I kind of figured it was going to come to this. I'm a Red Cross volunteer, so I'm biased, but I also have about 5 years' experience with them on local and national disasters.
The ARC is a large, slow-moving, often inflexible, long on lawyers, short on common sense bureaucracy. It is maddening to work for them sometimes (in a volunteer capacity), but at the end of the day you look at the good they do, and you realize nobody else really does it better.
The ARC doesn't accept materiel because the logistics of dealing with those kinds of (often inappropriate) items are horrific. No organization has the manpower to separate the junk from the usable, and transporting that stuff and distributing it takes more people that you don't have. Money works because it allows you to get the right kind of assistance to the people who need it -- quickly.
I'm not sure where you get your information about the ARC "...using any disaster as an excuse for a recruitment drive, even when they're not really needed." They estimate the budget they'll need for a given disaster (based on past, similar disasters) and then they stop fundraising for that disaster when they hit that mark. Any amount that flows in after that is used for the victims of that disaster, and to support chapters in disadvantaged parts of the country that cannot raise enough funds to support smaller disasters in their areas. If you live someplace besides a big city, believe me, you want it to work this way.
As for doing next to nothing in Louisiana, you must be joking. Compare the scope of relief of any other organization with the ARC's after Katrina - all across the country - and you won't find anyone who mounted anything even close.
My chapter literally trained new volunteers day and night during Charley/Ivan and then again during and after Katrina. Were they perfect models of Red Cross volunteers? Nope. But many stayed on, took the regular training the regular way, and now respond to local fires and national disasters, and now they are mostly perfect models.
I don't know who's right in this trademark dispute, but the ARC isn't the bunch of villains you're trying to make them out to be.
This captures the essence: Make this (Wikipedia) a learning experience, don't block it.
I was prepared to take any IT department to task that would dare block something like this without higher guidance, but instead read that it's the school board doing it. Egad, they're subject to being voted out, what a horribly shortsighted vision this board has.
School boards should not be meddling in this. They should be defining grand visions and seeking funding. With micromanagement like this, it's a wonder anyone teaches.
RE: Prepaid debit cards. From an anonymity standpoint, these seem almost ideal. Assuming you fund them with cash, they should be untraceable. I'm surprised there hasn't been a great hue and cry from US Homeland Security because there's no verifiable name attached to them, no SSAN, no driver's license number.
Are they usable on internet gambling sites? If not, is there a prepaid card that *is* usable?
Even conventional Visa/Mastercard business cards must have a person's name on them, not just the business name. These seem to get around that requirement too.
Often, IT departments get the brunt of the blame for these kinds of "censorship" or "bandwidth preservation" decisions, but that's the wrong target.
This is an administration/policy issue: No way should IT be responsible for deciding what gets blocked and what does not. If there are hard data (which IT is responsible for gathering) that shows that bandwith concerns are an issue, then the administration needs to decide what to do about it, e.g., block all streaming mp3s or go after the 10 students hogging most of the bandwidth). At that point it is then IT's job to implement that decision.
Faculty and students have the right to know the thinking that went into the decision, and the people to look to are the administrators: President, Faculty Board, whatever. Not IT. A decision on allocation of resources and how it affects faculty/staff/students should be congruent with the mission of the university. If it's not, the institution can count on negative publicity, sharp questions by prospective students, and, potentially, lawsuits and a big hit to fund-raising efforts.
Administration is paid to be at the point of that spear, not IT.
You know, I think far too many are discounting AI because they believe it would make a bot "predictable." Adding in a bit of randomness, solely to confuse human players, and preferentially on small pots, would take care of much of that problem. Or simply changing, deliberately, from tight to loose, slow to fast, from time to time will be very similar to what humans do to remain "unpredictable."
Additionally, while humans have it all over bots in compiling and evaluating "non-data-related" information (for lack of a better word), such as "tells," speed of play preferences, etc., bots remember better. In an 8 player game, chances are you won't be able to tell me 2 hours from now whether I checked or raised my pocket 8s pre-flop, but a bot will. At the time you might use that information to help decide what kind of player I am (loose, in this case), but a bot can continually readjust what it thinks that play really meant given the context of my subsequent play.
I think the neatest thing is that bots can tell you *why* they're making a particular play. They could have heuristics too ("always get caught bluffing early") like chess bots do. It would make a human-bot game much more interesting for the spectators if the bot could tell the crowd on the sly, "watch me bluff this sucka!" The side bets on the "players" could be just as interesting as the main game, based on what the bot has just told the crowd about what it believes the game situation to be.
About the last thing a patent does is "level" any playing fields; if anything, it is designed to do just the opposite: "The exclusive right granted to a patentee in most countries is the right to prevent others from making, using, selling, offering to sell or importing the claimed invention." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent
And while you're right that a patent contains no restrictions about what you may do with a patented product, the licensing agreement almost certainly does. Typically, you may not reverse-engineer a product, for example, or use it in such a way that would make the creator of it liable for your misdeeds.
To me, this doesn't sound like such a terrible contract, given the complexities of the systems involved. Other posters have noted that the city could have negotiated with another vendor, but presumably found that to be too expensive. Someone always has a superior position in any contractual relationship; by having the vendor's employees escorted off the premises by the police, the City obviously believed they had the best of it. They were wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn you. Lost a mouthful of good Scotch.
