Re:Full credit for trying something different...
on
Barenaked USB Drive
·
· Score: 1
I don't thik it ever got released in the US
Huh? "If I had $1,000,000" got play on U.S. radio stations, and I bought my copy of Gordon at a Best Buy in Texas. In any case, BNL rocks and I'll buy any album they publish, on faith that they couldn't produce crap even if they tried.
Wow. A completely ridiculous statement, backed up by equally ridiculous moderation. Do you think that all people are the same, or something? That's the only way "we" could be ambivalent and spineless in the way you discuss.
It doesn't matter whatever medicinal uses it has. If it were shown to regrow hair, prolong erections, and cure prostate cancer, it would still be treated as an evil drug. The pharmaceutical companies would find the key curative ingredients and find aritficial derivative that could be patented. Drug companies do not want people to have a wonderdrug they can grow in their own backyard. It's bad for business. Furthermore, from the conservative politician viewpoint, it would be especially bad for the War on Drugs if they were smaked in the face with all the lies about weed they have been perpetuating for decades.
The road to decriminalization of marijuana requires a fundamental shift in the prevailing attitudes of society. Showing that it's mostly harmless won't do it. Showing that it actually has upsides won't do it. Millions of people peacably demonstrating won't do it. I doubt even a group of huge corporations forming political action committees could do it -- big tobacco is already on the run, so how the hell do you expect that people promoting another kind of smoke could get very far today?
For me, the ability to skip commercials is the cake, not the icing. By skipping commercials, I can losslessly compress 1 hour of television watching into 40-45 minutes. Time is our most precious commodity, and my God how easily we give it away.
Hmm. If the DVD weighs 15 grams, and you can dispose of 300 KG in one square meter of typical landfill space, then a single square-shaped landfill one kilometer on a side could itself hold 20 billion of these discs.
Ok, here's some insight for you. People who play poker to win absolutely love the type of player you describe. The mere 10% of poker players who really can be profitable long term don't make their profit playing each other. They make it off people who like to gamble. A properly bankrolled player will take a 60% shot to double their money over and over and over again and never be bitter when the sucker hits his 40% chance to come from behind and take the pot. They have a special name for the ones that take the worst of it and reload with a smile: ATM. Like the box in the convenience store that you withdraw money from.
You speak of the lack of face-to-face tells in online poker (and make a cute misspelling of "subtle" while you're at it.) Well, let me "tell" you something. The action -- the betting, and the particular betting patterns of opponents -- give a good poker player far more information than how someone is physically acting in person or how long they delay before acting online. Those tells do offer some information, but it's foolish to think you can rely on them for the entirety of your game. Whether you're playing face to face or online, you'll never get anywhere without an ingrained understanding of the odds, and the often not-so-subtle effects of chip stack sizes, position in the order of action, and the ability to accurately guess what ranges of hands your opponents are playing at any given time.
As someone who has been playing online poker since 2002, I can tell you firsthand that Wired's article paints a stark picture that makes things seem worse than they actually are. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that online poker completely lacks bots and cheats. Cheating is a problem with practically all sports and games. People do collude at "brick and mortar" poker tables as well.
Just like card rooms and casinos strive to make their games safe, so do online card rooms strive to detect and eliminate the bots. Their efforts include analysis (some automated, some done by real people) of people's play to find evidence of cheating. They punish the cheaters and do what they can to make reparations to the victims.
There are also problems with credit card fraud in online poker. Someone makes a huge deposit at an online card room, then passes chips to a partner in a high stakes heads up game. Partner cashes out. Original depositor defrauds credit institution by claiming identity theft, and the bank is stuck in a sticky spot. That problem has caused so much trouble that many big banks refuse to allow many kinds of transfers of funds to gaming sites.
I quit dealing with Party Poker over two years ago, because I thought their policies were too invasive of privacy and too restrictive on some simple issues. I have since played PokerStars and UltimateBet, and most recently Full Tilt. I haven't noticed any shrinkage in recent months. PokerStars is the biggest of those three; they have weekly $215 buy-in tournaments that continuously seat 3,500 players or more (yes, the total prize pool always exceeds their $150,000 guaranteed minimum). Their annual World Championship of Online Poker, just getting started for this year, is already breaking all of the records it itself set last year.
