion is used to provide a Judeo/Chrsitian mysticism to the whole thing which I think makes it seem more artsy than it's worth, but that's a personal opinion.
Not too much correlation there, but it's a (bad, predicatable) pun to be suggested. I hope I don't get mod-banned for this swipe at the Creators.
I hope this clears it all up. If you are still confused, look up my name or Evangelion in google, and you will learn more than you want just from the link descriptions.
Then cheap, individual consoles are going to be important to get. They should come with game discs that let you play GBA-SP or go webtv/networked mode with a broadband adapter and let you remotely boot net-aware games, like an arcade setup.
That would kick ass. Of course, they might not like the idea of only having to have one copy of the game for 4 people to play over a LAN (you'll probably need it for net play, however) In fact, that sounds like a good compromise! $150 for a "LAN party pack", GC, controller, Net/GBA rom, broadband adapter.
"Open source" is not equivalent to "I'm a dirty GNU hippy"
I DON'T CARE what RMS or anyone else says and dI o what I damn fucking well please.
Yes, I am angered by your statements, and yes I am ignorant. I am ignorant to RMS's blathing idiocy and utopian vision. I am ignorant to your warped, stereotypical, one-track mindset.
Yes, my proud ignorance does in no way invalidate your points, as you have not made any that aren't any more insightful than a lowly, cut-n-paste trollaxor.
In short, I think we should all move to Brazil, because I saw the uncut European version of the movie and they had great hair.
Who says they had to officially document anything?
on
Roswell Declassified
·
· Score: 1
The only things they have to declassify are things the government "is aware of". IE, if there are internal memos and reports, they never got out into the rest of the military proper, were never compartmentalized, and thus are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
Of course they filed normal, routine, daily-business of running a base type reports which were promptly given document control numbers and filed away. But I bet a lot of that is faked at ANY base to keep budget projections looking good. So of course you're not going to find anything interesting in that stuff. (I'm talking IN GENERAL... if the project wasn't explicitly being paid for by some task force, dollars to donuts the documentation is spotty, lazy, tooled-up, or non-existant)
If it was clandestine, it wouldn't have been widely known what was going on there, and they sure as hell wouldn't have published internal documents. No need for a paper trail if you want to keep things quiet.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aa aaaaaaa
::panting::
As an aside, how many developers who use/release open source have even read the GNU Manifesto? Not very many (especially no one I know, myself included). Christ almighty this whole thread has me pissed now.
While Sun may be doing The Right Thing, it doesn't make them philanthropists. You should support Sun for such actions, but not forget that company exists for its shareholders. Right now, our motives are colinear.
My advice: keep it that way.
Again, nothing is bad about stuff being NOT open source, but don't think that Sun is just giving stuff away because they feel generous. There are other reasons as well (besides not wanting to be seen as tightwads).
1) You really can't say they're being deceived because the machine doesn't make any claims as to what your chances of succeeding by making each choice is! The _user_ makes up his own expectations about how the machine works, and I think it's just too bad if that doesn't jive with reality.;-)
It's like when there's this really hot guy I like, and then I find out he's sleeping with someone, meanwhile I went out with him the a few nights ago, and I didn't even ask him if he was seeing anyone, and then I feel deceived? Not a healthy attitude; egocentric if you ask me.
And assuming humans must act as if they have free will... should it matter if we have or it not?
I say no, and here's why... "Free Will" means you have the ability to choose whats best for you or who you care about. Clearly you wouldn't choose any other way, right? You always want to make the best decision you possibly can... ALWAYS. Right?
So you have a choice, but the choice is obvious once you evaluate the situation. So really, even if you didn't have a choice (per se), that choice is imperative by your desire to choose the best thing, a fact of human nature.
So realizing you don't have free will, REALLY, isn't a big deal. You can't destroy your always-pick-best mindest because of that, otherwise you'll be miserable. Humans have this thing called "denial" you know, which means it'll let them function and continue evaluating choices, even if the endpoint is imminent. The way to rationalize that is: you can't just lay back and let it happen then, you still have to actively make the choice, even if there's no way to do otherwise. You will realize that the lack of free will does not excuse someone from making choices, because otherwise no optimal choices will be made. Only the weak would use the excuse of no free will to justify apathy.
