You, as a participant in online gambling, have ZERO ability to determine if you are being cheated.
All serious players at online casinos run programs which store each and every hand dealt at the tables they play at, and make various statistics based on that information. Some of them have a sufficient grasp of statistics to be able to figure out if they're being cheated. Certain things, like getting worse hands in a consistent manner, would be grossly obvious for instance. Furthermore, casinos already have a steady revenue stream: the rake. At tables where the big blind reaches 50 dollars, the casino takes about four dollars every single hand, so they're probably earning at least 200 dollars per hour per table at these stakes. There is absolutely no incentive for a casino to cheat his customers, which could just go elsewhere at the first sign of being cheated.
I had written a long rant about the rest of your post, but I think it is best to simply say that you have no idea what you're talking about. I will, however, give a reply to the last sentence.
I have no problem at all with banning online gambling worldwide.
It's easy to call for a ban when it doesn't affect you or anyone you know.
How about you let the "greens" speak for themselves instead of making up straw mens? I'm sure a few wackos at Greenpeace may get all excited over this, but I hardly ever hear anything from them nowadays, except when their boats get smashed.
If his computer is not locked, then the game is pretty much over, since someone can install a keylogger on his computer while he's gone. Also, like other posters said, the most dangerous part of the session is the initial setup, when you may mistakenly type your password in the wrong box. I remember sending my ssh password to Yahoo! Mail two or three times myself by mistake:(.
And if next time you get rooted, it's because of Apache, are you going to stop using it? What about Firefox? Hell, what if it's because of xorg? I can sympathize with your suspicion since you got burned once by screen, but I think you're depriving yourself of an AMAZINGLY USEFUL tool (I'll admit it, I love screen.). My point is, there are inevitably bugs in software, and there is no point in crippling your computer experience as long as the bugs get fixed. In that case, you could use tmux instead, I suppose, but what tells you it doesn't have a remote vulnerability, which has not been fixed?
The mean temperature of Venus is around 460C. The atmospheric pressure is 93 times that of earth. While I don't expect to walk on a distant planet in my lifetime, I would certainly hope we would do terraforming so that humands can one day walk on a distant planet, and this pressure is about 50% higher than the current human tolerance record. There is also no water - and I don't think there is any form of life on earth which can survive without water, at a temperature which will quickly boil any water it might store. As for the distance - who cares if takes a few more months for robotic probes to go to Mars instead of Venus? It's not like it takes more fuel. I don't think your argument to go to Venus instead of Mars makes much sense.
Often, these books also come with software. I don't think I need to explain to people here how hard it is to write good software.
I'm not pretending to speak for anyone here, but I've bought a few books which came with software, mostly for school, and I can't remember any single time where I found the software that came with the book to be of much use. The only times I ever thought the software included with a book was useful at all was when - the book came with a copy of some well know commercial software package (i.e. Maple); - the book came with some source code, which was probably written by the author, and not by the publisher. So, as far as I am concerned, you might as well make the book a bit cheaper and not bother writing any software for your books at all.
As another poster mentioned, the costs of publishing ebooks are vastly lower than the cost of publishing an equivalent paper copy. Your post completely sidesteps this issue.
I don't know exactly how it will shake out, but it looks like the Macmillan deal will probably be a turning point for e-books.
Neither do I, but I think the most likely turning point will be for MacMillan if they want to make significant sales in the emerging market for ebooks.
I tried xpra to hold the mail/news/calendar (Kontact) application in KDE, and it crashed after about a day... So I wouldn't recommend it personally, or at least not yet. As for xmove, the xpra FAQ states it has been without maintenance since 1997.
How productive must the executives be to justify the salaries? Seeing as it was them who negotiated the 66 million to begin with I would say there were quite productive indeed.
