I get so tired, every time this topic comes up, of seeing all the comments of "what's the problem? No one uses cash anymore!"
Maybe you don't. Maybe your friends don't. You're probably middle-to-upper class, living in an urban area, working 9-5 jobs. But not everyone is like you. Many people in this country do not have bank accounts or credit cards. Many people in this country do not get regular paychecks. Many people conduct business outside banking hours. Many people live dozens or hundreds of miles from the nearest bank!
There are still a hell of a lot of situations where cash is the most practical way to conduct transactions, even large transactions, and eliminating large bills does nothing but add hassle and decrease security.
John Brennan did pretty much that, stripping naked in protest of invasive TSA procedures. He was arrested for indecent exposure, taken to jail, and fined $1000 by TSA for "interference with screening personnel." He was found not guilty on the indecent exposure charge, the fine is still in appeals 4+ years later, but I'm pretty sure his legal expenses are in five figures.
I wouldn't for a moment discourage you from this plan, but please do be aware of what you're getting into, and the extent to which they will fuck with you.
Well, supporting Sai's Patreon is a decent place to start. I've been tossing him $10/mo for a while now, it's a pittance but at least it's something. He's been shockingly effective for someone who's just One Random Guy with practically no support. https://www.patreon.com/saizai
Lots of people claiming that this has been done before, or is available for cheaper. Really? Show me.
The point of this desk is that it lets you transition seamlessly between standing, sitting, and reclining positions, with the desk and monitor properly positioned in all cases. I'm unaware of anything in the under-$5000 range that does this.
The workstation setup I've found that's most comfortable for me is a monitor arm swinging out over a recliner, but it doesn't let me move around, and my neck is bent forward to look at the monitor, causing neck and shoulder pain. (Without the monitor arm, looking at the laptop screen, it's even worse.) A conventional desk setup, even with fancy ergonomic chair and keyboard, creates problems with my back and arms. I've briefly experimented with standing desks (IKEA hack) but my knees are very emphatic about their dislike of the idea of standing all day - an anti-fatigue mat would help, as would a sit/stand setup, but trying to use both is a hassle because you have to both change your desk height and roll out / put away the mat every time you change positions. And it's a pretty substantial investment of both time and money in a style of working that I have little reason to think will work for me.
The Altwork would let me recline while having the monitor directly in my line of site without hunching over, and transition from that into sitting with one button press, and from there get up and swing the desk out to the side over an anti-fatigue mat and work standing up. I am certainly not looking to spend $6000 on a desk - or $4000, the pre-order price - or $2400, my after-tax-deduction pre-order price - but it seems like a complete solution to an ergonomic dilemma I've had for over a decade now, and I don't see any cheaper alternative that does it.
Is there something out there already that's cheaper and better? Great! Show me! Take my money!
If you don't care about what kind of job you get, just how much money you make, then:
a) You will make more money than someone who considers other factors in their choice of career. b) You will take any courses which you're told will enhance your marketability, no matter how disgusting. Like COBOL.
Hence it's unsurprising that people who take COBOL make more money... but is it *because* they took COBOL? That's less clear. Correlation is not causation.
“Bad drivers will at some point need to improve their driving or accept [having] to pay for the real risk they represent”... yeah, right. If you drive at night, such as for work, Progressive will penalize you no matter how good a driver you are and how safely you drive and how many precautions you take against the possible hazards caused by darkness. They will toss you in the same premium bin with the partiers and drunks. Screw that.
Snapshot can't measure driving quality. It measures speed and distance travelled and sudden stops. Presumably if I'm driving at night and take a longer route going 75mph on a wide-open freeway, instead of driving 35mph on the shorter twisty two-lane country road with far more hazards from drivers crossing the center line or deer jumping into the road, Snapshot will penalize me for it. Again, screw that.
Speaking as someone who's still struggling with the extensor tendinitis he developed as a young programmer over 15 years ago, with hundreds of nights of pain and hundreds of thousands in lost earnings as a result...