Also, in the non-online poker world, the World Series of Poker Main Event was nearly three times as large this year as it was last year; they had to break the first day of play up over three days, having 1/3 of the field play their first day each day. Only after that was the field small enough that they could fit everyone in the convention center used for the tournament at the same time.
All indications point towards poker still growing, and online poker is at least stable. Maybe if Party Gaming stock is losing value, it's for some other reason. If they are actually losign players, then maybe it's because their players are moving elsewhere.
I would suggest you read some of David Sklansky's books on poker. He is big on his Fundamental Theorem of Poker, and the utilization of Game Theory.
The FTOP states that you profit every time you play a hand exactly as you would if you could see all the cards, and you profit every time an opponent makes the wrong play assuming he could see all the cards. Making a "mistake" in this context means giving your opponent favorable odds to chase a draw, calling when you don't have favorable odds, failing to value bet a winning hand, calling with a losing hand, etc.. Sklansky uses Game Theory to propose ways in which you bet, bluff, call, and fold with the correct frequency to give your opponent the most opportunities to make mistakes and make as few mistakes as possible yourself.
Actually applying what Sklansky writes takes a lot of knowledge of the game. You have to be able to recognize betting patterns, calculate pot odds on the fly, accurately estimate your implied odds, put your opponents on ranges of hands, and many other things. All in real-time.
Some of those are things computers are good at. Many of them are not.:)
It blows me away that AMD doesn't run an ad campaign that says something like "AMD: Faster"
Yes, because we all need to take our 99.6% CPU idle time up to the next level. If you're utilizing more than 0.2% of your CPU cycles on average, you're obviously yesterday's crap.
You don't win anything if you don't have an accident. If you do, you win all the money you need to pay off the damage you're liable for, and if you have coverage on your own vehicle then you win the cost of the repairs if the vehicle is repairable, or equivalent cash to replace it if it isn't. If you have additional medical coverage, the accident can also help your regular medical insurance cover your medical bills. So, you're betting that you will have an accident.
The house determines what odds to lay you based on your driving record, past accidents, and demographic information like your age and sex. So, once you "win" once you have to pay more for the same returns in the future!
It's a surprisngly conservative industry in many ways.
Not really, when you consider that it has much in common with the insurance business. Laying a chip down on a craps table and taking out an auto policy are virtually the same in many ways. Both are gambling propositions in which the house has a slight edge. In both cases, the house doesn't care about the outcome of any individual bet, except when the bettor is cheating. In both cases, the odds are well understood by the house beforehand and usually not so well understood by the bettor.
Ain't it nice that in order to drive a car or get health care in the U.S., you are compelled to gamble? You buy insurance in both cases, making a bet that you won't have a car accident or get sick, respectively. Maybe full understanding of that would put Las Vegas into perspective for those who like to think that gambling is an evil vice.
Interesting. Dictionary.com does return a result for "stupider" and doesn't even say it's nonstandard usage. Not checking your sources, then, looks stupider than the grandparent's use of the word to begin with. While you go over there to look it up, how about using this link to get there.
450 dead is about one third of the 1500-strong flock that jumped. That is clearly numerologically significant, considering the article also is about 1/3 of something being effectively dead.
If you're a PokerStars player, search for user "WilWheaton" and maybe we can play together I like to play the 10 +1 MTT SNGs. If I have the time and bankroll, and enough people are interested, I may try to put together a weekly geek/blogger 20+2 tournament.
I'm an avid online poker player, and even got my own 15 minutes of fame when I won an entry into the British Poker Open and got to play on TV. I won my qualifier, outlasting Jesus, Howard, Andy, and two other nobodies like myself. Raymer knocked me out in the semifinals by getting lucky.
I think I can give you a run for your money.
I pass the geek test by being a member of the community here, and I have a blog as well. Here is an account of my BPO win and another of my loss in the semifinals.
It kind of blows me away that they are allowing players to script their own objects, or so it seems.