And no one can stay apathetic for long, it's quite boring.
So after the initial shock, things would be back to the status-quo, even if you could prove the absence of free will. I have more faith in human nature than most!
::big hug for the anonymous coward for getting to the core of this issue::
I would be outraged. But not because I felt I was being cheated, but that such a huge effort was being launched into deceiving me. In fact, that such a huge effort was being made into making everyone at the table have house-odds of winning, which is lame. If they just let people play, the idiots lose their fat wads, while the more astute stay longer. (maybe blackjack was a bad example?)
Also, you can tell the house is cheating anyway (How is that bozo winning as much as me??!), which is different then what was happening here.
You can't tell the machine is cheating unless you re-wind time or use an emulator. And, the machine manufacturer wasn't going to expect that would happen, so the game only makes the illusion of choice. Is that the machine makers fault? In fact, it's kind of retarded to call what's happening a "cheat". It's only a cheat if you take a shortcut that has sideffects. There are no side-effects in this case. The guy who posted that "expose" is just tooting his own horn. You know, like if there were two ways to invert a matrix, a real way, and a "fast" way, but they gave you the same answer, and the "fast" way was faster, would you be outraged if it chose the fast way over some other way you learned in school? I wouldn't!! Normally, this would be fine. But then someone exposes it, and blows it out of proportion.
Most such machines use exactly that strategy: decide first, then make it look like you have control. Even the later mechanical one-arm-bandits used that technique.
The only difference between the two ways you could frame the situation is that in one case the person knows how the machine operates. They'll come to realize they're at the mercy of a PNRG which has none of the analog, "almost-maybe-next-time" feel of a roulette wheel. They'll be shocked to learn that the machine works really hard to make it look like there's a modicum of manuverability or hope of "beating it", which resonates with the player, only to keep them there dropping quarters for longer.
And then they get all insulted the machine is lying to them? That's them just not understanding 1) how computers work 2) how Casinos work.
I haven't taken a pschye course, but I'm well aware of the perception of control's function in the gaming experience. But if the user can't tell he can't effect the outcome, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE!? The only reason why we know that it doesn't use some sort of unneccesarily sophisticated probability model to account for every user input is because a bored dickhead dumped a ROM and used a replay attack. Big f'in deal. People will still be attracted to them like flies, as most of them couldn't give 2 shits. All they need to hear is someone striking it rich down the row to get them motivated again.
Personally, I'm not outraged (can you tell I didn't just "find this out"). But I also think video poker and the like is just stupid. I'd go to Vegas for the shows, not to play video games. I can do that at home.
Sun's original intentions were not to open the source. They had originally hoped to use it as an alternative to Microsoft Office, but that dream was quickly squashed. They did the next best thing (for which I am grateful).
Note that StarOffice, the full product, is not open source. It becomes open source (and integrated into Open Office) as features trickle into the public domain. Certain parts of StarOffice are tied up in IP restrictions. Fortunately they are not too important.
I realize now that there may be a different issue with regards to the double or nothing feature specifically of the slot machine in question.
A double-or-nothing feature is indictative of a 50% chance to improve the score. Anything more than 50% would artificially raise the value of the actual prize seeing as then it would always be profitable to double the money, and you'd win more often than not.
A guess-if-its-higher-or-lower thing is probably geared to a 70-80% chance of winning. So it makes the double-or-nothing seem more lucrative. But if the guessing game is rigged to have a 50% probability of winning, then it has misrepresented the chance of your ability to improve your winnings by making "the correct choice", or any choice by the matter.
It sounds like it was a feature that was added on at the last second. Then the author realized it was fucking with her probability tables, so she made it only let you win half the time, so the double-or-nothing didn't affect the overall payoffs.
No, it's also correct for a single person. Consider my example posed to another poster:
Here's the game, I'm thinking of a number from zero to eleven (I'm lying). I have a wheel with numbers 1-10 on it. I'll spin the wheel, and you guess if the number I'm thinking of is higher or lower than the one it lands on.
Meanwhile, I've already flipped a coin, and it was heads, which means no matter what, you lose.
So as it turns out the wheel lands on 10. You guess lower, naturally. I say, WRONG, it was 11.
According to your statement, you would cry foul to this. Okay, fine, let's think about it for a second.
