Re:Then Why Are We Seeing the Same Negative Effect
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Which is very bad, since the USA is so dependent on imports, it would fall apart without them.
Or maybe we would revive our manufacturing infrastructure, so we could make our electronics and toys and cheap you-assemble furniture ourselves, which would create jobs and keep more money circulating within our own borders. Maybe the value of the dollar would fall, making it more expensive for offshore labor, which would bring jobs back home. Maybe oil would become so expensive as a result that we have no choice but to invest in renewable energy and public transportation. Maybe goods would become more expensive, so maybe we'd stop buying disposable things and make better use of what we do have.
We wouldn't like it one bit, but those are all things we have to do anyway, sooner or later.
Now, if we can just get the traffic engineers to implement this neato structure called a cloverleaf...
You're kidding, right?
When I first moved to Texas, it took me about a week to get used to the frontage roads, and then quickly realized their genius. Even the rural ones, where oncoming traffic has to yield. Scary as it seems, it really does make sense.
Now that I've left Texas, I want to punch whoever invented the cloverleaf in the face.
Real artists are driven by a primal urge to create. Throughout history and even now, most of them never make much money off of it, but they do it anyway. For them, creating is not work. It's their life's love.
People in general are driven by a primal urge to accumulate wealth. Throughout history and even now, those with a talent for making much more money than average people will continue to make money long after they have made more than they will ever need for themselves or their families. Stacking up money is not a means to an end, but an end unto itself.
So there you go. If you've got the art inside and it wants to get out, you're gonna let it out even if you're not getting paid. If you get paid for it, then you'll never be happy with your accumulated wealth. Either way, you're still motivated.
Back in their early days they used to run something called "Dial-A-Song". It was basically just an answering machine with one of their songs recorded as the greeting. They would switch out the song often.
One time the machine recorded part of a two-way conversation when a woman named Gloria called the machine to listen to it with someone else on the line. TMBG released that recording as an unnamed track on their "Miscellaneous T" b-side compilation album. There is a transcript here.
Here's a short clip of Linnell with accordion and singing Museum of Idiots. Love the horn section. Youtube also has videos with the studio version of this song.
They built this whole neighborhood out of wood, out of wood
I guess I'll still be around when they burn, burn it down
I will be standing around when they burn it down
Here in the Museum of Idiots
Honey I'm there when you need me, please believe me, please believe me
I'll still be right where you left me, if you manage to forget me
Where we met is where you may forget
Here in the Museum of Idiots
If you and I had any brains, we wouldn't be in this place
Chop me up into pieces, if it pleases, if it pleases
And when the chopping is through, every piece will say I love you
Every piece of me will say I love you
Here in the Museum of Idiots
Every piece of me will say I love you, you, you
Here in the Museum of Idiots
I've never quite understood this type of "single issue" consumer.
I have this "single issue" mentality, and I think it makes both logical and emotional sense. Basically, consumers are individuals and have very little power in a marketplace dominated by huge corporations. We don't get to haggle over prices much; it's pretty much take-it-or-leave-it. We can theoretically vote with our wallets by going to a competitor.
However, the big businesses just end up colluding. It's usually not overt. They're not having meetings to decide these things, but they follow each other when their "competitors" show some success. So eventually, all the competition is overcharging and under-providing while claiming that the value they provide is fair. They collectively have the upper hand, because a consumer can't say "no" to ALL of them. If you gotta make a phone call or get on the Internet or travel somewhere fast, then you have to agree to be taken advantage of by these implicitly colluding corporate monsters.
So over time, things get worse and worse for the consumer. ISPs cap bandwidth. Phone companies get away with making their users pay for minutes they never use, or charge them ten times as much when they use too much. Airlines begin to nickel-and-dime you to for everything -- any bet on how long it will take them to start installing pay toilets on the planes?
We poor consumers basically just keep taking the worst of it, until we finally just refuse to take it any more. Sometimes when it gets really bad, we file class-action lawsuits. Those make lawyers rich and make us feel better, and sometimes the defendant backs down and plays nice for a while. But if banding together and suing is not an option, then we have to use whatever other weapons we have to fight back. One good way is to bad-mouth an offending business at every opportunity.
As screwed-over consumers, the value we get from latching on to such a "single issue" is not that we are refusing our patronage to an entity who offended us, but that it gives us something specific to focus on when we share our tales of woe in hopes of costing them more business than just our own.