What makes you think it wouldn't have happened without them? Google wanted to compete with Microsoft, and it saw that it could only win by making the Internet a viable platform for software development, so it went to the most serious competitor to Internet Explorer and funded it. I don't see any need for some expensive master of rhetoric to convince Google to finance the Mozilla Foundation. It's not like 66 millions is a lot of money for Google.
if they didn't deserve it the board wouldn't be giving it
I remember a/. poster saying that money is never so poorly spent as when you're spending someone else's money to pay for stuff which is meant for someone else. I think it applies particularly well to this situation.
if they grab more than they earn the company dies and the code base is free so no real loss
When the word gets around that the executives are taking all the money, who will be willing to fund them? I was considering to make a donation to the SSH project, but if I heard that they did something similar, there's no chance in hell I would give them anything. And I don't think I'm the only one who would do that.
If you really must insist on this socialist idea of spreading the wealth then by all means, move to Cuba and see how productive they are there.
Most of the time, when I copy stuff from a website, it's for my personal use. I don't want or need my browser or any other program to guess what I intend to do with the content I copy and paste from a website. Furthermore, even if I wanted a feature like you're currently describing, I don't see any need for it to be done by an external website which I have absolutely no trust in. Finally, I use the clipboard very frequently to cut and paste passwords, so as far as I'm concerned, the clipboard has to be private. I'll keep my "wild wild west" internet like it is, thank you very much. Please keep your tagged and leashed internet away from me.
ASUS includes a desktop widget to track CPU clock speed. While using the UL80JT, I could see it moving up and down with what I did; up with program openings and CPU-intensive processes, and way down at idle.
This all sounds good in theory, but I don't think it works in practice. - The Linux user is really small, so there's not much point in developing games for them; and worse, we're all tech-savvy, so most Linux gamers have a Windows computer somewhere if there is a game they want to run. So your first point is completely moot. - I don't think game development benefits nearly as much from code reuse as most other software development.
Anyways, I think the current state of game development speaks in my favor. Take a look at Unreal 3... It has been released for two years, and they're still working on the Linux version! This speaks volumes about how much they expect to benefit from releasing that game. Even Carmack doesn't seem too keen on releasing a Linux version of the upcoming Rage. Personally, I don't think Id software and Epic Megagames would bother making Linux versions of their game engines except for the fact that Linux is so disproportionally present on game servers.
One last point I would like to address in your post is regarding the difficulty of running a game in wine. Anecdotes do not make data, but I have found that the few times I tried playing a Linux version of a game, that the gaming experience was sufficiently inferior to the one on Windows and the installation troublesome that I ended up booting Windows to play anyways.
Lucky for me most of the titles I currently enjoy have taken this approach; I will continue to gravitate to those that do, and deny $$$ to those that won't.
Unfortunately for you, the rest of the world is using consoles and Windows and couldn't care less which platforms a game runs on.
In fact, if GM REALLY wanted to excel, they would break themselves up, and have the divisions compete. The problem with the situation for GM, Chrysler and Ford was that it was too few CEO's and worse, they were incestuous (had to come up through the industry). Heck, rather than sell volvo, saturn, and hummer to China, they would be better off rolling them into one company, giving them a CEO from outside of the industry, and then allowing them to compete against others, esp GM itself. It will mean that the company would have to shrink, but, within 4 years they would be ready for IPO, or would be bankrupt.
If google needed processing power to compute prime number or to do protein folding, you would have a point. However, as it is, most of their products are fairly bandwidth intensive (text searches for database access, youtube, etc), and I'm not sure what kind of calculations they could get done remotely on under-powered Atoms, which can be turned off at the whim of their users, and whose profitability would outweigh the bandwidth cost. Also, although anecdotes are not data, this is not a novel idea, and yet I'm still waiting to see a profitable business model which is centered on distributed processing power. None of those businesses lasted, and they weren't giving away laptops for free...
I personally doubt Google netbooks will ever be given away, but I can imagine them being offered for "free" as part a long term Internet contract.