It's not too much of a stretch. LambdaMOO has been doing it since 1990. Just like EverQuest is DikuMUD with a graphical shell, Second Life is a lot like a MOO with a graphical shell.
They do directly sell land by auction (can't link because that portion of the site is subscriber-only). They also have an option where you can own an entire server. The 256K sq. meter option is an entire simulator (they call it a "sim" for short).
I have no idea of how much CPU and memory running one requires, but considering the game utilizes Havok Physics and most functionality is programmed in the Linden Scripting Language, it probably takes a respectable amount of each.
The bandwidth use is probably hefty as well, because network updates between X players concentrated in a small area are on the order of X ^ 2. The game animates everything your avatar does -- if you type in chat on your keyboard, your avatar indicates you are typing with an animation and particle effect. If you mouse over something in the game, your avatar turns its head to look where you're pointing. If you click to interact with a game object, your avatar gestures. All those little updates amount to a lot when you have thirty people close together all doing them at once and every action is broadcast to the other 29.
Second Life is an online game of a whole different sort. You see, the vast majority of the content in the game is player created. As a subscriber, you have the ability to upload textures and sounds. You can create objects in the game and put the textures on the objects. You can program in a proprietary scripting language using a provided API that gives you access to the game's particle system, accounting system, and the game world itself.
The backbone of this economy is the Linden Dollar (L$). Each subscriber gets a weekly stipend of it as part of the package, plus you can trade real money for L$ on the open market. Players create and consume content in the game. For example, some people spend all of their time creating avatar clothing textures (using Linden-provided texture template) and selling copies of them to other players. The ones that make the best clothes make the most bank. Other people (LOTS of other people) re-invent the slot machine or various casino games over and over again and rake the money gambled with the game's they've created. Some people create new games on their own (like one called Tringo that's very popular these days) and license them. Tringo can be played for free, but it takes a lot of land to host a game and organizations that collectively own huge tracts of land and use them as malls use Tringo and like games to attract shoppers.
In other words, the game is just nothing but the foundation upon which an economy can form. One formed there, and Second Life's creators deserve to be lauded for that.
This is one huge ass scam type deal, yet totally legal and ingenius.
No, it's not a scam. They're trading value for dollars. It's also not ingenious, it's Economics 101. They couldn't do this if the virtual estate (as opposed to real estate) didn't have any value to the game's subscribers.
Game players have been trading the rights to pixels on eBay for as long as there have been persistent-state worlds. Sony is in an endless fight to keep EverQuest items off eBay so they can create their own service that does the same thing, while EA pretty much ignores Ultima Online real money trade. Now, Second Life has merely chosen to cut itself in on the action.
This isn't even a new business model. Magic: The Gathering Online does a brisk trade in completely virtual playing cards. There was a game before them called Star Trek ConQuest Online or something like that, which did the same thing and didn't even give you the option to convert a complete virtual set of cards into a complete real set of cards.
And, how's this really different from buying the rights to use a bunch of bits that make a song come out of your computer's speakers?
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Wow. A completely ridiculous statement, backed up by equally ridiculous moderation. Do you think that all people are the same, or something? That's the only way "we" could be ambivalent and spineless in the way you discuss.
Who, other than the scammers, says it is justified?
It doesn't matter whatever medicinal uses it has. If it were shown to regrow hair, prolong erections, and cure prostate cancer, it would still be treated as an evil drug. The pharmaceutical companies would find the key curative ingredients and find aritficial derivative that could be patented. Drug companies do not want people to have a wonderdrug they can grow in their own backyard. It's bad for business. Furthermore, from the conservative politician viewpoint, it would be especially bad for the War on Drugs if they were smaked in the face with all the lies about weed they have been perpetuating for decades.
The road to decriminalization of marijuana requires a fundamental shift in the prevailing attitudes of society. Showing that it's mostly harmless won't do it. Showing that it actually has upsides won't do it. Millions of people peacably demonstrating won't do it. I doubt even a group of huge corporations forming political action committees could do it -- big tobacco is already on the run, so how the hell do you expect that people promoting another kind of smoke could get very far today?
Hmm. If the DVD weighs 15 grams, and you can dispose of 300 KG in one square meter of typical landfill space, then a single square-shaped landfill one kilometer on a side could itself hold 20 billion of these discs.