I haven't bought a Sony product since the PS2 -- back then my single issue was proprietary formats. Then it was the rootkit. Then Blu-Ray, then removing Linux from the PS3, and now their inability to keep from being rooted like a clogged toilet.
A few weeks back, I ordered a steak from the Chilis across the way. It was a to-go order, and the place is walking distance from my house. I'm not expecting much -- it is Chilis after all, but I do expect that the food be edible. I ordered it cooked medium. Now, I knew I was taking a bit of a risk. The quality of that place has steadily gone down over the last year -- food badly seasoned, or brought to the table cold when dining in, or long waits both before and after ordering, what have you. So, I go get my steak, and don't check it before I leave. I get home, open it, and find a thin piece of shoe leather. The cook had sliced it open down the middle, must have clearly seen that it was beyond well-done, and boxed it up for me anyway. Not wanting to bother going back for a new one, I decided to have a bite anyway, and discovered that it was old meat on the verge of being rancid (which must be why they overcooked it.) That was over the top. So I took the food back and pointed out every horrid thing about that box of food to the manager. When he offered me a replacement, and coupons for next time, I told him I'm never setting foot in there again. And I haven't. Not just his Chilis, but every other one, and I've even diverted group lunches at work to other places by telling that story.
It's not that they fucked up one steak. It's that their quality has been declining over the last couple years while their prices have been going up. The steak was just the final straw, and it's a good solid example of why not to give them my custom. Maybe they'll learn their lesson; if I ever become convinced of that then I'll give 'em another try.
Screw the DoJ. They're busy laying the smack down on online poker. How about they stop with calling the kettle black and instead work on busting some real criminals of their own.
Fuckers.
I've thought it funny that for quite a long time, U.S. soft drinks sold in large bottles are labeled as and referred to as two-liter bottles. Even the most hidebound grumpy old granddad who would never utter the word "kilometer" will say "two-liter Coke".
But every other soft drink can or bottle is labeled in ounces. Typical cans are 12-ounce, typical bottles are 16, but there are smaller and larger versions, always in ounces.
I can't quite figure out why "two-liter" became the norm there instead of the approximately equal "half-gallon". Both phrases have the same number of syllables and same cadence when spoken. We buy our milk and fruit juice and other drinks by Imperial measure -- we buy a pint or a quart or a half-gallon or a gallon jug of milk, never a liter.
With the classic double-slit experiment, the argument is that the quantum particle goes through both slits because of the way it interferes with itself at the detector (interference pattern). But can we do something similar with quantum teleportation: have my friends in Japan and Australia mail the boxes back unopened, merge the contents of the two boxes and show that the single resulting ball has been to both Japan and Australia?
Well, if the boxes were mailed back unopened and somehow merged back together, then the resulting "ball" would be unchanged from the original. It wouldn't matter if they went to another galaxy and back, if nothing ever interacted with them. That's the rub: things are only changed by measurement and what you describe is only two measurements: 1> Splitting the ball; and 2> Merging the split balls back into one. Like everything else, information is a conserved quantity. A qubit won't spontaneously flip.
Maybe you are asking something more like the following:
1> Beam a high-energy photon into a splitter
2> Two lower-energy entangled photons emerge. Their total energy equals the energy of the original photon. They are both traveling in opposite directions, with opposite polarization. However, we have no way of knowing the polarization or energy or direction of travel of either, until we measure one. They are entangled.
3> Both photons hit perfectly aligned equidistant mirrors and are reflected back, where they hit the same atom that split them, at the same time.
4> The splitter merges the two photons and emits a new photon, which you then measure.
So the question would be, what would be the characteristics of the final photon, right?
When the photons bounce off the reflectors, the reflectors recoil. This interaction exchanges some energy and spin. Some of the entanglement from the two photons is transferred to their corresponding reflectors and now those two reflectors share some of the information that the entangled photons carried. The result is a bunch of new entanglements. The mirrors now share some of the random unknown information that the photons used to share, while the photons are no longer fully correlated with each other and instead contain some information traded with the mirrors. So when the photons are merged again, the resulting photon contains some of the information from each of the two reflectors.
So I guess, yes, if you knew some identifying characteristics of the mirrors, then the resulting final photon would contain some information showing that it had interacted with both.
What you are suggesting sounds like an ansible. This is a science fiction FTL communication device invented by Orson Scott Card. It's based on the idea of a trapped subatomic particle that has been split in two, while the resulting pair of particles remain permanently linked such that any change made to one is reflected instantly in the other no matter how much spacial distance separates them.