It's an interesting hack, but I really don't like the commercial feeling the story has, with a link in the slashdot post, an oral mention of the LED kit seller in the video, and a big "Thanks nerdkits" displayed at the end.
Maybe not, but they probably weren't spending tens of millions of taxpayers money on useless junk (and remember the GDP of Iraq is 100 times smaller than that of the US, so it is a much greater chunk of money than it would appear at first).
I was a math major not so long ago, and I used a tablet pc at the time... It worked fairly well, although I never digitized what I wrote down, and didn't really look into it either. I'm not sure you would get good results with a Wacom tablet though. I know another student in a class (computer, this time) I took tried that, and he could not even read what he wrote. So if you decide to try it, you may want to keep your receipt. Good luck.
How about the individuals who demand our government buy price-controlled medicine from Canada to deny the organization who discovered it the fruits of their labor, and the ability to recoup their investment?
My father has cancer... I can't give you an exact price for his medication, but last time I heard it was around 300$ per pill, taken daily. He lives in Canada. He does not pay that price for his medication, but that is not my point. I just want to point out that I don't think Canada is preventing the pharmaceutical companies from turning in a profit. (It just seems hard to imagine they expected to charge that much more from their prospective clients when they developed their medecine, since there would be nobody able to afford it.)
If, by your definition, the Internet is an AI, then your definition of AI is meaningless (and useless for anyone working in that field). Your post reeks of ill-deserved elitism and the message it conveys is incredibly depressing: individually the human is nothing/we already have AI, so we have nothing to reach for. I'm not going to argue about the first part, since I do not think it deserves any answer, but I'll say about the second part that we would never get true AI if most people thought like you do.
I read Atlas Shrugged twice, but I still haven't read that speech. I think the book is an entertaining read because it is such a patently ridiculous and long winded straw man, but this chapter is just unbearable.
For some reason, all these countries which have socialized medicine and which will let older people die without treatment all seem to be ahead as far as life expectancy goes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy US is at rank 45 behind Japan, Canada and pretty much all of Europe. I can't speak about the elderly visiting the US to get treatment, but I can tell you that I was in Tijuana, on the border to the US last year, and I saw firsthand that the medical industry seems very prominent in that city. I think you can reach the same conclusion that I came to when I observed this, although I have to admit I have no further data to back my suppositions.
Well, the potential customers for the XO are mostly government agencies, and last I heard, the representative of those agencies seemed to care very much that the computers they would purchase would be able to run Windows. If they can't get any of those customers interested, the only ones left to buy an XO will be individuals in Europe and North America who have a reasonable amount of disposable income, and which the OLPC project has already refused to serve before.
One of the main advantages of being on a linux box is that I don't have to either - go to every website with some piece of software I use and download it, and install it every new release, or - run a dozen different update programs in the background that ask me to download and install a new version every time java or quicktime has a new release, or - run tons of outdated software. You do have a valid point that apps can be hard to install, but often it is possible to download a precompiled version from the developers' website or even a package that will install just fine on your computer, as long as you run a reasonably popular distribution. However, I think that the ability to keep all my software updated with minimal efforts far outweighs the ability to try new programs as soon as they are released.
The only function of this oil platform which looks green is power generation. What about food supplies and waste disposal? The front of the oil rig is lined up with motor boats, which don't look all that green to me. This looks like the perfect vacation for those super rich hippie couples which live in a house with enough floor space for twenty families, with 3 or 4 cars in their entrance, but they're green because they get their power from solar, and their cars are all hybrids. Yep, some kind of green alright.
If this story is true, can you imagine what would happen if spyware started using those DRM features? It will be utterly impossible to clean it up. I'm not looking forward to having to choose between reinstalling and doing a rollback from a month ago if my computer gets infected.
Slashdot Mirror
You, as a participant in online gambling, have ZERO ability to determine if you are being cheated.