First: It's a natural hacker impulse to focus on keyboard layouts and hardware and other fun toys like that. Resist that urge. The importance of that stuff is tiny compared to good overall ergonomic habits, good posture, taking breaks, and managing tension. Get all the help that you can on those issues. Watch your own habits. Have someone else watch you. Make adjustments.
Second: Having said that... when I was first having hand trouble, I switched to Dvorak. This was, for me, a very poor decision. As you've noticed, Dvorak overloads the right pinky finger, which is a bad idea on a typewriter, but a horrible idea on a computer keyboard where other often-used keys are on the right edge of the layout.
Moving the entire arm to hit Enter and other right-edge keys with a non-pinky finger helped some, but not enough. After a couple weeks of increasing right-pinky pain, I simply swapped the L and P keys, so the commonly-used L was on the left index instead of the right pinky.
The L/P swap helped with the overloading, but exacerbated my second problem with a new layout, which was greater tension while typing. Even though I felt comfortable with Dvorak on a conscious level, I was still sometimes tensing up before keystrokes as my fingers weren't sure which way to go for an extra few milliseconds. And I was still having to use QWERTY keyboards often enough that I couldn't completely banish that muscle memory. Eventually I just switched back to QWERTY. More finger-mileage, yes, but is finger-mileage really the issue? It wasn't for me.
Third: No, really. Spend your time on the annoying difficult-to-scientifically-analyze meatspace issues like posture, not on keyboard layouts.
Of course Twitter refers almost no traffic to news sites - Twitter sends traffic to bit.ly and the like, which then redirect to news sites. To a lesser extent, so does Facebook.
Looking through the original study, they don't even attempt to address this issue. Remarkably shoddy work.
A new econobox 15" laptop is not even close to equivalent to a three-year-old high-end ultraportable. Or a three-year-old 17" gaming laptop. Or a three-year-old tablet PC. Or even a three-year-old high-end 15" office laptop. It's dishonest to suggest that because the new econobox has comparable benchmarks, that it's a comparable system. Laptops are more complicated than that. The econobox has nowhere near the same utility.
If you disagree, try lugging it through an airport instead of the older ultraportable, or try holding it in one hand to take inventory instead of the older tablet. See how much good the extra PCMarks do you.
Also, what kind of laptops are you buying that cost $2000 but can't be sold for $350 three years later? I bought a three-year-old high-end ThinkPad for a friend for $750 recently. Cost twice as much as a new econobox, benchmarks were worse, but it was still a great deal for a far better user experience.
The following article from the New England Journal of Medicine has a good summary of why the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program exists, and why some of its recent decisions, including the award in the Poling case, have been problematic. Basically, since 2005 the policy has been to concede cases where petitioners establish a plausible theory by which their injury could have been caused by the vaccine, rather than requiring proof or even scientific evidence that the vaccine caused said injury.
"Too large for a phone" is a matter of opinion. This is exactly the size of phone I've been waiting for. I want as large a screen as possible, without making it impossible to hold it to my ear for my (very occasional) voice calls, or conveniently carry it in a holster or (less often) a pocket.
For me, a phone being tiny is of little value. Give me vast amounts of screen space, a large physical keyboard with hard keys with spacing and some travel distance, and a huge battery that won't run out even if I spend all day using it heavily in areas with poor signal. The Dell Streak isn't what I want, having only the screen space but not the physical keyboard and an unknown battery (and an obsolete OS), but the size? Perfect.
"Not useful for serious business"? Depends on your business. Much of my business is coordinating employees via email and text message, keeping records in spreadsheets and simple text documents, and occasionally consulting and searching through previous emails and web-based resources. A smartphone with a 5" screen, a reasonable array of apps, and a keyboard that lets me do 50wpm, is just fine for this.
Even my T-Mobile Sidekick was adequate for most of my business needs, despite the dubious browser and poor screen, thanks to the ultra-quick app switching and utterly fabulous hard keyboard unmatched by any other device. If Microsoft hadn't bought the platform, stripped it of development resources, and left it to die, I might still be using it.