Quantum entanglement can be thought of as working like that, except that as soon as one of the split particles interacts with anything else at all in any way and the resulting change is "transferred" to the paired particle, that entanglement is broken.
The actual spookiness is in the details, like what if I now measure it's spin with respect to a different axis, the classical and quantum results differ then, but I cannot think of any practical application this provides us.
Basically, the rate of correlation when measuring entangled things is a function of the orientations of the detectors. The only way to explain that is: 1> Assume that the universe is deterministic, so the entire future state of the system is known at the time of the event that creates the entanglement; 2> Assume that a change made to one member of an entangled pair have an instant effect across any distance on the other member of that pair.
Since entanglement and randomness are inextricably linked here, there's no way to use the effect to either foresee the future or communicate faster than light (and by extension, change the past). So you're right that there's no practical application for it.
It just raises some extremely thought-provoking questions about the nature of our reality.
It's the same old teleportation thing, except now faster and with higher fidelity.
The article is extremely light on information and (as usual) rife with such misleading phrases as "SchrÃdinger's Cat" and "spooky action at a distance".
Sugar Damages You
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 4, Informative
High blood sugar causes your body damage. It will destroy capillaries in your extremities and retinas, making you blind and gangrenous. Sounds pretty toxic to me.
Sugar is also necessary for the body to function. If you don't eat any, your body will make some. However, the amount actually required to function is very small. When blood sugar is kept at ideal levels, all is well and sugar is not killing you.
The problem is, people are eating way too much of it these days. Not just sugar, but starches that break down into sugar very quickly when eaten. This causes blood sugar spikes, provoking your metabolism to go into defense mode. That means a spike of insulin to control the blood sugar level quickly. However, this often overcompensates, leaving blood sugar low, which drives one to eat again, much sooner than is actually necessary. Plus, the excess sugar is stored as fat, and fat leads to insulin resistance over the long haul -- diabetes.
People need to eat more protein and fat, and choose carbohydrates that are absorbed into the system slowly. Keep the blood sugar on an even keel and you can break the cycle of endless hunger. You'll lose weight without having to diet, because you won't be driven to eat by the ping-ponging of your blood sugar level. And the fine structures of your body will sustain less damage from the blood sugar spikes, meaning you'll weather aging a lot better.
They saw a thriving business that they couldn't get their claws into, so they shut it down.
The poker industry has been lobbying the US federal government and state governments for a decade for explicit legalization and regulation on the basis that poker is a competitive game of skill, and not gambling. There is a grey area there.
Unfortunately, the federal government just responds by coercing the banks to stop processing transactions for poker sites, forcing them underground, and passing little laws here and there that makes it harder for the poker sites to do business. Meanwhile, poker has the status of a spectator sport on ESPN and a half dozen other cable channels.
The poker industry has been trying to play ball but Congress has just kicked them in the teeth. Online Poker wants to be taxed and regulated and legal in the U.S. They have gone to great lengths to cooperate with state governments the world over in criminal investigations, as well as legislation.
Poker makes its money by raking a little money from each pot and charging vigorish on tournament fees. They don't care who wins or loses. They just want more people playing more hands per hour for larger stakes.
Also, these poker sites have the randomness of their games analyzed by reputable neutral third parties. And if you want to collect up a significant sample of random card draws from these games and do your own analysis to look for cheating, nothing is stopping you.
It is in the best interest of the poker sites to provide a fair game, and towards that goal they do a great deal of cheat detection of their own. They catch people colluding. They also cooperate with governments in money laundering investigations.
The poker industry is aching for a court test of "is poker a game of skill, or gambling" in the courts. Maybe this will be a good opportunity for that, at least on the gambling-specific charges.
I'm so Anonymous that I don't even have a FB account, and I haven't bought a piece of Sony hardware since 2001.
To post anonymously, or not to post anonymously: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
I just ran a random number generator in the background, and played depending the result. I beat the machine, because the machine is not random, it do what people do.
There is no causal relationship between playing randomly and winning. If you increase your sample size enough, you will find that you can win only about half your games playing that way.
When either or both contestants throw randomly in ro-sham-bo, the result is random. Think about it. Randomness is unpredictable. So it doesn't matter whether you strategize against it or not. Your predictions will be wrong as often as they are right. Against a random throw, it doesn't matter if you throw rock every time or try to predict the random throw. Your predictions are meaningless; you can't WIN more often than half the time against a truly random opponent but that means you also can't LOSE more often than half the time.