All serious players at online casinos run programs which store each and every hand dealt at the tables they play at, and make various statistics based on that information. Some of them have a sufficient grasp of statistics to be able to figure out if they're being cheated. Certain things, like getting worse hands in a consistent manner, would be grossly obvious for instance. Furthermore, casinos already have a steady revenue stream: the rake. At tables where the big blind reaches 50 dollars, the casino takes about four dollars every single hand, so they're probably earning at least 200 dollars per hour per table at these stakes. There is absolutely no incentive for a casino to cheat his customers, which could just go elsewhere at the first sign of being cheated.
Here is a link to a blog about a cheating scandal at one of the major poker sites. The cheating was discovered by players, and it was not done by the casino, but by rogue employees.
I had written a long rant about the rest of your post, but I think it is best to simply say that you have no idea what you're talking about. I will, however, give a reply to the last sentence.
I have no problem at all with banning online gambling worldwide.
It's easy to call for a ban when it doesn't affect you or anyone you know.
How about you let the "greens" speak for themselves instead of making up straw mens? I'm sure a few wackos at Greenpeace may get all excited over this, but I hardly ever hear anything from them nowadays, except when their boats get smashed.
If his computer is not locked, then the game is pretty much over, since someone can install a keylogger on his computer while he's gone. Also, like other posters said, the most dangerous part of the session is the initial setup, when you may mistakenly type your password in the wrong box. I remember sending my ssh password to Yahoo! Mail two or three times myself by mistake :(.
And if next time you get rooted, it's because of Apache, are you going to stop using it? What about Firefox? Hell, what if it's because of xorg? I can sympathize with your suspicion since you got burned once by screen, but I think you're depriving yourself of an AMAZINGLY USEFUL tool (I'll admit it, I love screen.). My point is, there are inevitably bugs in software, and there is no point in crippling your computer experience as long as the bugs get fixed. In that case, you could use tmux instead, I suppose, but what tells you it doesn't have a remote vulnerability, which has not been fixed?
The mean temperature of Venus is around 460C. The atmospheric pressure is 93 times that of earth. While I don't expect to walk on a distant planet in my lifetime, I would certainly hope we would do terraforming so that humands can one day walk on a distant planet, and this pressure is about 50% higher than the current human tolerance record. There is also no water - and I don't think there is any form of life on earth which can survive without water, at a temperature which will quickly boil any water it might store. As for the distance - who cares if takes a few more months for robotic probes to go to Mars instead of Venus? It's not like it takes more fuel. I don't think your argument to go to Venus instead of Mars makes much sense.
Often, these books also come with software. I don't think I need to explain to people here how hard it is to write good software.
I'm not pretending to speak for anyone here, but I've bought a few books which came with software, mostly for school, and I can't remember any single time where I found the software that came with the book to be of much use. The only times I ever thought the software included with a book was useful at all was when
- the book came with a copy of some well know commercial software package (i.e. Maple);
- the book came with some source code, which was probably written by the author, and not by the publisher.
So, as far as I am concerned, you might as well make the book a bit cheaper and not bother writing any software for your books at all.
As another poster mentioned, the costs of publishing ebooks are vastly lower than the cost of publishing an equivalent paper copy. Your post completely sidesteps this issue.
I don't know exactly how it will shake out, but it looks like the Macmillan deal will probably be a turning point for e-books.
Neither do I, but I think the most likely turning point will be for MacMillan if they want to make significant sales in the emerging market for ebooks.
I tried xpra to hold the mail/news/calendar (Kontact) application in KDE, and it crashed after about a day... So I wouldn't recommend it personally, or at least not yet. As for xmove, the xpra FAQ states it has been without maintenance since 1997.
How productive must the executives be to justify the salaries? Seeing as it was them who negotiated the 66 million to begin with I would say there were quite productive indeed.