You have no way of knowing what number I picked. I could have actually spun a wheel with 12 numbers on it at it really said 11. But the chances of that happening are 1/6th as likely as the coin toss that decided your fate.
In essence, the coin toss TRUMPS the wheel spin because the wheel spin means nothing, the coin toss determines the ouctome.
Not cool. But wait a minute... WAIT A MINUTE.
If you spin a hidden wheel, and then a visible wheel, one with 12 spaces and one with 10, then have to guess whether the covered one is higher or lower, clearly you guess higher when the exposed number is 1-5, and lower when 6-10.
The odds of you guessing correctly are: 11/12 + 10/12 + 9/12 + 8/12 + 7/12 / 5 = 3/4 (for either range), considering each spin to be equal-probable.
So, I revise my coin toss method: now I flip two coins and tell you you're wrong only if I get 2 heads.
The only difference here now is that in the first case, you can do worse than 75% if you don't stick to the 1-5 higher formula, rather than in the second case where everyone has a 75% chance of winning. How is that unfair? I just made it MORE FAIR. It doesn't discriminate against stupid people.
I imagine the outcome selector of the double/nothing was calculated to be significantly more than 50%, so that every outcome was statistically likely.
So, you're mad because you don't have an edge over a stupid person, yet in the long run, everyone is still out of their money.
And the coder who wrote the game has 50 lines less code to debug, and as a result has made pure profit. I'd say he is the only winner, no matter what the rules.
1) You can't tell the outcome of the game until you push the button. 2) The payoff chances are algorithmically designed to reach a payout percentage as set in the machine. 3) You can't rewind time.
According to 1), there is always some FINITE chance that you will either win or lose, no matter how much "information" the game shows you about your current state. (For example, the hidden number in the Hi-Lo guess)
According to 2), the system must do a good job of maintaining payoff probability; if it's too high, it'll be bad for business, if it's too low, it won't meet regulations.
According to 3), it doesn't matter what the outcome is, any evidence you can gather from the machine to show what you should have done is worthless, since you can't apply it to the previous game.
To achieve 2) and provide incremental feedback or changing probabilites during the game at each choice is a challenge. But because of 3) and 1), it is possible to pick the result at the outset and it can still be a plausible conclusion no matter what the user does.
It completely follows from logic, there is no discrimination, so how is this unfair? Has it taken the "thrill" out of it?
Keep in mind the thrill is there to get you to spend even more money than you would if you knew how the machine operated. Why don't you play a video game instead?
Also, consider this:
I choose whether you win or lose at the beginning of the game. Then I spin a wheel with numbers on it, and say to you: "I'm thinking of a number. Is this number of the wheel higher or lower???" If the number is very high, you will say lower. Of course, I'll tell you it's higher if I already thought you were going to lose.
But, considering each spin is equally likely, and my chosen outcome was decided with the flip of a proverbial coin, then over N trials there is nothing unfair about that game, you have the same possibility of winning if instead of choosing WIN or LOSE, I spun a wheel with numbers on it and didn't lie to you. In each case it's.5...
Go ahead and work out the outcome spaces for each type of event, and count the number of winning and losing spaces for the player. You'll find that if the event is the chosen by two uniform random variables (coin toss + wheel spin, or wheel spin+ wheel spin), the outcomes are identical. In the first one, the wheel spin is a formality, it boils down to the coin toss. In the second one, guessing the sign of the difference between a hidden and visible wheel spin is also 50%, so it's just like a coin toss. Same thing.
That's what this game is doing, so why get all up in arms?
Over the number of games played, the weighted payoffs of all outcomes will approach the required odds. How the machine achieves the odds is arbitrary. In this case, the game decides the outcome in the beginning (probably to try to stick to a payoff curve). Thus any button pressing is just formalities, you pick your risk/payoff and it tells you what the coin toss was. It would be too difficult for it to incrementally adjust the probabilities to account for different in-game activities, and stay on-target for staying close to the minimum payout. As to whether this is unethical, consider this:
No one is ever going to be given a chance to go back and time and make 'the other choice' on such a fruit machine. So to the user, it's all the same. The machine isn't being dishonest since you're not supposed to know how it makes its decisions; it's a black box to you. This kind of analysis is only possible using an emulator, but pointless.
