Only one team on the leaderboard has beaten Cinematch. They're close to qualifying for the Progress prize, but not necessarily winning it. The Progress prize is given away yearly, and not necessarily to the team with the best score.
Netflix was actually pretty smart about how they set up the contest. The $1 million prize is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to attain, but for a mere $50K per year they have thousands of people making small improvements to their system.
You aren't missing anything. The issues prevented by this bill seem to be:
1. How difficult will it be to go through intermediaries, and will the average person bother?
2. How many of the sites will comply (as PartyGaming and 888 have) so as to avoid legal troubles?
There are rumors that they put a last minute provision in exempting the tracking of checks, since the burden on the banking industry would be too great, so the answer to question #1 is probably that intermediaries might not even be necessary.
As for question #2, there will always be someone to pick up the slack given the amount of money at stake. It looks like the US online gambling "center of gravity" may shift from the regulated environments of Europe to the loosely- or non-regulated environments of the Caribbean and Costa Rica.
1. The bill doesn't make it illegal to gamble online. It makes it illegal for credit card companies and banks to allow offshore gambling transactions.
2. The American Gaming Association is opposed to the legislation. Online gaming, especially online poker, is driving people to the casinos in record numbers.
From what I've read, the idea is that you can charge it at home, over a much longer period of time, but you use the charging station when you don't have that option (say if you're on a long road trip or don't have the time).
It's possible they're smart enough to start the programs with the same starting conditions in each case, i.e. no knowledge of their opponents hands.
The effect of luck in poker win rates can still be seen over even 100000 hands. Google for "poker" and "confidence interval" for some in depth discussions on it.
America -historically and culturally- tends to value negative freedom (the freedom to own a gun), whereas the Europeans tend towards positive freedoms (the freedom to not get shot).
"The freedom not to get shot" isn't an actual freedom, however, so your argument is specious. Less frequent gun crime is simply one of the possible advantages of restricting the freedom to own a gun.
Since the value of a freedom (positive or negative) is a personal judgement of its pros and cons, giving an absolute label of positive or negative is meaningless.
Well one of the researchers (I think from Duke) was on NPR yesterday and she said that they didn't find the internet was a major factor in shrinking social circles, so that could account for the FUD part. The biggest factor seemed to be the increased amount of time spent at work.
if the US actually did, which the article submitter's sensationalism makes it hard to tell without spending more time than I have reading about it right now
The WTO did rule that the US couldn't prohibit online gambling, but it was later narrowed to only online horse racing, so the submitter is indeed wrong.
And the WTO has no real power to tell the US not to. That's the beauty of being a sovereign nation.
Here you are sorely mistaken. The WTO has the power to leverage punitive fines against the US if we don't abide by their rules, which they have done on several occasions.
Not to mention the WTO ruling that was mentioned was later narrowed to only online horse racing, i.e. since the US allows online horse racing, it can't block other countries from offering it to Americans. The US is still free to block everthing else.
The UK also recently passed a law stating that it was legal to accept bets from Americans. I don't think the US should expect much help from the British on this issue.
For those who are addicted to gambling, I doubt they get the same high playing lotto as they do betting on college basketball games. That might be a second reason to ban internet gambling.
Many state governments make money from horse racing, including bets placed over the internet. Not surprisingly, online horse racing is excluded from the ban.
And if I'm going to be taxed buying a book at Amazon, why shouldn't people be taxed who want to gamble in off-shore sites?
Gambling income is already taxed, no matter where the site is.
I have an HD PVR through TWC (extra $6/month, if it breaks it's not my problem).
This is the biggest single reason not to get TiVo IMHO. In the 2 years I've had TimeWarner's DVR I've had 2 hard drive failures and I've upgraded to the HD DVR. 3 new boxes, and I'm still paying just $6/month.
Over a large sample of cards this would be obviously non-random. Most sites allow users to save each hand, and there are programs that gather statistics on these hands. Nothing (unsuprisingly) has shown up yet.
It boggles the mind anyone would think they could catch a minimally well written piece of software cheating for the people who control the server and all its software.
It boggles the mind that anyone thinks a poker site would jeopardize tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue so that some house players could win a few pots. The house already gets a cut of every pot.
Virtually every major site has had its algorithm (and its security) audited by an independent third party -- their integrity is quite important to their revenue stream.
Seems like it should be possible to create many different environments within an MMOG where only a subset of skills/experience apply. That way you could give the grinders a place to go, and casual gamers a place to go.
I'm thinking specifically of including online gambling within the MMOG for casual gamers, but I imagine you could create other environments where less skilled players could go and have fun.
They've already been there and done that. Paradise poker published its shuffle algorithm on its website in an effort to convince people that it was safe. Cigital realized that, in addition to being faulty and producing a non-even distribution, they were seeding the RNG with the current time. Cigital was able to create a program to predict the turn & river after receiving their hole cards and seeing the flop.
This was in 1999 though, and all the sites know about it and are much smarter about things. Most of them use hardware random number generators now and some even collect a pool of entropy from their users' collective mouse movements.
Re:it's an illusion alright
on
Ajax On Rails
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· Score: 1
It's illusory alright, when I start at the US and scrolldue westthe first thing that I come to is the UK.
Best to read these things closely before you start hurling around insults.
Slashdot Mirror
No he actually devoured it -- eating books is the latest tenet of eXtreme Programming.
What he means is that Google cannot raise their prices arbitrarily, because they do have legitimate competitors that their customers can utilize.
Ruby has threads. Not sure how you got the idea it doesn't.