What makes you think it wouldn't have happened without them? Google wanted to compete with Microsoft, and it saw that it could only win by making the Internet a viable platform for software development, so it went to the most serious competitor to Internet Explorer and funded it. I don't see any need for some expensive master of rhetoric to convince Google to finance the Mozilla Foundation. It's not like 66 millions is a lot of money for Google.
if they didn't deserve it the board wouldn't be giving it
I remember a /. poster saying that money is never so poorly spent as when you're spending someone else's money to pay for stuff which is meant for someone else. I think it applies particularly well to this situation.
if they grab more than they earn the company dies and the code base is free so no real loss
When the word gets around that the executives are taking all the money, who will be willing to fund them? I was considering to make a donation to the SSH project, but if I heard that they did something similar, there's no chance in hell I would give them anything. And I don't think I'm the only one who would do that.
If you really must insist on this socialist idea of spreading the wealth then by all means, move to Cuba and see how productive they are there.
That doesn't deserve an answer.
Most of the time, when I copy stuff from a website, it's for my personal use. I don't want or need my browser or any other program to guess what I intend to do with the content I copy and paste from a website. Furthermore, even if I wanted a feature like you're currently describing, I don't see any need for it to be done by an external website which I have absolutely no trust in. Finally, I use the clipboard very frequently to cut and paste passwords, so as far as I'm concerned, the clipboard has to be private. I'll keep my "wild wild west" internet like it is, thank you very much. Please keep your tagged and leashed internet away from me.
ASUS includes a desktop widget to track CPU clock speed. While using the UL80JT, I could see it moving up and down with what I did; up with program openings and CPU-intensive processes, and way down at idle.
So basically it's like the task manager?
This all sounds good in theory, but I don't think it works in practice.
- The Linux user is really small, so there's not much point in developing games for them; and worse, we're all tech-savvy, so most Linux gamers have a Windows computer somewhere if there is a game they want to run. So your first point is completely moot.
- I don't think game development benefits nearly as much from code reuse as most other software development.
Anyways, I think the current state of game development speaks in my favor. Take a look at Unreal 3... It has been released for two years, and they're still working on the Linux version! This speaks volumes about how much they expect to benefit from releasing that game. Even Carmack doesn't seem too keen on releasing a Linux version of the upcoming Rage. Personally, I don't think Id software and Epic Megagames would bother making Linux versions of their game engines except for the fact that Linux is so disproportionally present on game servers.
One last point I would like to address in your post is regarding the difficulty of running a game in wine. Anecdotes do not make data, but I have found that the few times I tried playing a Linux version of a game, that the gaming experience was sufficiently inferior to the one on Windows and the installation troublesome that I ended up booting Windows to play anyways.
Lucky for me most of the titles I currently enjoy have taken this approach; I will continue to gravitate to those that do, and deny $$$ to those that won't.
Unfortunately for you, the rest of the world is using consoles and Windows and couldn't care less which platforms a game runs on.
In fact, if GM REALLY wanted to excel, they would break themselves up, and have the divisions compete. The problem with the situation for GM, Chrysler and Ford was that it was too few CEO's and worse, they were incestuous (had to come up through the industry). Heck, rather than sell volvo, saturn, and hummer to China, they would be better off rolling them into one company, giving them a CEO from outside of the industry, and then allowing them to compete against others, esp GM itself. It will mean that the company would have to shrink, but, within 4 years they would be ready for IPO, or would be bankrupt.
I seriously doubt this would work... Have a look at this comic which illustrates my point.
If google needed processing power to compute prime number or to do protein folding, you would have a point. However, as it is, most of their products are fairly bandwidth intensive (text searches for database access, youtube, etc), and I'm not sure what kind of calculations they could get done remotely on under-powered Atoms, which can be turned off at the whim of their users, and whose profitability would outweigh the bandwidth cost. Also, although anecdotes are not data, this is not a novel idea, and yet I'm still waiting to see a profitable business model which is centered on distributed processing power. None of those businesses lasted, and they weren't giving away laptops for free...
