sure, but one reason the NeXT version was full grayscale & fancy while the Mac version was B&W and simple was that Macs originally shipped with B&W screens (no grayscale) and a resolution of 72dpi. I think icons were 12 by 12 pixels (maybe 16 by 16) - you try representing a fancy diffraction pattern on a system like that.
>>it was of course shocking how NeXT like mac OSX is. all the way down to the spinning multi-colored beach ball.
Hang on there. I've been using Macs since the mid 1980s (how I remember the excitement of getting a 20Mb external hard drive to supplement the single 800K floppy...it took me years to fill it. But i digress), and there's always been a spinning beach ball. Of course it started out in B&W since that's how Macs started too (and NeXT was originally launched as a grayscale machine).
NeXT took as much from the original Mac interface as it has given back to OSX.
>>The software has already been tested with air traffic controllers.
Why did they bother testing it with air traffic controllers when they could have launched it straight onto some low-risk industry, like nuclear power? (Then again maybe we don't want software imitating Homer Simpson's logic.)
>>Psst, Glenn, in a civil suit there is no presumption of innocence, and quite literally no prejudice.
RTFDMCA. Under the DMCA willful violation of copyright is a CRIMINAL offence as well as a civil one. Thus a subpoena demonstrating the existence of infringing material may well lead to a criminal prosecution. Hence the need for presumption of innocence.
>>No, IANAL, but I'm wondering how much of a lawyer Glenn really is. He mentions constitutional issues five times, but doesn't expand on what those are, or why they'd apply in a civil suit.
More of a lawyer than you. The argument is that the LAW is unconstitutional, not that the suitor is acting unconstitutionally. Every law passed by Congress, civil or criminal, can be challenged in court and overturned if it breaches the constitution. That's what the constitution is for.
Can someone explain why the number of bits used in a processor always has to advance by doubling (from 8 to 16 to 32 to 64)? Moreover it seems to me that the leap from 32 to 64 bits being standard is likely to take around a decade, whereas 8 to 16 bit was more like a 5 year changeover, so the technology isn't progressing at an ever-increasing rate, we're just having to wait for longer between larger jumps.
Why didn't anyone release a 48 bit chip (for example) 5 years ago, instead of us having to wait around to go straight to 64?
Not meant to be offensive, I just wonder if we USians are the only ones who still delude ourselves with the myth of unbiased reporting...
If you've written that after watching Fox news, then you are seriously deluded. Basically, in the US, newspapers provide balanced coverage while TV news unashamedly chases ratings by being populist and biased. In the UK, TV coverage is balanced (by law) while newspapers generally take a political slant. Given that most people get their news from the TV, I'd say the British system results in a better educated public.
This is especially true since there's little diversity of viewpoints even on US TV - the choice seems to be between rightwing and very rightwing - and very few genuinely national newspapers, meaning that "balanced" coverage is whatever the NY Times prints. In the UK, on the other hand, in addition to the balanced coverage provided by the numerous TV news stations, the presence of 10 national newspapers all with different political points of view, from unashamedly liberal to unashamedly neo-con, means that at least you're generally aware of other points of view, even if you don't subscribe to them.
And anyway, nobody reads tabloid newspapers for the news. That's why they have to put a half-naked girl on page 3...
Aside from the fact that that's completely untrue (ask all the folk who sail and row on the Charles -- as I have done), it would be much harder to "walk on oil" than water. Water striders are kept afloat by surface tension, and oil, especially light oils that float on water, has much lower surface tension than water.
But in any case, all MIT students need to is wait until February when the Charles generally freezes over. Shouldn't be hard to walk over that.
You don't know one thing. The great majority of crimes are never solved. How many burglaries/car thefts/pickpocketings/muggings etc that you or your friends and family reported ever results in a conviction?
That's why increasing jail sentences has almost no impact on crime rates -- they only affect a criminal's behaviour if he thinks he's going to get caught. (Plus in my view it's subject to the law of diminishing returns. If someone's ready to risk 15 years in jail for a crime, are they really going to think again just because you put it up to 25?)
