I doubt the typical cash register jockey gives a shit; you're probably better office contacting the home office. Their investor relations contacts seem like a good choice.
I've heard the same thing of dice. The sides with more numbers, ie 4,5, 6 etc. have a slightly higher chance of rolling because there is more die on them and it changes the outcome a wee bit.
Depends on the dice. Your typical, rounded-edge drugstore dice are full of bias. Casino dice, on the other hand, are made with an exacting process to ensure that bias is minimized, and the spots are made of a material that is of the same density as the rest of the die.
One benefit of wearing a watch is that whenever you check the time you're assured of a consistent frame of reference. IOW, you don't have to worry about some public clock being slow, or whether the person you ask just got off a plane from 2 time zones away and forgot to reset his watch. Even if I'm in a clock store, I still look at my watch if I want to know what time it is.
However, I agree that for a lot of people watches are first and foremost a piece of jewelry.
That's all well and good, but if they change the terms of the contract, they have to send you a copy of the new terms and give you a chance to opt out (by cancelling the service) before they take effect. They can't just change the terms in secret and expect you to figure it out on your own.
What would be nice would be to have selective settings for javascript, be able to enable javascript on a host whitelist, or disable for a host blacklist
I know you said you use Mozilla, but for people using Internet Explorer, this is exactly the sort of thing that IE's security zones are designed for. I seem to recall there having been some issues with the zones "leaking" under certain circumstances in the past, though.
Yeah, this happens to me too - the most recent was a few months ago. For some reason, my PC started beeping at me, and it was driving me nuts. I was closing applications and fiddling with volume controls for the longest time; I finally shut the thing down only to get more pissed as the beeping continued. Eventually, I woke up and realized I was going to be late for work.
But they did implement the policy to keep the idiots quiet; they just waited for the right moment. Meanwhile, they maximized the amount of time in the market during which the public largely was unaware of the need to have periodic $99 service performed on the device or replace it at full price. Not only did they achieve higher initial sales volumes with this deception, they also gave buyers time to fall in love with all the good things about the iPod - the large hard drive, the acclaimed interface, the convenience, the iTunes integration, the general coolness. They gave the first wave of buyers enough time to become accustomed to the iPod that most of them can no longer imagine life without it, and now they will (happily or not) pony up another $99-$499 every couple years when their battery dies. Even Casey Neistat (the ipodsdirtysecret.com guy) bought a new one, and now says "We think Apple's new policy is fair.".
If it was designed to be a revenue stream, the battery service would have been around for almost as long as the iPod itself.
However, announcing the battery service sooner would have drawn public attention to the limited battery life. One could argue that by waiting until people started complaining loudly and publicly about the issue, they kept sales volume at a higher level than would have been possible had the average consumer realized that the unit requires periodic $99 maintenance that involves returning it to the manufacturer.
Let's face it - until the recent furor, it never occurred to most prospective iPod buyers that the unit contains a disposable component, and the design of the product encourages this ignorance. I can't think of a single other non-disposable battery-powered consumer device that does not have an obvious and easy way to replace the batteries. The lack of such obvious and easy access strongly suggests that no internal components need to be replaced except in extraordinary circumstances.
The timing also is interesting - the battery replacement program was introduced very quickly after the negative publicity started to build, and Apple says it was in the works for several months beforehand. This is exactly what I would do if I were attempting to boost sales by hiding such an issue from the public - keep quiet about the issue until it's discovered independently, then announce a replacement plan very quickly, giving the impression not of subterfuge but of rapid response to problems with the product.
Adding extras to the disc as an incentive to buy it is a great idea IMO, and a lot of bands are already doing this. However, my reading of this is that it goes well beyond that. The article quotes a Sony exec as saying that the discs will play normally on almost all players. This sounds to me as though they are putting copy protection on the first session, and the DRM'd second session tracks are there to reduce the backlash. This makes a lot more sense to me than putting unprotected tracks in the first session, in which case everybody would just rip those instead of fiddling with the DRM'd tracks that only play on Sony devices.
I dunno. My reading of this is that the first session is going to have some sort of copy protection, and the DRM'd files in the second session are an attempt to reduce consumer backlash. According to the article, "The disc can be played on almost any device conventionally, said Sony Music Chief Technology Officer Phil Wiser" (emphasis added). Presumably the word "almost" is a tacit admission that the discs will not work properly in some players due to copy protection.