I personally doubt Google netbooks will ever be given away, but I can imagine them being offered for "free" as part a long term Internet contract.
Oh yes, and the poster's link is to the company website, so he's definitely affiliated with them.
It's an interesting hack, but I really don't like the commercial feeling the story has, with a link in the slashdot post, an oral mention of the LED kit seller in the video, and a big "Thanks nerdkits" displayed at the end.
Maybe not, but they probably weren't spending tens of millions of taxpayers money on useless junk (and remember the GDP of Iraq is 100 times smaller than that of the US, so it is a much greater chunk of money than it would appear at first).
I was a math major not so long ago, and I used a tablet pc at the time... It worked fairly well, although I never digitized what I wrote down, and didn't really look into it either. I'm not sure you would get good results with a Wacom tablet though. I know another student in a class (computer, this time) I took tried that, and he could not even read what he wrote. So if you decide to try it, you may want to keep your receipt. Good luck.
How about the individuals who demand our government buy price-controlled medicine from Canada to deny the organization who discovered it the fruits of their labor, and the ability to recoup their investment?
My father has cancer... I can't give you an exact price for his medication, but last time I heard it was around 300$ per pill, taken daily. He lives in Canada. He does not pay that price for his medication, but that is not my point. I just want to point out that I don't think Canada is preventing the pharmaceutical companies from turning in a profit. (It just seems hard to imagine they expected to charge that much more from their prospective clients when they developed their medecine, since there would be nobody able to afford it.)
If, by your definition, the Internet is an AI, then your definition of AI is meaningless (and useless for anyone working in that field). Your post reeks of ill-deserved elitism and the message it conveys is incredibly depressing: individually the human is nothing/we already have AI, so we have nothing to reach for. I'm not going to argue about the first part, since I do not think it deserves any answer, but I'll say about the second part that we would never get true AI if most people thought like you do.
I read Atlas Shrugged twice, but I still haven't read that speech. I think the book is an entertaining read because it is such a patently ridiculous and long winded straw man, but this chapter is just unbearable.
For some reason, all these countries which have socialized medicine and which will let older people die without treatment all seem to be ahead as far as life expectancy goes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
US is at rank 45 behind Japan, Canada and pretty much all of Europe.
I can't speak about the elderly visiting the US to get treatment, but I can tell you that I was in Tijuana, on the border to the US last year, and I saw firsthand that the medical industry seems very prominent in that city. I think you can reach the same conclusion that I came to when I observed this, although I have to admit I have no further data to back my suppositions.
Well, the potential customers for the XO are mostly government agencies, and last I heard, the representative of those agencies seemed to care very much that the computers they would purchase would be able to run Windows. If they can't get any of those customers interested, the only ones left to buy an XO will be individuals in Europe and North America who have a reasonable amount of disposable income, and which the OLPC project has already refused to serve before.
One of the main advantages of being on a linux box is that I don't have to either
- go to every website with some piece of software I use and download it, and install it every new release, or
- run a dozen different update programs in the background that ask me to download and install a new version every time java or quicktime has a new release, or
- run tons of outdated software.
You do have a valid point that apps can be hard to install, but often it is possible to download a precompiled version from the developers' website or even a package that will install just fine on your computer, as long as you run a reasonably popular distribution. However, I think that the ability to keep all my software updated with minimal efforts far outweighs the ability to try new programs as soon as they are released.
The only function of this oil platform which looks green is power generation. What about food supplies and waste disposal? The front of the oil rig is lined up with motor boats, which don't look all that green to me. This looks like the perfect vacation for those super rich hippie couples which live in a house with enough floor space for twenty families, with 3 or 4 cars in their entrance, but they're green because they get their power from solar, and their cars are all hybrids. Yep, some kind of green alright.
If this story is true, can you imagine what would happen if spyware started using those DRM features? It will be utterly impossible to clean it up. I'm not looking forward to having to choose between reinstalling and doing a rollback from a month ago if my computer gets infected.