Sure, this large a phone isn't for everyone. But that's one of the lovely things about an open OS - you have choices in hardware. I'd rather use iPhone OS, it's a far smoother user experience, but where am I going to find an iPhone with a 4-5" screen? or a physical keyboard? or running on a carrier other than AT&T?
If Adobe loves Apple, they have a funny way of showing it. When they ship versions of Flash Player for OS X that are even less efficient and even more buggy than the Windows versions, and publicly acknowledge that making Flash for OS X anything more than barely usable is a low priority because they'd rather work on the Windows and mobile versions, that doesn't sound like love to me.
even a player keeping a perfect count cannot create a significant edge.
Funny how much time they spend scrutinizing players who "cannot create a significant edge", isn't it? You kinda wonder why they even bother barring them. Except, of course, if your hypothesis is completely bogus...
Option 1: Your analysis is incomplete and inaccurate.
Option 2: Countless media portrayals and first-hand accounts of card counters making money are all wrong. Media reports of expensive anti-counting technical measures are part of a casino conspiracy to make people believe blackjack is beatable. Books and conferences on blackjack game protection are hoaxes. People who've been barred from multiple properties based on information in the Griffin book are making it all up. Lawsuits against casinos whose security guards have roughed up card counters are actually filed by insiders as part of this elaborate theater they're putting on to increase public interest in blackjack.
The article says Google is crowdsourcing their data, but if so, where's the input? When I click on "My Location", I just get a message that "Your location could not be determined" - I don't see any followup on "so where are you, so we can add this location/wifi-signal pair to our database".
For what it's worth, Loki gets my home location exactly right, while Google doesn't even venture a guess.
FWIW, I've been using the Skip Dr device for years, and it's done a great job for me, 100% success on perhaps a dozen or two discs. Customer reviews on Amazon also appear positive overall.
If you're dealing with truly irreplaceable and valuable discs, though, you might want to use a professional service - it surely doesn't make sense to buy a professional-quality device for use with your own collection, unless you plan to use original media and store them in a bag of gravel for the indefinite future.
I still don't see how you would stop collusion via phone, or just having multiple computers with different providers so you could hold two or three hands at a table. You can't stop it, but you can use all that forensic data to detect that something screwy was going on. Cheating both effectively and subtly is not easy, and if you slip up, you're running the risk of having your entire online bankroll confiscated or redistributed to your victims. If you have the necessary skill, it's more rational to play lower stakes honestly. (Or, I suppose, play on a site like Absolute with substandard security. Sigh.)
Imagine how painful it would sound to hear a bunch of poker players discuss programming. Sadly, I don't have to imagine it - one of the great disadvantages of live poker is that one gets to hear a bunch of poker players discuss quite a few topics they know nothing about.:)
It seems like every time online poker is mentioned on Slashdot, there's a chorus of "What kind of fool would play poker online?! Cheaters, bots, hackers, oh my!"
Granted, this particular incident does give a black eye to the industry, but I can't help thinking back to the mid-nineties. Every once in a while there'd be a news story about some online store or other leaking credit card information, or closing up shop and keeping customer money without delivering the goods, or some other scandal. And every time there'd be a chorus of "What kind of fool would give away their credit card number online?" "Well, what do you expect when you send money off to some website, who knows where they even are or if they'll ship what you bought?"
I think online poker is about where e-commerce was ten years ago. And if those arguments against e-commerce sound silly to you, well, that's what your blanket statements about online poker sound like to those of us who play online on a weekly or daily basis, and rarely if ever encounter any problems.
(The biggest problem I've ever had is the US Attorney's Office deciding that money on deposit to NETeller by US customers was "evidence", and holding on to my $9000 for six months while conducting their grandstanding crusade against the company. As for online cheating, while I'm sure it's happened to me occasionally, I'm not arrogant enough to think I could win the amount I have over the last few years against consistently crooked opposition. No one is that good, certainly not me.)
Slashdot Mirror
I get so tired, every time this topic comes up, of seeing all the comments of "what's the problem? No one uses cash anymore!"