From a mathematical point of view as well: IT DOESN'T MATTER ONE BIT. a) you don't know the initial state of the machine in real life, b) you can't tell the outcome until after you've made all your choices.
So according to b), it doesn't really matter WHEN the machine actually decides whether you win or lose because the payouts are carefully designed to be equally in the machine's favor no matter what stakes you choose. And all this is just mental masturabation because since you don't know a), knowing the algorithms involved doesn't give you jack shit. It could be asking an elf if you were ugly and paying out based on that, and it wouldn't matter because you don't have a)
You would have no way of knowing you were being "cheated", and really you aren't, since it doesn't matter because you have no "introspection", you can't "Win" at a slot machine.
Things like saying (quoting from the website) "If I only held those cherries, I would have won", that it wouldn't have mattered because the computer would have made you lose anyway... is not recognizing the fact that YOU CANNOT GO BACK IN TIME ANYWAY!!! SO WHY EVEN CONSIDER "MODELLING" THAT LOGICAL FALLACY THAT SOMEHOW YOU CAN DO "BETTER" AT A FUCKING WHEEL OF CHANCE?!?! You think the game designers have nothing better to do then make their money-sinks into devices that model some sort of fictious, expected, or antiquated behavior?
Calling it fradulent is not understanding how the machines work. Fixed odds is EQUAL to fixed outcomes, especially when it comes to computer based games of chance.
They're going to make it into a "drag-it-out battle" between the characters, rival gangs of monsters.
And they're going to explain why they have this rivalry. Okay, great. Except...
THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE GAME.
The game is where the ass-kicking belongs (and rightly so!). Before the game (as in this comic), there was no ass-kicking. They were getting to the ass-kicking, but rest assured, it had not come down to fisticuffs.
Just bizness, as Demitri would say.
If it doesn't involve Morrigan fucking some poor sap, and then blackmailing them (or killing them), it's not worth it. How else could she have managed to get Berial taken out so convienently! Alas, Dreanwave is too pussy to break with the Comic code, so we will have all that beautiful art by Lou Kang go to waste at the safe edge of sensuality and controversy.
So, in conclusion, American Capcom comics = Gay (at least this one).
If you want background story, download some MegaMan RPG roms and watch the Darkstalker OAVs. Oh, and Devil May Cry does not deserve to be a comic. It's such an overdone topic in that medium that it makes me want to vomit.
And just think, as criminals get more sophisticated, the models will begin to fail, and it's back to "zone coverage".
I can imagine this getting into macrocycles as demand pushes more technology, which is then picked up on and counteracted by criminals "in the know".
Right now, we're lucky that most criminals are not uber-hackers who can break into police databases to get datasets to run through the models they leeched off University FTP sites.
But that's not to say that it couldn't be done by a third part. Contractors who can't find work might start looking for a quick buck...
You're right, but for the wrong reason. And you're also wrong for an unrelated reason.
40 is an excellent sample for measuring a trend in a population of 10000, if there's no correlating factor between the data points.
In this case, it sounds like all the hardware was bought on one order. This means all of the hard drives could have come on the same palette (and were accidentally dropped by Big Mike in the warehouse, whoops).
So calm down, you don't need to invest in 4-leaf clovers.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't... recognize... You mean you don't know who I am?
Surely then you would have gotten the joke. Despite TrollKore members' reputations (esp. Dessimator), they are not completely devoid of humor.
The post is, in fact, the opening lyrics to "Neon Genesis Evangelion", which I can attest is Rob Limo's favorite Anime as he jacks off to me all the time.
I CAN SEE YOU ROB! EVEN WHEN YOU COVER YOURSELF WITH A BLANKET
The title of this article is "Platform Evangelism", for which Evangelion is a close derivative word from German.
It means Gospel, roughly. Evangelism means to preach Gospel, IE, the "Microsoft Way". The Gospel in the Japanese anime Shin Seiiki Evangelion is used to provide a Judeo/Chrsitian mysticism to the whole thing which I think makes it seem more artsy than it's worth, but that's a personal opinion.
Not too much correlation there, but it's a (bad, predicatable) pun to be suggested. I hope I don't get mod-banned for this swipe at the Creators.
I hope this clears it all up. If you are still confused, look up my name or Evangelion in google, and you will learn more than you want just from the link descriptions.