Lets see, the surrounding nations all signed military pacts, consolidated command structures, authorized foriegn troop access, massed an army on the Israeli border
Lucky Stalin didn't react in the same way to the formation of Nato or we'd be eking out a post-nuclear existence by now...
And then those filthy jews started a war.
Indeed, many of my relatives among them. I spent passover with a retired Israeli general last year (who fought in the 1967 war). He was of the opinion that no amount of military crackdown by israel on the Palestinians could ever stop the suicide bombings; peace could only be achieved if Israel pulled back, including the settlements. He also thought that Sharon was a disaster.
No-one looking at the current situation in Israel should forget that the two best chances for peace was ended not by Palestinian terrorists, but by Israeli extremists. The first chance was ended when fanatics opposed to a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. The second came with Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, which he made in the full knowledge that it would spark violent protests among the Palestians. The first brought down the Labour government that agreed the Oslo accords and was about to implement them, and ushered in the Likud era; the second resulted in the Al-Aqsa Intifada that would see Barak's administration - which was also close to a peace deal - replaced by Sharon's hardliners.
It is a regrettable fact of Israeli history that whenever one group of Israelis is close to achieving peace with the Palestinians, another tries to undermine them. It is the tragedy of Israeli history that they always succeed. It's notable that whereas in Northern Ireland, continuing attacks by hardline elements (eg the Omagh bomb) led to the strengthening of the peace process by increasing the resolve of people on both sides to eschew violence, both Israelis and Palestinians appear to be unable to see beyond the next spiral of revenge attacks.
You are totally missing the point! The Israelis never go after civilians just for the sake of going after civilians...If the Palestinians would quit sending suicide bombers to kill innocent Israeli's then they could have their own state.
Recall that before Israeli independence, what was then Palestine was a British protectorate under a League of Nations and then UN mandate. Israeli independence was won through precisely the kind of sustained terrorism that the Palestinians practice today. In 1939 the the Irgun militant group bombed a marketplace, killing 24 (Arab) civilians and injured 39. In 1946, they bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people. In 1947 they threw grenades into a Jerusalem cafe, killing 11 civilians.
Another group, Lehi or the Stern Gang, sent parcel bombs to British politicians. In 1948, they assassinated the UN mediator, count Bernadotte, who had negotiated the truce ending the 1948 war of independence. During that war, Irgun and the Stern gang together killed 107 civilians in an attack on the village of Deir Yassin. Following independence, these "heroes" were incorporatedn into the future Israeli army. One member of the Stern Gang, Yitzhak Shamir, later became Prime Minister of Israel.
These attacks -- which cannot be described as anything but terrorist -- succeeded in their aim of driving the British from Palestine and creating an independent Israeli state. Israel is a nation born in blood, with (Zionist) terrorism as its midwife. What the Palestinians are doing now may not be morally defensible, but they are merely following the highly successful example set by Jewish freedom fighters 60 years previously.
Israel has never once started one of the wars that it has participated in
Sorry, I think you must have forgotten about the six day war in 1967 (OK so it was a "preemptive strike". Name a war where the first person to attack hasn't claimed that). You also seem to have overlooked the 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon -- the last one being condemned even by the US.
So by my counting Israel was invaded twice in the last 55 years: the 1947 independence war and the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Perhaps you were confusing Israel with Lebanon, which has never started a war but has been invaded three times in the last 30 years (by Syria in 1976, Israel in 1978 and 1982).
However, it should be noted that there has never been a strike against an unimportant figure.
I suppose that depends how you defined important figures. Even if you count any suspicious looking palestinian as "important", I don't see how you can include people like James Miller, a british reporter, or Iain Hook, a UN aid worker. Of course the Israeli army admits these were "mistakes", but does that exonerate them?
Never do you see in the news: Israel kills busload of Palestinian schoolchildren. Why?