Maybe you don't. Maybe your friends don't. You're probably middle-to-upper class, living in an urban area, working 9-5 jobs. But not everyone is like you. Many people in this country do not have bank accounts or credit cards. Many people in this country do not get regular paychecks. Many people conduct business outside banking hours. Many people live dozens or hundreds of miles from the nearest bank!
There are still a hell of a lot of situations where cash is the most practical way to conduct transactions, even large transactions, and eliminating large bills does nothing but add hassle and decrease security.
John Brennan did pretty much that, stripping naked in protest of invasive TSA procedures.
Do you mean John Brennan, the CIA Director?
That would be hilarious :) But no, it's a different John Brennan.
John Brennan did pretty much that, stripping naked in protest of invasive TSA procedures. He was arrested for indecent exposure, taken to jail, and fined $1000 by TSA for "interference with screening personnel." He was found not guilty on the indecent exposure charge, the fine is still in appeals 4+ years later, but I'm pretty sure his legal expenses are in five figures.
I wouldn't for a moment discourage you from this plan, but please do be aware of what you're getting into, and the extent to which they will fuck with you.
Well, supporting Sai's Patreon is a decent place to start. I've been tossing him $10/mo for a while now, it's a pittance but at least it's something. He's been shockingly effective for someone who's just One Random Guy with practically no support. https://www.patreon.com/saizai
Lots of people claiming that this has been done before, or is available for cheaper. Really? Show me.
The point of this desk is that it lets you transition seamlessly between standing, sitting, and reclining positions, with the desk and monitor properly positioned in all cases. I'm unaware of anything in the under-$5000 range that does this.
The workstation setup I've found that's most comfortable for me is a monitor arm swinging out over a recliner, but it doesn't let me move around, and my neck is bent forward to look at the monitor, causing neck and shoulder pain. (Without the monitor arm, looking at the laptop screen, it's even worse.) A conventional desk setup, even with fancy ergonomic chair and keyboard, creates problems with my back and arms. I've briefly experimented with standing desks (IKEA hack) but my knees are very emphatic about their dislike of the idea of standing all day - an anti-fatigue mat would help, as would a sit/stand setup, but trying to use both is a hassle because you have to both change your desk height and roll out / put away the mat every time you change positions. And it's a pretty substantial investment of both time and money in a style of working that I have little reason to think will work for me.
The Altwork would let me recline while having the monitor directly in my line of site without hunching over, and transition from that into sitting with one button press, and from there get up and swing the desk out to the side over an anti-fatigue mat and work standing up. I am certainly not looking to spend $6000 on a desk - or $4000, the pre-order price - or $2400, my after-tax-deduction pre-order price - but it seems like a complete solution to an ergonomic dilemma I've had for over a decade now, and I don't see any cheaper alternative that does it.
Is there something out there already that's cheaper and better? Great! Show me! Take my money!
If you don't care about what kind of job you get, just how much money you make, then:
a) You will make more money than someone who considers other factors in their choice of career.
b) You will take any courses which you're told will enhance your marketability, no matter how disgusting. Like COBOL.
Hence it's unsurprising that people who take COBOL make more money... but is it *because* they took COBOL? That's less clear. Correlation is not causation.
Monty (of Ogg and Vorbis fame) on 24/192 Music Downloads, and why they make no sense.
“Bad drivers will at some point need to improve their driving or accept [having] to pay for the real risk they represent” ... yeah, right. If you drive at night, such as for work, Progressive will penalize you no matter how good a driver you are and how safely you drive and how many precautions you take against the possible hazards caused by darkness. They will toss you in the same premium bin with the partiers and drunks. Screw that.
Snapshot can't measure driving quality. It measures speed and distance travelled and sudden stops. Presumably if I'm driving at night and take a longer route going 75mph on a wide-open freeway, instead of driving 35mph on the shorter twisty two-lane country road with far more hazards from drivers crossing the center line or deer jumping into the road, Snapshot will penalize me for it. Again, screw that.
Speaking as someone who's still struggling with the extensor tendinitis he developed as a young programmer over 15 years ago, with hundreds of nights of pain and hundreds of thousands in lost earnings as a result...