Toodles!
Then cheap, individual consoles are going to be important to get. They should come with game discs that let you play GBA-SP or go webtv/networked mode with a broadband adapter and let you remotely boot net-aware games, like an arcade setup.
That would kick ass. Of course, they might not like the idea of only having to have one copy of the game for 4 people to play over a LAN (you'll probably need it for net play, however)
In fact, that sounds like a good compromise! $150 for a "LAN party pack", GC, controller, Net/GBA rom, broadband adapter.
"Open source" is not equivalent to "I'm a dirty GNU hippy"
I DON'T CARE what RMS or anyone else says and dI o what I damn fucking well please.
Yes, I am angered by your statements, and yes I am ignorant. I am ignorant to RMS's blathing idiocy and utopian vision. I am ignorant to your warped, stereotypical, one-track mindset.
Yes, my proud ignorance does in no way invalidate your points, as you have not made any that aren't any more insightful than a lowly, cut-n-paste trollaxor.
In short, I think we should all move to Brazil, because I saw the uncut European version of the movie and they had great hair.
The only things they have to declassify are things the government "is aware of". IE, if there are internal memos and reports, they never got out into the rest of the military proper, were never compartmentalized, and thus are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
Of course they filed normal, routine, daily-business of running a base type reports which were promptly given document control numbers and filed away. But I bet a lot of that is faked at ANY base to keep budget projections looking good. So of course you're not going to find anything interesting in that stuff. (I'm talking IN GENERAL... if the project wasn't explicitly being paid for by some task force, dollars to donuts the documentation is spotty, lazy, tooled-up, or non-existant)
If it was clandestine, it wouldn't have been widely known what was going on there, and they sure as hell wouldn't have published internal documents. No need for a paper trail if you want to keep things quiet.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaa
a aa aaaaaaa
::panting::
NO ONE GIVES A FUCK WHAT R.M.S. OR YOU SAY!!!
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
As an aside, how many developers who use/release open source have even read the GNU Manifesto? Not very many (especially no one I know, myself included). Christ almighty this whole thread has me pissed now.
Read carefully, mods. Operative word in the quip was "foam".
Recent social commentary: it's funny, laugh.
Unless the BSP tree for map viewability is computed at load time... I highly doubt it.
then from what starting point will RedHat, Debian et al. have to work from? How will they even know anyone cares to install Linux on a tablet PC?
They read slashdot too...
:-)
While Sun may be doing The Right Thing, it doesn't make them philanthropists. You should support Sun for such actions, but not forget that company exists for its shareholders. Right now, our motives are colinear.
My advice: keep it that way.
Again, nothing is bad about stuff being NOT open source, but don't think that Sun is just giving stuff away because they feel generous. There are other reasons as well (besides not wanting to be seen as tightwads).
Hee hee, sounds funny when read aloud. I slay me.
1) You really can't say they're being deceived because the machine doesn't make any claims as to what your chances of succeeding by making each choice is! The _user_ makes up his own expectations about how the machine works, and I think it's just too bad if that doesn't jive with reality. ;-)
... ALWAYS. Right?
::big hug for the anonymous coward for getting to the core of this issue::
It's like when there's this really hot guy I like, and then I find out he's sleeping with someone, meanwhile I went out with him the a few nights ago, and I didn't even ask him if he was seeing anyone, and then I feel deceived? Not a healthy attitude; egocentric if you ask me.
And assuming humans must act as if they have free will... should it matter if we have or it not?
I say no, and here's why... "Free Will" means you have the ability to choose whats best for you or who you care about. Clearly you wouldn't choose any other way, right? You always want to make the best decision you possibly can
So you have a choice, but the choice is obvious once you evaluate the situation. So really, even if you didn't have a choice (per se), that choice is imperative by your desire to choose the best thing, a fact of human nature.
So realizing you don't have free will, REALLY, isn't a big deal. You can't destroy your always-pick-best mindest because of that, otherwise you'll be miserable. Humans have this thing called "denial" you know, which means it'll let them function and continue evaluating choices, even if the endpoint is imminent. The way to rationalize that is: you can't just lay back and let it happen then, you still have to actively make the choice, even if there's no way to do otherwise. You will realize that the lack of free will does not excuse someone from making choices, because otherwise no optimal choices will be made. Only the weak would use the excuse of no free will to justify apathy.