These things would be like drops in the ocean.
The thing that bugs me is, why hasn't this been tried in humans sooner?
That got an Insightful mod?
Ok, here's some insight for you. People who play poker to win absolutely love the type of player you describe. The mere 10% of poker players who really can be profitable long term don't make their profit playing each other. They make it off people who like to gamble. A properly bankrolled player will take a 60% shot to double their money over and over and over again and never be bitter when the sucker hits his 40% chance to come from behind and take the pot. They have a special name for the ones that take the worst of it and reload with a smile: ATM. Like the box in the convenience store that you withdraw money from.
You speak of the lack of face-to-face tells in online poker (and make a cute misspelling of "subtle" while you're at it.) Well, let me "tell" you something. The action -- the betting, and the particular betting patterns of opponents -- give a good poker player far more information than how someone is physically acting in person or how long they delay before acting online. Those tells do offer some information, but it's foolish to think you can rely on them for the entirety of your game. Whether you're playing face to face or online, you'll never get anywhere without an ingrained understanding of the odds, and the often not-so-subtle effects of chip stack sizes, position in the order of action, and the ability to accurately guess what ranges of hands your opponents are playing at any given time.
As someone who has been playing online poker since 2002, I can tell you firsthand that Wired's article paints a stark picture that makes things seem worse than they actually are. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that online poker completely lacks bots and cheats. Cheating is a problem with practically all sports and games. People do collude at "brick and mortar" poker tables as well.
Just like card rooms and casinos strive to make their games safe, so do online card rooms strive to detect and eliminate the bots. Their efforts include analysis (some automated, some done by real people) of people's play to find evidence of cheating. They punish the cheaters and do what they can to make reparations to the victims.
There are also problems with credit card fraud in online poker. Someone makes a huge deposit at an online card room, then passes chips to a partner in a high stakes heads up game. Partner cashes out. Original depositor defrauds credit institution by claiming identity theft, and the bank is stuck in a sticky spot. That problem has caused so much trouble that many big banks refuse to allow many kinds of transfers of funds to gaming sites.
I quit dealing with Party Poker over two years ago, because I thought their policies were too invasive of privacy and too restrictive on some simple issues. I have since played PokerStars and UltimateBet, and most recently Full Tilt. I haven't noticed any shrinkage in recent months. PokerStars is the biggest of those three; they have weekly $215 buy-in tournaments that continuously seat 3,500 players or more (yes, the total prize pool always exceeds their $150,000 guaranteed minimum). Their annual World Championship of Online Poker, just getting started for this year, is already breaking all of the records it itself set last year.
Also, in the non-online poker world, the World Series of Poker Main Event was nearly three times as large this year as it was last year; they had to break the first day of play up over three days, having 1/3 of the field play their first day each day. Only after that was the field small enough that they could fit everyone in the convention center used for the tournament at the same time.
All indications point towards poker still growing, and online poker is at least stable. Maybe if Party Gaming stock is losing value, it's for some other reason. If they are actually losign players, then maybe it's because their players are moving elsewhere.
I would suggest you read some of David Sklansky's books on poker. He is big on his Fundamental Theorem of Poker, and the utilization of Game Theory.
:)
The FTOP states that you profit every time you play a hand exactly as you would if you could see all the cards, and you profit every time an opponent makes the wrong play assuming he could see all the cards. Making a "mistake" in this context means giving your opponent favorable odds to chase a draw, calling when you don't have favorable odds, failing to value bet a winning hand, calling with a losing hand, etc.. Sklansky uses Game Theory to propose ways in which you bet, bluff, call, and fold with the correct frequency to give your opponent the most opportunities to make mistakes and make as few mistakes as possible yourself.
Actually applying what Sklansky writes takes a lot of knowledge of the game. You have to be able to recognize betting patterns, calculate pot odds on the fly, accurately estimate your implied odds, put your opponents on ranges of hands, and many other things. All in real-time.
Some of those are things computers are good at. Many of them are not.