First: It's a natural hacker impulse to focus on keyboard layouts and hardware and other fun toys like that. Resist that urge. The importance of that stuff is tiny compared to good overall ergonomic habits, good posture, taking breaks, and managing tension. Get all the help that you can on those issues. Watch your own habits. Have someone else watch you. Make adjustments.
Second: Having said that... when I was first having hand trouble, I switched to Dvorak. This was, for me, a very poor decision. As you've noticed, Dvorak overloads the right pinky finger, which is a bad idea on a typewriter, but a horrible idea on a computer keyboard where other often-used keys are on the right edge of the layout.
Moving the entire arm to hit Enter and other right-edge keys with a non-pinky finger helped some, but not enough. After a couple weeks of increasing right-pinky pain, I simply swapped the L and P keys, so the commonly-used L was on the left index instead of the right pinky.
The L/P swap helped with the overloading, but exacerbated my second problem with a new layout, which was greater tension while typing. Even though I felt comfortable with Dvorak on a conscious level, I was still sometimes tensing up before keystrokes as my fingers weren't sure which way to go for an extra few milliseconds. And I was still having to use QWERTY keyboards often enough that I couldn't completely banish that muscle memory. Eventually I just switched back to QWERTY. More finger-mileage, yes, but is finger-mileage really the issue? It wasn't for me.
Third: No, really. Spend your time on the annoying difficult-to-scientifically-analyze meatspace issues like posture, not on keyboard layouts.
I've been using WiTopia a little over a year and had no problems with it.
BoingBoing recently posted a link to TunnelBear, which has several positive reputable reviews.
"Obama 'will have a 50 cal in the head soon'". In my books, such a line only amounts to a threat if there's a reasonable possibility of its execution.
So if, for example, the person saying it owns a Remington 700 ML .50 caliber rifle and .50 caliber ammunition?
Oh, wait... he did.
Of course Twitter refers almost no traffic to news sites - Twitter sends traffic to bit.ly and the like, which then redirect to news sites. To a lesser extent, so does Facebook.
Looking through the original study, they don't even attempt to address this issue. Remarkably shoddy work.
A new econobox 15" laptop is not even close to equivalent to a three-year-old high-end ultraportable. Or a three-year-old 17" gaming laptop. Or a three-year-old tablet PC. Or even a three-year-old high-end 15" office laptop. It's dishonest to suggest that because the new econobox has comparable benchmarks, that it's a comparable system. Laptops are more complicated than that. The econobox has nowhere near the same utility.
If you disagree, try lugging it through an airport instead of the older ultraportable, or try holding it in one hand to take inventory instead of the older tablet. See how much good the extra PCMarks do you.
Also, what kind of laptops are you buying that cost $2000 but can't be sold for $350 three years later? I bought a three-year-old high-end ThinkPad for a friend for $750 recently. Cost twice as much as a new econobox, benchmarks were worse, but it was still a great deal for a far better user experience.
The following article from the New England Journal of Medicine has a good summary of why the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program exists, and why some of its recent decisions, including the award in the Poling case, have been problematic. Basically, since 2005 the policy has been to concede cases where petitioners establish a plausible theory by which their injury could have been caused by the vaccine, rather than requiring proof or even scientific evidence that the vaccine caused said injury.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0802904
See also the Wikipedia article on the program, which also discusses the Poling case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court
"Too large for a phone" is a matter of opinion. This is exactly the size of phone I've been waiting for. I want as large a screen as possible, without making it impossible to hold it to my ear for my (very occasional) voice calls, or conveniently carry it in a holster or (less often) a pocket.
For me, a phone being tiny is of little value. Give me vast amounts of screen space, a large physical keyboard with hard keys with spacing and some travel distance, and a huge battery that won't run out even if I spend all day using it heavily in areas with poor signal. The Dell Streak isn't what I want, having only the screen space but not the physical keyboard and an unknown battery (and an obsolete OS), but the size? Perfect.