Because the Palestinians don't have the option of sending in helicopter gunships to assassinate Israeli politicians. I'm not condoning suicide bombings, but your comparison is laughable. In a conflict, each side will naturally make use of the means at its disposal. Moreover israel's "targeted assassinations" invariably kill many more people than just those being targeted -- but obviously a 6-year-old girl who happens to live next door to a Hamas leader doesn't matter as much as a 6-year-old killed in a suicide bombing.
For those interested in getting to the heart of the story, check out the original research paper from Nature magazine. If you're not at a university or other institute with site-wide access you'll need to subscribe or pay to see it, though.
It sounds as though people already are making their voice heard on this issue. Today I was listening to a radio debate on the future of the European Parliament broadcast on BBC radio 4. (The broadcast will be repeated Saturday 10:15pm.) One of the participants, a British MEP, said she had received many messages from constituents about the new software patent directives -- proving, as she said, the importance of the EP in representing citizens' interests in EU legislation. Personally I'm in no doubt that the unofficial/. campaign against the directive was responsible for a large number of said messages.
Am I missing something here? Maybe I'm just the wrong side of 25, but why should txting have any impact? If I'm willing to tap out "this movie sucks" on a 12-button keypad, then I'm just as likely to have made a phone call to the same effect in the pre-SMS era. What I can see is that now every teenager has a mobile phone, they'd be quicker to communicate with each other whether by txt or voice.
But if the MPAA is worried about the effect of SMS texting on ticket sales, just wait until video messaging takes off. Then you'll be able to see for yourself how bad the movie before buying a ticket.
metric (evil French-Jacobin invention!) actually metric was invented long before the French revolution, in 1670. It just wasn't used much until the revolutionaries decided to make it the French standard in 1795. Oddly, while most measurements caught on, the decimal clock (10 hours of 100 minutes per day) never became popular - probably beause it's cheaper to make a new ruler or set of weights than reengineer all the clocks.
I asked him why AT&T didn't didn't use three-ring binders like everybody else.
What makes you think there is a worldwide binder standard? The UK uses 2-ring binders, France uses 4-ring, US uses 3-ring, apparently AT&T uses 5 rings...I'm guessing no-one bothers with more than 5 but I wouldn't be surprised if the spacing between rings varied between countries, even those that use the same number.
40% illiteracy out of 1 billion people means 600 million literate people. That's equal to the total populations of the USA and EU combined. I'm sure they can spare a few thousand to work on a space program. And if they really have an annual govt revenue of $48 billion -- well, that means that on average each indian pays only $48 per year in taxes. I'm packing my bags.
But if you want to talk similarities with 1969 USA how about comparing the India-Pakistan nuclear standoff with USA-USSR. The space race was a major part of cold war rivalry (not to mention an important "peaceful" forum for developing missile technology). Maybe India sees things similarly.
Grandpa: please do the maths. You'll find that you never have a greater than 50% of winning per roll, at least if you define a win as making a net profit per bet. If you define it as "any spin on which at least one of my bets wins", then that's easy to pull off (jst cover more than half the numbers), but overall your expected winnings will be negative.
For example, suppose you cover 1-12 and 13-24 as per the example. True, you've got a 24/37 chance of your number coming up and you winning $3. But your average winnings per spin are $3*24/37=$1.95. Since you've put $2 down on the bet, that means that on average this strategy loses you $0.05 per spin, or 2.5% of your original stake.
Pa: It's the presence of the "0" on the wheel, which never pays out, that makes roulette profitable for casinos. And it's precisely this reason - that (in the long run) one in every 37 spins the casino is guaranteed to win - that makes this true. So it is quite accurate to say that in roulette, the casino profits because on average it wins more often you.
Of course it's also trivially true that the casino profits because they don't "pay you as much as you deserve" -- because you are equating what you deserve with fair odds (i.e. paying out $3.08 rather than $3 if you win on a 1-12 roulette bet). But in actual fact, the odds in roulette are pretty damn even - how often have you seen a "0" come up at a roulette table? - which is why it's possible to play it for a long time before losing.