Battlestar Galactica ruined Caprica for me. Galactica went off the rails in the middle and each episode started leaving me more and more frustrated. I stuck with it, though, but the ending just killed it for me. I don't care to re-watch any part of it, and I'm not slightly interested in any spinoff.
trying to bully an admittedly annoying and vocal cult into silence?
Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. What those people do is not just speech. They take deliberate offensive action targeted at specific people and do them harm. They are bullies, and Anon are bullies, and is bullying a bully ironic? I don't see how.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe we would revive our manufacturing infrastructure, so we could make our electronics and toys and cheap you-assemble furniture ourselves, which would create jobs and keep more money circulating within our own borders. Maybe the value of the dollar would fall, making it more expensive for offshore labor, which would bring jobs back home. Maybe oil would become so expensive as a result that we have no choice but to invest in renewable energy and public transportation. Maybe goods would become more expensive, so maybe we'd stop buying disposable things and make better use of what we do have. We wouldn't like it one bit, but those are all things we have to do anyway, sooner or later.
You're kidding, right?
When I first moved to Texas, it took me about a week to get used to the frontage roads, and then quickly realized their genius. Even the rural ones, where oncoming traffic has to yield. Scary as it seems, it really does make sense.
Now that I've left Texas, I want to punch whoever invented the cloverleaf in the face.
Real artists are driven by a primal urge to create. Throughout history and even now, most of them never make much money off of it, but they do it anyway. For them, creating is not work. It's their life's love.
People in general are driven by a primal urge to accumulate wealth. Throughout history and even now, those with a talent for making much more money than average people will continue to make money long after they have made more than they will ever need for themselves or their families. Stacking up money is not a means to an end, but an end unto itself.
So there you go. If you've got the art inside and it wants to get out, you're gonna let it out even if you're not getting paid. If you get paid for it, then you'll never be happy with your accumulated wealth. Either way, you're still motivated.
Back in their early days they used to run something called "Dial-A-Song". It was basically just an answering machine with one of their songs recorded as the greeting. They would switch out the song often.
One time the machine recorded part of a two-way conversation when a woman named Gloria called the machine to listen to it with someone else on the line. TMBG released that recording as an unnamed track on their "Miscellaneous T" b-side compilation album. There is a transcript here.
If you are right, then you have nothing to hide.
I have this "single issue" mentality, and I think it makes both logical and emotional sense. Basically, consumers are individuals and have very little power in a marketplace dominated by huge corporations. We don't get to haggle over prices much; it's pretty much take-it-or-leave-it. We can theoretically vote with our wallets by going to a competitor.
However, the big businesses just end up colluding. It's usually not overt. They're not having meetings to decide these things, but they follow each other when their "competitors" show some success. So eventually, all the competition is overcharging and under-providing while claiming that the value they provide is fair. They collectively have the upper hand, because a consumer can't say "no" to ALL of them. If you gotta make a phone call or get on the Internet or travel somewhere fast, then you have to agree to be taken advantage of by these implicitly colluding corporate monsters.
So over time, things get worse and worse for the consumer. ISPs cap bandwidth. Phone companies get away with making their users pay for minutes they never use, or charge them ten times as much when they use too much. Airlines begin to nickel-and-dime you to for everything -- any bet on how long it will take them to start installing pay toilets on the planes?
We poor consumers basically just keep taking the worst of it, until we finally just refuse to take it any more. Sometimes when it gets really bad, we file class-action lawsuits. Those make lawyers rich and make us feel better, and sometimes the defendant backs down and plays nice for a while. But if banding together and suing is not an option, then we have to use whatever other weapons we have to fight back. One good way is to bad-mouth an offending business at every opportunity.
As screwed-over consumers, the value we get from latching on to such a "single issue" is not that we are refusing our patronage to an entity who offended us, but that it gives us something specific to focus on when we share our tales of woe in hopes of costing them more business than just our own.
I haven't bought a Sony product since the PS2 -- back then my single issue was proprietary formats. Then it was the rootkit. Then Blu-Ray, then removing Linux from the PS3, and now their inability to keep from being rooted like a clogged toilet.