Agreed. Flash has its uses, but I hate it when I stumble into a site some fucktard thought would be cool to do 100% in Flash. After gritting my teeth over -click not working to open a link in a new window and the right-click context menu not being available, I invariably hit or - out of habit to navigate back one link and end up backing out of the whole damn site, forcing me to thread my way back in to whatever buried page I was reading. Rule #1 of web design should be don't fuck with higher-level UI elements, and Flash fails miserably in that regard.
I don't see anything in there forbidding transfer of the license; it seems to be more concerned with unauthorized duplication and commercial use. Of course, now that this is getting attention, I'm sure the terms will quietly be amended to explicitly state that the user is purchasing a nontransferable license, but there seems to be some wiggle room in there at present.
Bookpool has it for $24.50. I can't remember the last time I found technical books cheaper anywhere else. You do have to spend $40 to get free shipping though.
They are changing the rules. Card counting is now only allowed by the house.
But the house doesn't force you to bet more when the deck is in its favor, and less when the deck is in your favor. Counting the cards is prefectly fine; it's the alteration of one's bets in response to the count that changes the odds of the game.
It's ridiculous to claim that someone makes money when they pay out, and not when they take in.
It may help not to think of it in terms of winning and losing payouts, but in terms of commission, or vigorish. When you place a bet at a sports book, you put up $11 and get $10 (plus your original $11 bet back) if you win. If you lose, the house keeps the whole $11. In other words, the house takes a 10% commission on losing bets in the sports book.
Now consider roulette. Let's assume you're betting a single number on a double-0 wheel for $1 per spin. When you lose, the house takes your $1. When you win, the correct payout is $37 (the odds are 37 to 1 against any single number). However, the house only gives you $35. In other words, the house takes a $2 (or 5.4%) commission on winning bets at the roulette wheel (and most other games outside the sports book).
Sure, the casino only collects money when you lose a bet at the roulette wheel, but their profit comes from the vigorish that is charged against winning bets by reducing the payout to a point below the expected value of the bet.
as long as you don't "lay" your don't bet. if you lay odds on your don't bet after the point, you have to bet more to win less.
The odds bet pays true odds (i.e. no house advantage) regardless of whether you're on the pass line or don't pass. Once the shooter is on a number, the odds of sevening out before hitting that number again are as follows:
4 or 10: 2 to 1
5 or 9: 3 to 2
6 or 8: 6 to 5
on a point of 4 and 10 you bet 2 to win 1 the 5 and 9 you bet 3 to win 2 and the 6 and 8 you bet 6 to get 5.
Exactly the way it should be. For a don't better, once the shooter is up on a point, the odds favor him sevening out before he makes his point. Since he will seven out (on average) 2 times for every time he makes a point of 4 or 10, the correct odds payoff is 1 to 2 on these numbers. The same applies to the other point numbers. Over the long run, you will break even on this bet, as will the pass line better who gets the reversed payouts (2 to 1 on a 4 or 10, etc.).
if you don't lay odds you get even money on your original bet.
Flat bets always pay even money, regardless of whether you take/lay odds behind them. It doesn't matter whether you're a do better or a don't better; the odds bet is the only fair bet you'll find in a casino, with the exception of some video poker machines (but exploiting those requires memorization of fairly complex strategy tables that vary by machine type).
The danger of betting against the dice isn't that you give up statistical advantage (actually, the flat bet is slightly less in the house's favor on the don't side - the pass line has a house edge of 1.41% vs. 1.39% for don't pass), it's that hitting a losing streak goes through your bankroll faster because you're putting more money at stake at any given time.
Exactly. The casino has the resources to weather far longer losing streaks than you do, so eventually you will hit a streak that will bankrupt you. Also, remember that casinos have betting limits in place, so when you get on one of those nasty streaks (which happen a lot more often than most people think) you quickly hit the betting limit and find yourself in the position of having to win 2 (or more) consecutive bets in order to win the one betting unit each series nets you.
The team said it retrieved foreskin tissue from two 5-year-old boys and two men, and facial tissue from a 60-year-old woman, as a source of skin cells. They fused those cells with New Zealand rabbit eggs from which the vast majority of rabbit DNA had been removed.
If you thought rotten.com was bad, just wait until foreskinrabbitface.com goes live.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt the typical cash register jockey gives a shit; you're probably better office contacting the home office. Their investor relations contacts seem like a good choice.
I've heard the same thing of dice. The sides with more numbers, ie 4,5, 6 etc. have a slightly higher chance of rolling because there is more die on them and it changes the outcome a wee bit.
Depends on the dice. Your typical, rounded-edge drugstore dice are full of bias. Casino dice, on the other hand, are made with an exacting process to ensure that bias is minimized, and the spots are made of a material that is of the same density as the rest of the die.