You don't win anything if you don't have an accident. If you do, you win all the money you need to pay off the damage you're liable for, and if you have coverage on your own vehicle then you win the cost of the repairs if the vehicle is repairable, or equivalent cash to replace it if it isn't. If you have additional medical coverage, the accident can also help your regular medical insurance cover your medical bills. So, you're betting that you will have an accident.
The house determines what odds to lay you based on your driving record, past accidents, and demographic information like your age and sex. So, once you "win" once you have to pay more for the same returns in the future!
Ain't it nice that in order to drive a car or get health care in the U.S., you are compelled to gamble? You buy insurance in both cases, making a bet that you won't have a car accident or get sick, respectively. Maybe full understanding of that would put Las Vegas into perspective for those who like to think that gambling is an evil vice.
Interesting. Dictionary.com does return a result for "stupider" and doesn't even say it's nonstandard usage. Not checking your sources, then, looks stupider than the grandparent's use of the word to begin with. While you go over there to look it up, how about using this link to get there.
Yeah, that's what quantum computers will do.
This is Slashdot, after all. This here is basically a gratuitous reply made solely for the purpose of showing off my new sig. Enjoy!
The passes also work for the buses. The double-deckers offer great views.
450 dead is about one third of the 1500-strong flock that jumped. That is clearly numerologically significant, considering the article also is about 1/3 of something being effectively dead.
I think I can give you a run for your money.
I pass the geek test by being a member of the community here, and I have a blog as well. Here is an account of my BPO win and another of my loss in the semifinals.
How would one go about making a bong that could operate in freefall?
And René DesCartes was a drunken fart
"I drink, therefore I am."
They do directly sell land by auction (can't link because that portion of the site is subscriber-only). They also have an option where you can own an entire server. The 256K sq. meter option is an entire simulator (they call it a "sim" for short).
I have no idea of how much CPU and memory running one requires, but considering the game utilizes Havok Physics and most functionality is programmed in the Linden Scripting Language, it probably takes a respectable amount of each.
The bandwidth use is probably hefty as well, because network updates between X players concentrated in a small area are on the order of X ^ 2. The game animates everything your avatar does -- if you type in chat on your keyboard, your avatar indicates you are typing with an animation and particle effect. If you mouse over something in the game, your avatar turns its head to look where you're pointing. If you click to interact with a game object, your avatar gestures. All those little updates amount to a lot when you have thirty people close together all doing them at once and every action is broadcast to the other 29.
Second Life is an online game of a whole different sort. You see, the vast majority of the content in the game is player created. As a subscriber, you have the ability to upload textures and sounds. You can create objects in the game and put the textures on the objects. You can program in a proprietary scripting language using a provided API that gives you access to the game's particle system, accounting system, and the game world itself.
The backbone of this economy is the Linden Dollar (L$). Each subscriber gets a weekly stipend of it as part of the package, plus you can trade real money for L$ on the open market. Players create and consume content in the game. For example, some people spend all of their time creating avatar clothing textures (using Linden-provided texture template) and selling copies of them to other players. The ones that make the best clothes make the most bank. Other people (LOTS of other people) re-invent the slot machine or various casino games over and over again and rake the money gambled with the game's they've created. Some people create new games on their own (like one called Tringo that's very popular these days) and license them. Tringo can be played for free, but it takes a lot of land to host a game and organizations that collectively own huge tracts of land and use them as malls use Tringo and like games to attract shoppers.
In other words, the game is just nothing but the foundation upon which an economy can form. One formed there, and Second Life's creators deserve to be lauded for that.
Game players have been trading the rights to pixels on eBay for as long as there have been persistent-state worlds. Sony is in an endless fight to keep EverQuest items off eBay so they can create their own service that does the same thing, while EA pretty much ignores Ultima Online real money trade. Now, Second Life has merely chosen to cut itself in on the action.
This isn't even a new business model. Magic: The Gathering Online does a brisk trade in completely virtual playing cards. There was a game before them called Star Trek ConQuest Online or something like that, which did the same thing and didn't even give you the option to convert a complete virtual set of cards into a complete real set of cards.
And, how's this really different from buying the rights to use a bunch of bits that make a song come out of your computer's speakers?