A few weeks back, I ordered a steak from the Chilis across the way. It was a to-go order, and the place is walking distance from my house. I'm not expecting much -- it is Chilis after all, but I do expect that the food be edible. I ordered it cooked medium. Now, I knew I was taking a bit of a risk. The quality of that place has steadily gone down over the last year -- food badly seasoned, or brought to the table cold when dining in, or long waits both before and after ordering, what have you. So, I go get my steak, and don't check it before I leave. I get home, open it, and find a thin piece of shoe leather. The cook had sliced it open down the middle, must have clearly seen that it was beyond well-done, and boxed it up for me anyway. Not wanting to bother going back for a new one, I decided to have a bite anyway, and discovered that it was old meat on the verge of being rancid (which must be why they overcooked it.) That was over the top. So I took the food back and pointed out every horrid thing about that box of food to the manager. When he offered me a replacement, and coupons for next time, I told him I'm never setting foot in there again. And I haven't. Not just his Chilis, but every other one, and I've even diverted group lunches at work to other places by telling that story.
It's not that they fucked up one steak. It's that their quality has been declining over the last couple years while their prices have been going up. The steak was just the final straw, and it's a good solid example of why not to give them my custom. Maybe they'll learn their lesson; if I ever become convinced of that then I'll give 'em another try.
Check out the wikipedia entry on House of the Rising Sun for more examples of this kind of musical cross-pollenation.
Very cool to know he's working with John Flansburgh. That guy is one seriously underrated guitarist and all-around musical and lyrical genius.
Yeah. Buy high and sell low. That'll get 'em.
Screw the DoJ. They're busy laying the smack down on online poker. How about they stop with calling the kettle black and instead work on busting some real criminals of their own. Fuckers.
And here's the citation needed
I've thought it funny that for quite a long time, U.S. soft drinks sold in large bottles are labeled as and referred to as two-liter bottles. Even the most hidebound grumpy old granddad who would never utter the word "kilometer" will say "two-liter Coke".
But every other soft drink can or bottle is labeled in ounces. Typical cans are 12-ounce, typical bottles are 16, but there are smaller and larger versions, always in ounces.
I can't quite figure out why "two-liter" became the norm there instead of the approximately equal "half-gallon". Both phrases have the same number of syllables and same cadence when spoken. We buy our milk and fruit juice and other drinks by Imperial measure -- we buy a pint or a quart or a half-gallon or a gallon jug of milk, never a liter.
There's even a Wikipedia page about it here.
Well, if the boxes were mailed back unopened and somehow merged back together, then the resulting "ball" would be unchanged from the original. It wouldn't matter if they went to another galaxy and back, if nothing ever interacted with them. That's the rub: things are only changed by measurement and what you describe is only two measurements: 1> Splitting the ball; and 2> Merging the split balls back into one. Like everything else, information is a conserved quantity. A qubit won't spontaneously flip.
Maybe you are asking something more like the following:
1> Beam a high-energy photon into a splitter
2> Two lower-energy entangled photons emerge. Their total energy equals the energy of the original photon. They are both traveling in opposite directions, with opposite polarization. However, we have no way of knowing the polarization or energy or direction of travel of either, until we measure one. They are entangled.
3> Both photons hit perfectly aligned equidistant mirrors and are reflected back, where they hit the same atom that split them, at the same time. 4> The splitter merges the two photons and emits a new photon, which you then measure.
So the question would be, what would be the characteristics of the final photon, right?
When the photons bounce off the reflectors, the reflectors recoil. This interaction exchanges some energy and spin. Some of the entanglement from the two photons is transferred to their corresponding reflectors and now those two reflectors share some of the information that the entangled photons carried. The result is a bunch of new entanglements. The mirrors now share some of the random unknown information that the photons used to share, while the photons are no longer fully correlated with each other and instead contain some information traded with the mirrors. So when the photons are merged again, the resulting photon contains some of the information from each of the two reflectors.
So I guess, yes, if you knew some identifying characteristics of the mirrors, then the resulting final photon would contain some information showing that it had interacted with both.
What you are suggesting sounds like an ansible. This is a science fiction FTL communication device invented by Orson Scott Card. It's based on the idea of a trapped subatomic particle that has been split in two, while the resulting pair of particles remain permanently linked such that any change made to one is reflected instantly in the other no matter how much spacial distance separates them.
Quantum entanglement can be thought of as working like that, except that as soon as one of the split particles interacts with anything else at all in any way and the resulting change is "transferred" to the paired particle, that entanglement is broken.