I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg.
I don't disagree, but I can't help but think of the Jargon File entry for field circus:
Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer with a flat tire?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.
Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer who is out of gas?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.
Q: How can you tell it's your field circus engineer?
A: The spare is flat, too.
One benefit of wearing a watch is that whenever you check the time you're assured of a consistent frame of reference. IOW, you don't have to worry about some public clock being slow, or whether the person you ask just got off a plane from 2 time zones away and forgot to reset his watch. Even if I'm in a clock store, I still look at my watch if I want to know what time it is.
However, I agree that for a lot of people watches are first and foremost a piece of jewelry.
That's all well and good, but if they change the terms of the contract, they have to send you a copy of the new terms and give you a chance to opt out (by cancelling the service) before they take effect. They can't just change the terms in secret and expect you to figure it out on your own.
What would be nice would be to have selective settings for javascript, be able to enable javascript on a host whitelist, or disable for a host blacklist
I know you said you use Mozilla, but for people using Internet Explorer, this is exactly the sort of thing that IE's security zones are designed for. I seem to recall there having been some issues with the zones "leaking" under certain circumstances in the past, though.
Yeah, this happens to me too - the most recent was a few months ago. For some reason, my PC started beeping at me, and it was driving me nuts. I was closing applications and fiddling with volume controls for the longest time; I finally shut the thing down only to get more pissed as the beeping continued. Eventually, I woke up and realized I was going to be late for work.
Don't forget your cover sheet. You got that memo, right?
But they did implement the policy to keep the idiots quiet; they just waited for the right moment. Meanwhile, they maximized the amount of time in the market during which the public largely was unaware of the need to have periodic $99 service performed on the device or replace it at full price. Not only did they achieve higher initial sales volumes with this deception, they also gave buyers time to fall in love with all the good things about the iPod - the large hard drive, the acclaimed interface, the convenience, the iTunes integration, the general coolness. They gave the first wave of buyers enough time to become accustomed to the iPod that most of them can no longer imagine life without it, and now they will (happily or not) pony up another $99-$499 every couple years when their battery dies. Even Casey Neistat (the ipodsdirtysecret.com guy) bought a new one, and now says "We think Apple's new policy is fair.".
If it was designed to be a revenue stream, the battery service would have been around for almost as long as the iPod itself.
However, announcing the battery service sooner would have drawn public attention to the limited battery life. One could argue that by waiting until people started complaining loudly and publicly about the issue, they kept sales volume at a higher level than would have been possible had the average consumer realized that the unit requires periodic $99 maintenance that involves returning it to the manufacturer.
Let's face it - until the recent furor, it never occurred to most prospective iPod buyers that the unit contains a disposable component, and the design of the product encourages this ignorance. I can't think of a single other non-disposable battery-powered consumer device that does not have an obvious and easy way to replace the batteries. The lack of such obvious and easy access strongly suggests that no internal components need to be replaced except in extraordinary circumstances.
The timing also is interesting - the battery replacement program was introduced very quickly after the negative publicity started to build, and Apple says it was in the works for several months beforehand. This is exactly what I would do if I were attempting to boost sales by hiding such an issue from the public - keep quiet about the issue until it's discovered independently, then announce a replacement plan very quickly, giving the impression not of subterfuge but of rapid response to problems with the product.
Adding extras to the disc as an incentive to buy it is a great idea IMO, and a lot of bands are already doing this. However, my reading of this is that it goes well beyond that. The article quotes a Sony exec as saying that the discs will play normally on almost all players. This sounds to me as though they are putting copy protection on the first session, and the DRM'd second session tracks are there to reduce the backlash. This makes a lot more sense to me than putting unprotected tracks in the first session, in which case everybody would just rip those instead of fiddling with the DRM'd tracks that only play on Sony devices.
I dunno. My reading of this is that the first session is going to have some sort of copy protection, and the DRM'd files in the second session are an attempt to reduce consumer backlash. According to the article, "The disc can be played on almost any device conventionally, said Sony Music Chief Technology Officer Phil Wiser" (emphasis added). Presumably the word "almost" is a tacit admission that the discs will not work properly in some players due to copy protection.
Agreed. Flash has its uses, but I hate it when I stumble into a site some fucktard thought would be cool to do 100% in Flash. After gritting my teeth over -click not working to open a link in a new window and the right-click context menu not being available, I invariably hit or - out of habit to navigate back one link and end up backing out of the whole damn site, forcing me to thread my way back in to whatever buried page I was reading. Rule #1 of web design should be don't fuck with higher-level UI elements, and Flash fails miserably in that regard.