And no one can stay apathetic for long, it's quite boring.
So after the initial shock, things would be back to the status-quo, even if you could prove the absence of free will. I have more faith in human nature than most!
is an employee of Dreamwave or a raving fanboy.
Of course, no one will read this follow up post, and I've got Karma to burn, so I'm just going to flame on.
D4RK H0R5E 4EVA!!!!!111
Brining you only the finest.
I would be outraged. But not because I felt I was being cheated, but that such a huge effort was being launched into deceiving me. In fact, that such a huge effort was being made into making everyone at the table have house-odds of winning, which is lame. If they just let people play, the idiots lose their fat wads, while the more astute stay longer. (maybe blackjack was a bad example?)
Also, you can tell the house is cheating anyway (How is that bozo winning as much as me??!), which is different then what was happening here.
You can't tell the machine is cheating unless you re-wind time or use an emulator. And, the machine manufacturer wasn't going to expect that would happen, so the game only makes the illusion of choice. Is that the machine makers fault? In fact, it's kind of retarded to call what's happening a "cheat". It's only a cheat if you take a shortcut that has sideffects.
There are no side-effects in this case. The guy who posted that "expose" is just tooting his own horn.
You know, like if there were two ways to invert a matrix, a real way, and a "fast" way, but they gave you the same answer, and the "fast" way was faster, would you be outraged if it chose the fast way over some other way you learned in school? I wouldn't!! Normally, this would be fine. But then someone exposes it, and blows it out of proportion.
Most such machines use exactly that strategy: decide first, then make it look like you have control. Even the later mechanical one-arm-bandits used that technique.
The only difference between the two ways you could frame the situation is that in one case the person knows how the machine operates. They'll come to realize they're at the mercy of a PNRG which has none of the analog, "almost-maybe-next-time" feel of a roulette wheel. They'll be shocked to learn that the machine works really hard to make it look like there's a modicum of manuverability or hope of "beating it", which resonates with the player, only to keep them there dropping quarters for longer.
And then they get all insulted the machine is lying to them? That's them just not understanding 1) how computers work 2) how Casinos work.
I haven't taken a pschye course, but I'm well aware of the perception of control's function in the gaming experience. But if the user can't tell he can't effect the outcome, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE!? The only reason why we know that it doesn't use some sort of unneccesarily sophisticated probability model to account for every user input is because a bored dickhead dumped a ROM and used a replay attack. Big f'in deal. People will still be attracted to them like flies, as most of them couldn't give 2 shits. All they need to hear is someone striking it rich down the row to get them motivated again.
Personally, I'm not outraged (can you tell I didn't just "find this out"). But I also think video poker and the like is just stupid. I'd go to Vegas for the shows, not to play video games. I can do that at home.
Sun's original intentions were not to open the source. They had originally hoped to use it as an alternative to Microsoft Office, but that dream was quickly squashed. They did the next best thing (for which I am grateful).
Note that StarOffice, the full product, is not open source. It becomes open source (and integrated into Open Office) as features trickle into the public domain. Certain parts of StarOffice are tied up in IP restrictions. Fortunately they are not too important.
I realize now that there may be a different issue with regards to the double or nothing feature specifically of the slot machine in question.
A double-or-nothing feature is indictative of a 50% chance to improve the score. Anything more than 50% would artificially raise the value of the actual prize seeing as then it would always be profitable to double the money, and you'd win more often than not.
A guess-if-its-higher-or-lower thing is probably geared to a 70-80% chance of winning. So it makes the double-or-nothing seem more lucrative. But if the guessing game is rigged to have a 50% probability of winning, then it has misrepresented the chance of your ability to improve your winnings by making "the correct choice", or any choice by the matter.
It sounds like it was a feature that was added on at the last second. Then the author realized it was fucking with her probability tables, so she made it only let you win half the time, so the double-or-nothing didn't affect the overall payoffs.
I wouldn't call it cheating, just dumb.
No, it's also correct for a single person. Consider my example posed to another poster:
Here's the game, I'm thinking of a number from zero to eleven (I'm lying). I have a wheel with numbers 1-10 on it. I'll spin the wheel, and you guess if the number I'm thinking of is higher or lower than the one it lands on.