Basically, the rate of correlation when measuring entangled things is a function of the orientations of the detectors. The only way to explain that is: 1> Assume that the universe is deterministic, so the entire future state of the system is known at the time of the event that creates the entanglement; 2> Assume that a change made to one member of an entangled pair have an instant effect across any distance on the other member of that pair.
Since entanglement and randomness are inextricably linked here, there's no way to use the effect to either foresee the future or communicate faster than light (and by extension, change the past). So you're right that there's no practical application for it.
It just raises some extremely thought-provoking questions about the nature of our reality.
It's the same old teleportation thing, except now faster and with higher fidelity.
The article is extremely light on information and (as usual) rife with such misleading phrases as "SchrÃdinger's Cat" and "spooky action at a distance".
High blood sugar causes your body damage. It will destroy capillaries in your extremities and retinas, making you blind and gangrenous. Sounds pretty toxic to me.
Sugar is also necessary for the body to function. If you don't eat any, your body will make some. However, the amount actually required to function is very small. When blood sugar is kept at ideal levels, all is well and sugar is not killing you.
The problem is, people are eating way too much of it these days. Not just sugar, but starches that break down into sugar very quickly when eaten. This causes blood sugar spikes, provoking your metabolism to go into defense mode. That means a spike of insulin to control the blood sugar level quickly. However, this often overcompensates, leaving blood sugar low, which drives one to eat again, much sooner than is actually necessary. Plus, the excess sugar is stored as fat, and fat leads to insulin resistance over the long haul -- diabetes.
People need to eat more protein and fat, and choose carbohydrates that are absorbed into the system slowly. Keep the blood sugar on an even keel and you can break the cycle of endless hunger. You'll lose weight without having to diet, because you won't be driven to eat by the ping-ponging of your blood sugar level. And the fine structures of your body will sustain less damage from the blood sugar spikes, meaning you'll weather aging a lot better.
The poker industry has been lobbying the US federal government and state governments for a decade for explicit legalization and regulation on the basis that poker is a competitive game of skill, and not gambling. There is a grey area there.
Unfortunately, the federal government just responds by coercing the banks to stop processing transactions for poker sites, forcing them underground, and passing little laws here and there that makes it harder for the poker sites to do business. Meanwhile, poker has the status of a spectator sport on ESPN and a half dozen other cable channels.
The poker industry has been trying to play ball but Congress has just kicked them in the teeth. Online Poker wants to be taxed and regulated and legal in the U.S. They have gone to great lengths to cooperate with state governments the world over in criminal investigations, as well as legislation.
Poker makes its money by raking a little money from each pot and charging vigorish on tournament fees. They don't care who wins or loses. They just want more people playing more hands per hour for larger stakes.
Also, these poker sites have the randomness of their games analyzed by reputable neutral third parties. And if you want to collect up a significant sample of random card draws from these games and do your own analysis to look for cheating, nothing is stopping you.
It is in the best interest of the poker sites to provide a fair game, and towards that goal they do a great deal of cheat detection of their own. They catch people colluding. They also cooperate with governments in money laundering investigations.
The poker industry is aching for a court test of "is poker a game of skill, or gambling" in the courts. Maybe this will be a good opportunity for that, at least on the gambling-specific charges.
I'm so Anonymous that I don't even have a FB account, and I haven't bought a piece of Sony hardware since 2001.
To post anonymously, or not to post anonymously: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
There is no causal relationship between playing randomly and winning. If you increase your sample size enough, you will find that you can win only about half your games playing that way.
When either or both contestants throw randomly in ro-sham-bo, the result is random. Think about it. Randomness is unpredictable. So it doesn't matter whether you strategize against it or not. Your predictions will be wrong as often as they are right. Against a random throw, it doesn't matter if you throw rock every time or try to predict the random throw. Your predictions are meaningless; you can't WIN more often than half the time against a truly random opponent but that means you also can't LOSE more often than half the time.
You are absolutely correct.
Battlestar Galactica ruined Caprica for me. Galactica went off the rails in the middle and each episode started leaving me more and more frustrated. I stuck with it, though, but the ending just killed it for me. I don't care to re-watch any part of it, and I'm not slightly interested in any spinoff.
Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. What those people do is not just speech. They take deliberate offensive action targeted at specific people and do them harm. They are bullies, and Anon are bullies, and is bullying a bully ironic? I don't see how.