I don't see anything in there forbidding transfer of the license; it seems to be more concerned with unauthorized duplication and commercial use. Of course, now that this is getting attention, I'm sure the terms will quietly be amended to explicitly state that the user is purchasing a nontransferable license, but there seems to be some wiggle room in there at present.
I would be able to record 60 minutes of my toilet flushing ... and make the same amount of money as Brittney Spears.
Holy shit, dude. You really can get rich working from the privacy of your own home!
Bookpool has it for $24.50. I can't remember the last time I found technical books cheaper anywhere else. You do have to spend $40 to get free shipping though.
virus (pronounced WEE-russ)
Ah. So Ensign Chekov had a Latin accent then. That clears up a lot, thanks.
They are changing the rules. Card counting is now only allowed by the house.
But the house doesn't force you to bet more when the deck is in its favor, and less when the deck is in your favor. Counting the cards is prefectly fine; it's the alteration of one's bets in response to the count that changes the odds of the game.
I imagine in the future you'll walk through the door and to the cashier, hand your money over and they'll just give you an amount back
.25 BAC before sending you on your way?
But will they insert a catheter in your arm and pump you up to a
It's ridiculous to claim that someone makes money when they pay out, and not when they take in.
It may help not to think of it in terms of winning and losing payouts, but in terms of commission, or vigorish. When you place a bet at a sports book, you put up $11 and get $10 (plus your original $11 bet back) if you win. If you lose, the house keeps the whole $11. In other words, the house takes a 10% commission on losing bets in the sports book.
Now consider roulette. Let's assume you're betting a single number on a double-0 wheel for $1 per spin. When you lose, the house takes your $1. When you win, the correct payout is $37 (the odds are 37 to 1 against any single number). However, the house only gives you $35. In other words, the house takes a $2 (or 5.4%) commission on winning bets at the roulette wheel (and most other games outside the sports book).
Sure, the casino only collects money when you lose a bet at the roulette wheel, but their profit comes from the vigorish that is charged against winning bets by reducing the payout to a point below the expected value of the bet.
as long as you don't "lay" your don't bet. if you lay odds on your don't bet after the point, you have to bet more to win less.
The odds bet pays true odds (i.e. no house advantage) regardless of whether you're on the pass line or don't pass. Once the shooter is on a number, the odds of sevening out before hitting that number again are as follows:
4 or 10: 2 to 1
5 or 9: 3 to 2
6 or 8: 6 to 5
on a point of 4 and 10 you bet 2 to win 1 the 5 and 9 you bet 3 to win 2 and the 6 and 8 you bet 6 to get 5.
Exactly the way it should be. For a don't better, once the shooter is up on a point, the odds favor him sevening out before he makes his point. Since he will seven out (on average) 2 times for every time he makes a point of 4 or 10, the correct odds payoff is 1 to 2 on these numbers. The same applies to the other point numbers. Over the long run, you will break even on this bet, as will the pass line better who gets the reversed payouts (2 to 1 on a 4 or 10, etc.).
if you don't lay odds you get even money on your original bet.
Flat bets always pay even money, regardless of whether you take/lay odds behind them. It doesn't matter whether you're a do better or a don't better; the odds bet is the only fair bet you'll find in a casino, with the exception of some video poker machines (but exploiting those requires memorization of fairly complex strategy tables that vary by machine type).
The danger of betting against the dice isn't that you give up statistical advantage (actually, the flat bet is slightly less in the house's favor on the don't side - the pass line has a house edge of 1.41% vs. 1.39% for don't pass), it's that hitting a losing streak goes through your bankroll faster because you're putting more money at stake at any given time.
Exactly. The casino has the resources to weather far longer losing streaks than you do, so eventually you will hit a streak that will bankrupt you. Also, remember that casinos have betting limits in place, so when you get on one of those nasty streaks (which happen a lot more often than most people think) you quickly hit the betting limit and find yourself in the position of having to win 2 (or more) consecutive bets in order to win the one betting unit each series nets you.
They're way ahead of you. From the article:
The team said it retrieved foreskin tissue from two 5-year-old boys and two men, and facial tissue from a 60-year-old woman, as a source of skin cells. They fused those cells with New Zealand rabbit eggs from which the vast majority of rabbit DNA had been removed.
If you thought rotten.com was bad, just wait until foreskinrabbitface.com goes live.
minimize, show desktop
Try these:
<windows><m> / <shift><windows><m> (minimize all/recover)
<windows><d> (show desktop/recover)
Also useful are <windows><e> (open explorer) and <windows><r> (open run dialog)