Meanwhile, I've already flipped a coin, and it was heads, which means no matter what, you lose.
So as it turns out the wheel lands on 10. You guess lower, naturally. I say, WRONG, it was 11.
According to your statement, you would cry foul to this. Okay, fine, let's think about it for a second.
You have no way of knowing what number I picked. I could have actually spun a wheel with 12 numbers on it at it really said 11. But the chances of that happening are 1/6th as likely as the coin toss that decided your fate.
In essence, the coin toss TRUMPS the wheel spin because the wheel spin means nothing, the coin toss determines the ouctome.
Not cool. But wait a minute... WAIT A MINUTE.
If you spin a hidden wheel, and then a visible wheel, one with 12 spaces and one with 10, then have to guess whether the covered one is higher or lower, clearly you guess higher when the exposed number is 1-5, and lower when 6-10.
The odds of you guessing correctly are:
11/12 + 10/12 + 9/12 + 8/12 + 7/12 / 5 = 3/4 (for either range), considering each spin to be equal-probable.
So, I revise my coin toss method: now I flip two coins and tell you you're wrong only if I get 2 heads.
The only difference here now is that in the first case, you can do worse than 75% if you don't stick to the 1-5 higher formula, rather than in the second case where everyone has a 75% chance of winning. How is that unfair? I just made it MORE FAIR. It doesn't discriminate against stupid people.
I imagine the outcome selector of the double/nothing was calculated to be significantly more than 50%, so that every outcome was statistically likely.
So, you're mad because you don't have an edge over a stupid person, yet in the long run, everyone is still out of their money.
And the coder who wrote the game has 50 lines less code to debug, and as a result has made pure profit. I'd say he is the only winner, no matter what the rules.
Do you agree to these axioms?
.5...
1) You can't tell the outcome of the game until you push the button.
2) The payoff chances are algorithmically designed to reach a payout percentage as set in the machine.
3) You can't rewind time.
According to 1), there is always some FINITE chance that you will either win or lose, no matter how much "information" the game shows you about your current state. (For example, the hidden number in the Hi-Lo guess)
According to 2), the system must do a good job of maintaining payoff probability; if it's too high, it'll be bad for business, if it's too low, it won't meet regulations.
According to 3), it doesn't matter what the outcome is, any evidence you can gather from the machine to show what you should have done is worthless, since you can't apply it to the previous game.
To achieve 2) and provide incremental feedback or changing probabilites during the game at each choice is a challenge. But because of 3) and 1), it is possible to pick the result at the outset and it can still be a plausible conclusion no matter what the user does.
It completely follows from logic, there is no discrimination, so how is this unfair? Has it taken the "thrill" out of it?
Keep in mind the thrill is there to get you to spend even more money than you would if you knew how the machine operated. Why don't you play a video game instead?
Also, consider this:
I choose whether you win or lose at the beginning of the game. Then I spin a wheel with numbers on it, and say to you: "I'm thinking of a number. Is this number of the wheel higher or lower???" If the number is very high, you will say lower. Of course, I'll tell you it's higher if I already thought you were going to lose.
But, considering each spin is equally likely, and my chosen outcome was decided with the flip of a proverbial coin, then over N trials there is nothing unfair about that game, you have the same possibility of winning if instead of choosing WIN or LOSE, I spun a wheel with numbers on it and didn't lie to you. In each case it's
Go ahead and work out the outcome spaces for each type of event, and count the number of winning and losing spaces for the player. You'll find that if the event is the chosen by two uniform random variables (coin toss + wheel spin, or wheel spin+ wheel spin), the outcomes are identical. In the first one, the wheel spin is a formality, it boils down to the coin toss. In the second one, guessing the sign of the difference between a hidden and visible wheel spin is also 50%, so it's just like a coin toss. Same thing.
That's what this game is doing, so why get all up in arms?
Over the number of games played, the weighted payoffs of all outcomes will approach the required odds. How the machine achieves the odds is arbitrary. In this case, the game decides the outcome in the beginning (probably to try to stick to a payoff curve). Thus any button pressing is just formalities, you pick your risk/payoff and it tells you what the coin toss was.
It would be too difficult for it to incrementally adjust the probabilities to account for different in-game activities, and stay on-target for staying close to the minimum payout.