+1 Expectorated
I kind of figured it was going to come to this. I'm a Red Cross volunteer, so I'm biased, but I also have about 5 years' experience with them on local and national disasters.
The ARC is a large, slow-moving, often inflexible, long on lawyers, short on common sense bureaucracy. It is maddening to work for them sometimes (in a volunteer capacity), but at the end of the day you look at the good they do, and you realize nobody else really does it better.
The ARC doesn't accept materiel because the logistics of dealing with those kinds of (often inappropriate) items are horrific. No organization has the manpower to separate the junk from the usable, and transporting that stuff and distributing it takes more people that you don't have. Money works because it allows you to get the right kind of assistance to the people who need it -- quickly.
I'm not sure where you get your information about the ARC "...using any disaster as an excuse for a recruitment drive, even when they're not really needed." They estimate the budget they'll need for a given disaster (based on past, similar disasters) and then they stop fundraising for that disaster when they hit that mark. Any amount that flows in after that is used for the victims of that disaster, and to support chapters in disadvantaged parts of the country that cannot raise enough funds to support smaller disasters in their areas. If you live someplace besides a big city, believe me, you want it to work this way.
As for doing next to nothing in Louisiana, you must be joking. Compare the scope of relief of any other organization with the ARC's after Katrina - all across the country - and you won't find anyone who mounted anything even close.
My chapter literally trained new volunteers day and night during Charley/Ivan and then again during and after Katrina. Were they perfect models of Red Cross volunteers? Nope. But many stayed on, took the regular training the regular way, and now respond to local fires and national disasters, and now they are mostly perfect models.
I don't know who's right in this trademark dispute, but the ARC isn't the bunch of villains you're trying to make them out to be.
This captures the essence: Make this (Wikipedia) a learning experience, don't block it. I was prepared to take any IT department to task that would dare block something like this without higher guidance, but instead read that it's the school board doing it. Egad, they're subject to being voted out, what a horribly shortsighted vision this board has. School boards should not be meddling in this. They should be defining grand visions and seeking funding. With micromanagement like this, it's a wonder anyone teaches.
RE: Prepaid debit cards. From an anonymity standpoint, these seem almost ideal. Assuming you fund them with cash, they should be untraceable. I'm surprised there hasn't been a great hue and cry from US Homeland Security because there's no verifiable name attached to them, no SSAN, no driver's license number.
Are they usable on internet gambling sites? If not, is there a prepaid card that *is* usable?
Even conventional Visa/Mastercard business cards must have a person's name on them, not just the business name. These seem to get around that requirement too.
Often, IT departments get the brunt of the blame for these kinds of "censorship" or "bandwidth preservation" decisions, but that's the wrong target.
This is an administration/policy issue: No way should IT be responsible for deciding what gets blocked and what does not. If there are hard data (which IT is responsible for gathering) that shows that bandwith concerns are an issue, then the administration needs to decide what to do about it, e.g., block all streaming mp3s or go after the 10 students hogging most of the bandwidth). At that point it is then IT's job to implement that decision.
Faculty and students have the right to know the thinking that went into the decision, and the people to look to are the administrators: President, Faculty Board, whatever. Not IT. A decision on allocation of resources and how it affects faculty/staff/students should be congruent with the mission of the university. If it's not, the institution can count on negative publicity, sharp questions by prospective students, and, potentially, lawsuits and a big hit to fund-raising efforts.
Administration is paid to be at the point of that spear, not IT.
First, to generate them use KeyMaker http//www.itoolpad.com/products/keymaker/
Then, to keep all of those weird, unrememberable passwords safe, try Password Guardian http://www.crypto-central.com/html/passgard.html
There are other good products out there too, but the above are free.
You know, I think far too many are discounting AI because they believe it would make a bot "predictable." Adding in a bit of randomness, solely to confuse human players, and preferentially on small pots, would take care of much of that problem. Or simply changing, deliberately, from tight to loose, slow to fast, from time to time will be very similar to what humans do to remain "unpredictable."
Additionally, while humans have it all over bots in compiling and evaluating "non-data-related" information (for lack of a better word), such as "tells," speed of play preferences, etc., bots remember better. In an 8 player game, chances are you won't be able to tell me 2 hours from now whether I checked or raised my pocket 8s pre-flop, but a bot will. At the time you might use that information to help decide what kind of player I am (loose, in this case), but a bot can continually readjust what it thinks that play really meant given the context of my subsequent play.
I think the neatest thing is that bots can tell you *why* they're making a particular play. They could have heuristics too ("always get caught bluffing early") like chess bots do. It would make a human-bot game much more interesting for the spectators if the bot could tell the crowd on the sly, "watch me bluff this sucka!" The side bets on the "players" could be just as interesting as the main game, based on what the bot has just told the crowd about what it believes the game situation to be.
And while you're right that a patent contains no restrictions about what you may do with a patented product, the licensing agreement almost certainly does. Typically, you may not reverse-engineer a product, for example, or use it in such a way that would make the creator of it liable for your misdeeds.
To me, this doesn't sound like such a terrible contract, given the complexities of the systems involved. Other posters have noted that the city could have negotiated with another vendor, but presumably found that to be too expensive. Someone always has a superior position in any contractual relationship; by having the vendor's employees escorted off the premises by the police, the City obviously believed they had the best of it. They were wrong.