Sadly the country bringing the complaint in this case is Antigua, so the imposition of tariffs by Antigua will probably not be effective.
Only one team on the leaderboard has beaten Cinematch. They're close to qualifying for the Progress prize, but not necessarily winning it. The Progress prize is given away yearly, and not necessarily to the team with the best score.
Netflix was actually pretty smart about how they set up the contest. The $1 million prize is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to attain, but for a mere $50K per year they have thousands of people making small improvements to their system.
You aren't missing anything. The issues prevented by this bill seem to be:
1. How difficult will it be to go through intermediaries, and will the average person bother?
2. How many of the sites will comply (as PartyGaming and 888 have) so as to avoid legal troubles?
There are rumors that they put a last minute provision in exempting the tracking of checks, since the burden on the banking industry would be too great, so the answer to question #1 is probably that intermediaries might not even be necessary.
As for question #2, there will always be someone to pick up the slack given the amount of money at stake. It looks like the US online gambling "center of gravity" may shift from the regulated environments of Europe to the loosely- or non-regulated environments of the Caribbean and Costa Rica.
1. The bill doesn't make it illegal to gamble online. It makes it illegal for credit card companies and banks to allow offshore gambling transactions.
2. The American Gaming Association is opposed to the legislation. Online gaming, especially online poker, is driving people to the casinos in record numbers.
From what I've read, the idea is that you can charge it at home, over a much longer period of time, but you use the charging station when you don't have that option (say if you're on a long road trip or don't have the time).
It's possible they're smart enough to start the programs with the same starting conditions in each case, i.e. no knowledge of their opponents hands.
The effect of luck in poker win rates can still be seen over even 100000 hands. Google for "poker" and "confidence interval" for some in depth discussions on it.
If someone had a bot that could successfully beat online poker, why would they sell it?
The real difficulty in poker is putting your opponent on a hand. Having a good poker face is a secondary concern (and much easier to do).
"The freedom not to get shot" isn't an actual freedom, however, so your argument is specious. Less frequent gun crime is simply one of the possible advantages of restricting the freedom to own a gun.
Since the value of a freedom (positive or negative) is a personal judgement of its pros and cons, giving an absolute label of positive or negative is meaningless.
Well one of the researchers (I think from Duke) was on NPR yesterday and she said that they didn't find the internet was a major factor in shrinking social circles, so that could account for the FUD part. The biggest factor seemed to be the increased amount of time spent at work.
This would be pretty sweet for the airport.
Here's a comparison of the USDA study and Pimental study. It outlines the different assumptions and compares the numbers.
if the US actually did, which the article submitter's sensationalism makes it hard to tell without spending more time than I have reading about it right now
The WTO did rule that the US couldn't prohibit online gambling, but it was later narrowed to only online horse racing, so the submitter is indeed wrong.
And the WTO has no real power to tell the US not to. That's the beauty of being a sovereign nation.
Here you are sorely mistaken. The WTO has the power to leverage punitive fines against the US if we don't abide by their rules, which they have done on several occasions.
Not to mention the WTO ruling that was mentioned was later narrowed to only online horse racing, i.e. since the US allows online horse racing, it can't block other countries from offering it to Americans. The US is still free to block everthing else.
The UK also recently passed a law stating that it was legal to accept bets from Americans. I don't think the US should expect much help from the British on this issue.
For those who are addicted to gambling, I doubt they get the same high playing lotto as they do betting on college basketball games. That might be a second reason to ban internet gambling.
Many state governments make money from horse racing, including bets placed over the internet. Not surprisingly, online horse racing is excluded from the ban.
And if I'm going to be taxed buying a book at Amazon, why shouldn't people be taxed who want to gamble in off-shore sites?
Gambling income is already taxed, no matter where the site is.
assuming all players being equally likely to win
This will almost always be an incorrect assumption in a game of poker.
I have an HD PVR through TWC (extra $6/month, if it breaks it's not my problem).
This is the biggest single reason not to get TiVo IMHO. In the 2 years I've had TimeWarner's DVR I've had 2 hard drive failures and I've upgraded to the HD DVR. 3 new boxes, and I'm still paying just $6/month.
Over a large sample of cards this would be obviously non-random. Most sites allow users to save each hand, and there are programs that gather statistics on these hands. Nothing (unsuprisingly) has shown up yet.
It boggles the mind anyone would think they could catch a minimally well written piece of software cheating for the people who control the server and all its software.
It boggles the mind that anyone thinks a poker site would jeopardize tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue so that some house players could win a few pots. The house already gets a cut of every pot.
Virtually every major site has had its algorithm (and its security) audited by an independent third party -- their integrity is quite important to their revenue stream.
Seems like it should be possible to create many different environments within an MMOG where only a subset of skills/experience apply. That way you could give the grinders a place to go, and casual gamers a place to go.
I'm thinking specifically of including online gambling within the MMOG for casual gamers, but I imagine you could create other environments where less skilled players could go and have fun.
They've already been there and done that. Paradise poker published its shuffle algorithm on its website in an effort to convince people that it was safe. Cigital realized that, in addition to being faulty and producing a non-even distribution, they were seeding the RNG with the current time. Cigital was able to create a program to predict the turn & river after receiving their hole cards and seeing the flop.
This was in 1999 though, and all the sites know about it and are much smarter about things. Most of them use hardware random number generators now and some even collect a pool of entropy from their users' collective mouse movements.
It's illusory alright, when I start at the US and scroll due west the first thing that I come to is the UK.
Best to read these things closely before you start hurling around insults.