As to whether this is unethical, consider this:
No one is ever going to be given a chance to go back and time and make 'the other choice' on such a fruit machine. So to the user, it's all the same. The machine isn't being dishonest since you're not supposed to know how it makes its decisions; it's a black box to you. This kind of analysis is only possible using an emulator, but pointless.
From a mathematical point of view as well: IT DOESN'T MATTER ONE BIT. a) you don't know the initial state of the machine in real life, b) you can't tell the outcome until after you've made all your choices.
So according to b), it doesn't really matter WHEN the machine actually decides whether you win or lose because the payouts are carefully designed to be equally in the machine's favor no matter what stakes you choose. And all this is just mental masturabation because since you don't know a), knowing the algorithms involved doesn't give you jack shit. It could be asking an elf if you were ugly and paying out based on that, and it wouldn't matter because you don't have a)
You would have no way of knowing you were being "cheated", and really you aren't, since it doesn't matter because you have no "introspection", you can't "Win" at a slot machine.
Things like saying (quoting from the website) "If I only held those cherries, I would have won", that it wouldn't have mattered because the computer would have made you lose anyway... is not recognizing the fact that YOU CANNOT GO BACK IN TIME ANYWAY!!!
SO WHY EVEN CONSIDER "MODELLING" THAT LOGICAL FALLACY THAT SOMEHOW YOU CAN DO "BETTER" AT A FUCKING WHEEL OF CHANCE?!?!
You think the game designers have nothing better to do then make their money-sinks into devices that model some sort of fictious, expected, or antiquated behavior?
Calling it fradulent is not understanding how the machines work. Fixed odds is EQUAL to fixed outcomes, especially when it comes to computer based games of chance.
The software sucks, and no one would in their right minds want to see the source.
Not a good example to follow if you want an alternative ERP.
They acquired it by buying a German company (StarDivision)at a good price, and made a few improvements.
They're going to make it into a "drag-it-out battle" between the characters, rival gangs of monsters.
And they're going to explain why they have this rivalry.
Okay, great. Except...
THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE GAME.
The game is where the ass-kicking belongs (and rightly so!). Before the game (as in this comic), there was no ass-kicking. They were getting to the ass-kicking, but rest assured, it had not come down to fisticuffs.
Just bizness, as Demitri would say.
If it doesn't involve Morrigan fucking some poor sap, and then blackmailing them (or killing them), it's not worth it. How else could she have managed to get Berial taken out so convienently! Alas, Dreanwave is too pussy to break with the Comic code, so we will have all that beautiful art by Lou Kang go to waste at the safe edge of sensuality and controversy.
So, in conclusion, American Capcom comics = Gay (at least this one).
If you want background story, download some MegaMan RPG roms and watch the Darkstalker OAVs. Oh, and Devil May Cry does not deserve to be a comic. It's such an overdone topic in that medium that it makes me want to vomit.
Christ people.
And just think, as criminals get more sophisticated, the models will begin to fail, and it's back to "zone coverage".
I can imagine this getting into macrocycles as demand pushes more technology, which is then picked up on and counteracted by criminals "in the know".
Right now, we're lucky that most criminals are not uber-hackers who can break into police databases to get datasets to run through the models they leeched off University FTP sites.
But that's not to say that it couldn't be done by a third part. Contractors who can't find work might start looking for a quick buck...
they both suck.
Why doesn't anyone use BZIP on windows?
You're right, but for the wrong reason. And you're also wrong for an unrelated reason.
40 is an excellent sample for measuring a trend in a population of 10000, if there's no correlating factor between the data points.
In this case, it sounds like all the hardware was bought on one order. This means all of the hard drives could have come on the same palette (and were accidentally dropped by Big Mike in the warehouse, whoops).
So calm down, you don't need to invest in 4-leaf clovers.
but PLEASE... spare me the OSX fud.
we hacked together a Sun-compatible automount on top of the unsupported amd + NIS, and it's been working fine for a month.
Now that's some scary shit.
(oth, we avoid the mac tools as much as possible, except when you have to touch netinfo; maybe that's why we were okay)
Oracle.
No one in their right mind would pick that beast to learn databases except it can be gotten easily without restrictions.
And now every bozo on ExpertsExchange is asking about some Oracle-specific extension.
Figures.