How can a racist rant like this be modded "insightful"? First off, the only difference between groups 2 and 3 in this system (since both keep their own culture and language) is that those in group 2 come from countries that are either irrelevant or friendly to the US, and those in gourp 3 from those that are rivals or hostile.
And as for "group 1", they've assimilated so well because they've been here for generations. GO back a hundred years and you'll find Jewish immigrants and their kids speaking yiddish, Italians speaking Italian (ever see the Godfather?), Irish speaking Gaelic and none mixing with the other.
As for all those Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight for the USA in WWII... All US citizens of Japanese descent -- however well assimilated -- were IMPRISONED during WWII. Without trial, in clear breach of the constitution. Why? Because the authorities reckoned them to be "group 3" undesirables whose loyalty could not be trusted. Funny that now the US and Japan are allies, you consider them to be perfect examples of immigrants.
sure, much better to be killed in your beds by falling masonry. By the same logic we shouldn't have hurricane warnings, flood warnings, warnings of imminent terrorist attacks...you've been watching too many movies.
And why this assumption that criminals are any less solicitous about their own safety than other people? How many housebreakers are going to break into a house knowing that it's probably going to collapse on top of them, that they'll probably have nowhere to store the stuff they've stolen, and that they'll be the lone civilians driving round a city empty except for firemen and police...
"Theater", like many american usages, only became the standard US spelling fairly recently; before then, both variants were used. In Boston, you'll still see signs advertising the city's "theatre district".
Another example of recent US differentiation from British english is the word "apartment". Read early 20th century American novels, and the word never appears - they call them "flats". I have a feeling that real estate agents are to blame for this one - longer words always sound more impressive to the client. (That must be where the monstrosity of "condominium" came from)
Slashdot Mirror
sure, but one reason the NeXT version was full grayscale & fancy while the Mac version was B&W and simple was that Macs originally shipped with B&W screens (no grayscale) and a resolution of 72dpi. I think icons were 12 by 12 pixels (maybe 16 by 16) - you try representing a fancy diffraction pattern on a system like that.
>>it was of course shocking how NeXT like mac OSX is. all the way down to the spinning multi-colored beach ball.
Hang on there. I've been using Macs since the mid 1980s (how I remember the excitement of getting a 20Mb external hard drive to supplement the single 800K floppy...it took me years to fill it. But i digress), and there's always been a spinning beach ball. Of course it started out in B&W since that's how Macs started too (and NeXT was originally launched as a grayscale machine).
NeXT took as much from the original Mac interface as it has given back to OSX.
>>The software has already been tested with air traffic controllers.
Why did they bother testing it with air traffic controllers when they could have launched it straight onto some low-risk industry, like nuclear power? (Then again maybe we don't want software imitating Homer Simpson's logic.)
>>Psst, Glenn, in a civil suit there is no presumption of innocence, and quite literally no prejudice.
RTFDMCA. Under the DMCA willful violation of copyright is a CRIMINAL offence as well as a civil one. Thus a subpoena demonstrating the existence of infringing material may well lead to a criminal prosecution. Hence the need for presumption of innocence.
>>No, IANAL, but I'm wondering how much of a lawyer Glenn really is. He mentions constitutional issues five times, but doesn't expand on what those are, or why they'd apply in a civil suit.
More of a lawyer than you. The argument is that the LAW is unconstitutional, not that the suitor is acting unconstitutionally. Every law passed by Congress, civil or criminal, can be challenged in court and overturned if it breaches the constitution. That's what the constitution is for.
Can someone explain why the number of bits used in a processor always has to advance by doubling (from 8 to 16 to 32 to 64)? Moreover it seems to me that the leap from 32 to 64 bits being standard is likely to take around a decade, whereas 8 to 16 bit was more like a 5 year changeover, so the technology isn't progressing at an ever-increasing rate, we're just having to wait for longer between larger jumps.
Why didn't anyone release a 48 bit chip (for example) 5 years ago, instead of us having to wait around to go straight to 64?