"Not useful for serious business"? Depends on your business. Much of my business is coordinating employees via email and text message, keeping records in spreadsheets and simple text documents, and occasionally consulting and searching through previous emails and web-based resources. A smartphone with a 5" screen, a reasonable array of apps, and a keyboard that lets me do 50wpm, is just fine for this.
Even my T-Mobile Sidekick was adequate for most of my business needs, despite the dubious browser and poor screen, thanks to the ultra-quick app switching and utterly fabulous hard keyboard unmatched by any other device. If Microsoft hadn't bought the platform, stripped it of development resources, and left it to die, I might still be using it.
Sure, this large a phone isn't for everyone. But that's one of the lovely things about an open OS - you have choices in hardware. I'd rather use iPhone OS, it's a far smoother user experience, but where am I going to find an iPhone with a 4-5" screen? or a physical keyboard? or running on a carrier other than AT&T?
If Adobe loves Apple, they have a funny way of showing it. When they ship versions of Flash Player for OS X that are even less efficient and even more buggy than the Windows versions, and publicly acknowledge that making Flash for OS X anything more than barely usable is a low priority because they'd rather work on the Windows and mobile versions, that doesn't sound like love to me.
even a player keeping a perfect count cannot create a significant edge.
Funny how much time they spend scrutinizing players who "cannot create a significant edge", isn't it? You kinda wonder why they even bother barring them. Except, of course, if your hypothesis is completely bogus...
If you gamble in a casino with the belief you can win in the long run, you are an idiot. Winning is an anomaly, it has to be for the business to work.
Smart players are an anomaly. Thus the business can work even if some of the games are beatable.
the casino operators are not stupid.
You haven't spent much time in casinos, have you? They're among the most inertia-driven bureaucracies you'll ever see.
Option 1: Your analysis is incomplete and inaccurate.
Option 2: Countless media portrayals and first-hand accounts of card counters making money are all wrong. Media reports of expensive anti-counting technical measures are part of a casino conspiracy to make people believe blackjack is beatable. Books and conferences on blackjack game protection are hoaxes. People who've been barred from multiple properties based on information in the Griffin book are making it all up. Lawsuits against casinos whose security guards have roughed up card counters are actually filed by insiders as part of this elaborate theater they're putting on to increase public interest in blackjack.
You're pretty smart. Can't be #1. Must be #2!
The article says Google is crowdsourcing their data, but if so, where's the input? When I click on "My Location", I just get a message that "Your location could not be determined" - I don't see any followup on "so where are you, so we can add this location/wifi-signal pair to our database".
For what it's worth, Loki gets my home location exactly right, while Google doesn't even venture a guess.
FWIW, I've been using the Skip Dr device for years, and it's done a great job for me, 100% success on perhaps a dozen or two discs. Customer reviews on Amazon also appear positive overall.
If you're dealing with truly irreplaceable and valuable discs, though, you might want to use a professional service - it surely doesn't make sense to buy a professional-quality device for use with your own collection, unless you plan to use original media and store them in a bag of gravel for the indefinite future.
It seems like every time online poker is mentioned on Slashdot, there's a chorus of "What kind of fool would play poker online?! Cheaters, bots, hackers, oh my!"
Granted, this particular incident does give a black eye to the industry, but I can't help thinking back to the mid-nineties. Every once in a while there'd be a news story about some online store or other leaking credit card information, or closing up shop and keeping customer money without delivering the goods, or some other scandal. And every time there'd be a chorus of "What kind of fool would give away their credit card number online?" "Well, what do you expect when you send money off to some website, who knows where they even are or if they'll ship what you bought?"
I think online poker is about where e-commerce was ten years ago. And if those arguments against e-commerce sound silly to you, well, that's what your blanket statements about online poker sound like to those of us who play online on a weekly or daily basis, and rarely if ever encounter any problems.
(The biggest problem I've ever had is the US Attorney's Office deciding that money on deposit to NETeller by US customers was "evidence", and holding on to my $9000 for six months while conducting their grandstanding crusade against the company. As for online cheating, while I'm sure it's happened to me occasionally, I'm not arrogant enough to think I could win the amount I have over the last few years against consistently crooked opposition. No one is that good, certainly not me.)