Not meant to be offensive, I just wonder if we USians are the only ones who still delude ourselves with the myth of unbiased reporting...
If you've written that after watching Fox news, then you are seriously deluded. Basically, in the US, newspapers provide balanced coverage while TV news unashamedly chases ratings by being populist and biased. In the UK, TV coverage is balanced (by law) while newspapers generally take a political slant. Given that most people get their news from the TV, I'd say the British system results in a better educated public.
This is especially true since there's little diversity of viewpoints even on US TV - the choice seems to be between rightwing and very rightwing - and very few genuinely national newspapers, meaning that "balanced" coverage is whatever the NY Times prints. In the UK, on the other hand, in addition to the balanced coverage provided by the numerous TV news stations, the presence of 10 national newspapers all with different political points of view, from unashamedly liberal to unashamedly neo-con, means that at least you're generally aware of other points of view, even if you don't subscribe to them.
And anyway, nobody reads tabloid newspapers for the news. That's why they have to put a half-naked girl on page 3...
If the car ahead is already driving at the limit, why are you trying to overtake it?
>>Make School bus use COMPULSORY where applicable.
Why limit it to school buses? I'd say make bus/train/subway use "COMPULSORY" where applicable. Then we'd really solve the traffic problem.
Aside from the fact that that's completely untrue (ask all the folk who sail and row on the Charles -- as I have done), it would be much harder to "walk on oil" than water. Water striders are kept afloat by surface tension, and oil, especially light oils that float on water, has much lower surface tension than water.
But in any case, all MIT students need to is wait until February when the Charles generally freezes over. Shouldn't be hard to walk over that.
You don't know one thing. The great majority of crimes are never solved. How many burglaries/car thefts/pickpocketings/muggings etc that you or your friends and family reported ever results in a conviction?
That's why increasing jail sentences has almost no impact on crime rates -- they only affect a criminal's behaviour if he thinks he's going to get caught. (Plus in my view it's subject to the law of diminishing returns. If someone's ready to risk 15 years in jail for a crime, are they really going to think again just because you put it up to 25?)
> > I being former military am ASHAMED of our government right now!
>The spelling and grammattical errors in your post certainly indicate you have a military background
you mean because there aren't any (at least in the part you quote?
Lets see, the surrounding nations all signed military pacts, consolidated command structures, authorized foriegn troop access, massed an army on the Israeli border
Lucky Stalin didn't react in the same way to the formation of Nato or we'd be eking out a post-nuclear existence by now...
And then those filthy jews started a war.
Indeed, many of my relatives among them. I spent passover with a retired Israeli general last year (who fought in the 1967 war). He was of the opinion that no amount of military crackdown by israel on the Palestinians could ever stop the suicide bombings; peace could only be achieved if Israel pulled back, including the settlements. He also thought that Sharon was a disaster.
No-one looking at the current situation in Israel should forget that the two best chances for peace was ended not by Palestinian terrorists, but by Israeli extremists. The first chance was ended when fanatics opposed to a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. The second came with Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, which he made in the full knowledge that it would spark violent protests among the Palestians. The first brought down the Labour government that agreed the Oslo accords and was about to implement them, and ushered in the Likud era; the second resulted in the Al-Aqsa Intifada that would see Barak's administration - which was also close to a peace deal - replaced by Sharon's hardliners.
It is a regrettable fact of Israeli history that whenever one group of Israelis is close to achieving peace with the Palestinians, another tries to undermine them. It is the tragedy of Israeli history that they always succeed. It's notable that whereas in Northern Ireland, continuing attacks by hardline elements (eg the Omagh bomb) led to the strengthening of the peace process by increasing the resolve of people on both sides to eschew violence, both Israelis and Palestinians appear to be unable to see beyond the next spiral of revenge attacks.
You are totally missing the point! The Israelis never go after civilians just for the sake of going after civilians...If the Palestinians would quit sending suicide bombers to kill innocent Israeli's then they could have their own state.
Recall that before Israeli independence, what was then Palestine was a British protectorate under a League of Nations and then UN mandate. Israeli independence was won through precisely the kind of sustained terrorism that the Palestinians practice today. In 1939 the the Irgun militant group bombed a marketplace, killing 24 (Arab) civilians and injured 39. In 1946, they bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people. In 1947 they threw grenades into a Jerusalem cafe, killing 11 civilians.
Another group, Lehi or the Stern Gang, sent parcel bombs to British politicians. In 1948, they assassinated the UN mediator, count Bernadotte, who had negotiated the truce ending the 1948 war of independence. During that war, Irgun and the Stern gang together killed 107 civilians in an attack on the village of Deir Yassin. Following independence, these "heroes" were incorporatedn into the future Israeli army. One member of the Stern Gang, Yitzhak Shamir, later became Prime Minister of Israel.
These attacks -- which cannot be described as anything but terrorist -- succeeded in their aim of driving the British from Palestine and creating an independent Israeli state. Israel is a nation born in blood, with (Zionist) terrorism as its midwife. What the Palestinians are doing now may not be morally defensible, but they are merely following the highly successful example set by Jewish freedom fighters 60 years previously.
Israel has never once started one of the wars that it has participated in
Sorry, I think you must have forgotten about the six day war in 1967 (OK so it was a "preemptive strike". Name a war where the first person to attack hasn't claimed that). You also seem to have overlooked the 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon -- the last one being condemned even by the US. So by my counting Israel was invaded twice in the last 55 years: the 1947 independence war and the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Perhaps you were confusing Israel with Lebanon, which has never started a war but has been invaded three times in the last 30 years (by Syria in 1976, Israel in 1978 and 1982).
However, it should be noted that there has never been a strike against an unimportant figure.
I suppose that depends how you defined important figures. Even if you count any suspicious looking palestinian as "important", I don't see how you can include people like James Miller, a british reporter, or Iain Hook, a UN aid worker. Of course the Israeli army admits these were "mistakes", but does that exonerate them?
Never do you see in the news: Israel kills busload of Palestinian schoolchildren. Why?
Because the Palestinians don't have the option of sending in helicopter gunships to assassinate Israeli politicians. I'm not condoning suicide bombings, but your comparison is laughable. In a conflict, each side will naturally make use of the means at its disposal. Moreover israel's "targeted assassinations" invariably kill many more people than just those being targeted -- but obviously a 6-year-old girl who happens to live next door to a Hamas leader doesn't matter as much as a 6-year-old killed in a suicide bombing.
For those interested in getting to the heart of the story, check out the original research paper from Nature magazine. If you're not at a university or other institute with site-wide access you'll need to subscribe or pay to see it, though.
It sounds as though people already are making their voice heard on this issue. Today I was listening to a radio debate on the future of the European Parliament broadcast on BBC radio 4. (The broadcast will be repeated Saturday 10:15pm.) One of the participants, a British MEP, said she had received many messages from constituents about the new software patent directives -- proving, as she said, the importance of the EP in representing citizens' interests in EU legislation. Personally I'm in no doubt that the unofficial /. campaign against the directive was responsible for a large number of said messages.
Sunlight is a bit more predictable than wind, or so I would think.
It's a fair bet you don't come from Scotland.
Am I missing something here? Maybe I'm just the wrong side of 25, but why should txting have any impact? If I'm willing to tap out "this movie sucks" on a 12-button keypad, then I'm just as likely to have made a phone call to the same effect in the pre-SMS era. What I can see is that now every teenager has a mobile phone, they'd be quicker to communicate with each other whether by txt or voice.
But if the MPAA is worried about the effect of SMS texting on ticket sales, just wait until video messaging takes off. Then you'll be able to see for yourself how bad the movie before buying a ticket.
metric (evil French-Jacobin invention!)
actually metric was invented long before the French revolution, in 1670. It just wasn't used much until the revolutionaries decided to make it the French standard in 1795. Oddly, while most measurements caught on, the decimal clock (10 hours of 100 minutes per day) never became popular - probably beause it's cheaper to make a new ruler or set of weights than reengineer all the clocks.
I asked him why AT&T didn't didn't use three-ring binders like everybody else.
What makes you think there is a worldwide binder standard? The UK uses 2-ring binders, France uses 4-ring, US uses 3-ring, apparently AT&T uses 5 rings...I'm guessing no-one bothers with more than 5 but I wouldn't be surprised if the spacing between rings varied between countries, even those that use the same number.
40% illiteracy out of 1 billion people means 600 million literate people. That's equal to the total populations of the USA and EU combined. I'm sure they can spare a few thousand to work on a space program. And if they really have an annual govt revenue of $48 billion -- well, that means that on average each indian pays only $48 per year in taxes. I'm packing my bags.
But if you want to talk similarities with 1969 USA how about comparing the India-Pakistan nuclear standoff with USA-USSR. The space race was a major part of cold war rivalry (not to mention an important "peaceful" forum for developing missile technology). Maybe India sees things similarly.
Replying to the parent and grandparent:
Grandpa: please do the maths. You'll find that you never have a greater than 50% of winning per roll, at least if you define a win as making a net profit per bet. If you define it as "any spin on which at least one of my bets wins", then that's easy to pull off (jst cover more than half the numbers), but overall your expected winnings will be negative.
For example, suppose you cover 1-12 and 13-24 as per the example. True, you've got a 24/37 chance of your number coming up and you winning $3. But your average winnings per spin are $3*24/37=$1.95. Since you've put $2 down on the bet, that means that on average this strategy loses you $0.05 per spin, or 2.5% of your original stake.
Pa: It's the presence of the "0" on the wheel, which never pays out, that makes roulette profitable for casinos. And it's precisely this reason - that (in the long run) one in every 37 spins the casino is guaranteed to win - that makes this true. So it is quite accurate to say that in roulette, the casino profits because on average it wins more often you.
Of course it's also trivially true that the casino profits because they don't "pay you as much as you deserve" -- because you are equating what you deserve with fair odds (i.e. paying out $3.08 rather than $3 if you win on a 1-12 roulette bet). But in actual fact, the odds in roulette are pretty damn even - how often have you seen a "0" come up at a roulette table? - which is why it's possible to play it for a long time before losing.
How can a racist rant like this be modded "insightful"? First off, the only difference between groups 2 and 3 in this system (since both keep their own culture and language) is that those in group 2 come from countries that are either irrelevant or friendly to the US, and those in gourp 3 from those that are rivals or hostile.
And as for "group 1", they've assimilated so well because they've been here for generations. GO back a hundred years and you'll find Jewish immigrants and their kids speaking yiddish, Italians speaking Italian (ever see the Godfather?), Irish speaking Gaelic and none mixing with the other.
As for all those Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight for the USA in WWII... All US citizens of Japanese descent -- however well assimilated -- were IMPRISONED during WWII. Without trial, in clear breach of the constitution. Why? Because the authorities reckoned them to be "group 3" undesirables whose loyalty could not be trusted. Funny that now the US and Japan are allies, you consider them to be perfect examples of immigrants.
sure, much better to be killed in your beds by falling masonry. By the same logic we shouldn't have hurricane warnings, flood warnings, warnings of imminent terrorist attacks...you've been watching too many movies.
And why this assumption that criminals are any less solicitous about their own safety than other people? How many housebreakers are going to break into a house knowing that it's probably going to collapse on top of them, that they'll probably have nowhere to store the stuff they've stolen, and that they'll be the lone civilians driving round a city empty except for firemen and police...
"Theater", like many american usages, only became the standard US spelling fairly recently; before then, both variants were used. In Boston, you'll still see signs advertising the city's "theatre district".
Another example of recent US differentiation from British english is the word "apartment". Read early 20th century American novels, and the word never appears - they call them "flats". I have a feeling that real estate agents are to blame for this one - longer words always sound more impressive to the client. (That must be where the monstrosity of "condominium" came from)