"They didn't even nationalize arms manufacture in the midst of total war, for pete's sake."
They didn't nationalize it but it was completely state dominated. We are really splitting semantic hairs here. I'm pretty sure we've established China is more Fascist than Communist today and the fact that they jump from one side of the spectrum to the other in a few years without anyone noticing show how much the same the two idealogies are. I think we also established that the Republican party is pretty closer to Fascism than anything elseeconomically, they just haven't managed a full blown police state just yet.
I appreciate the yearning in some circles for Marxist-Leninist Socialism to introduce a workers paradise unfortunately in practice it ends up not being a collective or a workers paradise. It ends up being party members seizing all the power and wealth for themselves, and screwing all of the working stiffs, just like like the moneyed elites do in Capitalism and Fascism. Unfortunately all people who aspire to power are inherently corrupt or end up that way when they gain power and it leads to all governments of any size turning in to steaming piles of shit.
Another great example of bad karma in play, I'll go nuts if hear the Katrina news coverage comment another hundred times about the fact that Mississippi is losing $500,000 a day because their gambling barges are all wrecked. like that counts for anything in the middle of a disaster zone. There is another completely bad karma industry, one designed to drain money out of the pockets of people to ignorant to realize that gambling is a carefully designed strategy for states governments and corporations to separate them from their hard earned money in exchange for exactly nothing.
That is completely nuts. Oil companies, in particular Standard Oil created the fossil fuel economy, hand in hand with Ford and GM, who marketed it and suckered Americans in to buying in to it. It's created horrible urban environments like the ones in California, and nearly ever urban, suburban nightmare in the U.S. which make it nearly impossible to exist without owning a car. It created massive expanses of concrete where pedestrians are an endangered species and mass transit largely non existent. Most American cities have turned in hell holes where no one wants to live surrounded by a massive suburban sprawl. Ironically the quality of life in such an environment is horrible but people do it anyway. No one in their right mind would spend 2-4 hours a day commuting on traffic clogged and polluted freeways. I'll take life in the country or in a real city with subways, and corner markets you walk to any day. The karma of the American life style is nearly all bad and it will be world killing and unsustainable as the billions of people in China and India start buying in to it which they are.
Everything Americans do is driven by nonstop advertising and marketing campaigns. Most cars are a truly horrible place to invest money because, with a few exceptions, their value craters in a few years and the marketing machine starts telling you to mortgage your soul to buy a new one though its a horrible investment.
The oil companies have year after year artificially inflated gasoline prices to pad their profit margins, and then dropped prices just as the backlash develops. Chances are it will go that way this time too. Oil companies simply can't let prices stay at current levels indefinitely because everyone will start flocking to alternatives to their product. They might let it stay high just long enough for people to start investing in alternatives, then drop prices and put all those alternatives out of business so investors in them get doubly burned. Oil companies have for 100 years done nothing but manipulate America and the world.
"our AC running"
Air conditioning karma is just as bad. Its led to mass migrations in to places where people shouldn't be living like the Southwestern deserts and the deep south. AC is why so many people are living in the path of devastating Hurricanes in the South and in the deserts without enough water in the Southwest. Florida was not a place you wanted to live before AC. AC fueled the massive growth in coal fired power plants which is one of the worst parts of the fossil fuel karma.
Computers I wouldn't judge so harshly. Its enabled communication and learning on an unprecedented scale. It give people something to do besides drive around in cars or vegetate passively in front of the TV. They have a down side but their karma is at least a wash.
"and saying that these poor people somehow where asking for it"
The poor people were unfortunate victims but a big chunk of the Louisiana economy, and the people living there are completely intertwined with and dependent on the fossil fuel economy. You can't drive far in Louisiana without smelling the stench of refineries.
Wow that was a lot of links. The key point I got out of it is they really don't have data over a long enough period to really identify a cyclic pattern. There is sort of one but the history isn't long enough to prove it. It is clear, and they admit, that there has been a large spike in Hurricanes since 1995 up to now which is 10 years, and the last two years have been exceptionally bad in the Atlantic and gulf.
Taking the same data I think I could just as easily conclude that there has in fact been a big spike in Hurricane activity in the last ten years and I could depending on whim or prejudice either say its cyclic or its indicative of a new and dangerous trend which might get even worse than it already is.
One school of global warming theorists contend the oceans have been sinking both heat and carbon dioxide, they may be approaching their limit, and when they reach their limit climate change might accelerate.
Let me be clear I'm the first to admit there isn't enough evidence to declare human induced global warming to be a fact, or that recent weather extremes may be a by product, but there certainly isn't enough evidence to dismiss it either. Maybe it is due to increases in solar output or something natural.
Its hard to deny though that our climate is changing rapidly. We could stick our heads in the sand and hope its not man caused and keep doing what we are doing.
The other option is a simple recognition that use of fossil fuels is almost universally bad. Burning coal slowly poisons everything down wind. Burning gasoline poisons the air in cities. Oil is getting scarce and that scarcity is going to start doing major damage to our economy and lead to vicious global competition for control of the remaining reserves.
All in all it seems to me like maybe starting to rapidly pursue alternatives would be a really good idea. I'd sure like to hear someone make a case that just sticking our head in the sand continuing the status quo is a good idea, someone other than Exxon Mobile and the Bush administration because their case is based on their own wealth creation not on objective consideration of the issues.
Thats almost the data I'd like to see, you just wish they had more current temperature readings and more data from buoys out in the middle where the hurricane's build. Only thing I could garner was that the few current reports in the West Gulf near Texas seem to be running higher than the average, in the 90 degree range, and the few near Florida reporting are more on average. Wish they had graphs for all the historical data collected from the buoys along with where they are located.
Of course then to many of the stations in the Gulf might have been taken out by Katrina.
Dude if you reread your post you find you are agreeing with what I said more than disagreeing I think you were just to busy going off the deep end to notice.
"The only thing they arguably have similar is their penchant towards ruthless oppression"
Gee thats pretty big common ground, that and massive state intervention in everyone's lives and in all aspects of economics.
"There is no such thing as fascist-leaning Socialism."
epends on how you define Socialism. You may have heard of this thing called National Socialism. Yes the Nazi's referred to themselves as Socialists.
Socialism is in essence a form of government featuring a big, all controlling state. It really has two forms, on the left Communism and on the right Fascism. When they both reach their extremes they actually wrap around and become more the same than different. Only real difference in Communism there is state ownership of everything and in Fascism the party elite tend to own everything and there is a facade of free market capitalism, though the state intervenes in it at every turn to create artificial winners and loser much like you see today's Republican party doing, and it happens the winners they tend to pick are the party faithful just like in Germany and today in China.
In practice you find they end up being almost exactly the same, the only difference is bureaucrats and politicians garner all the power and wealth in Communism while Fascism doles some of it out to corporations and wealthy party members who run them.
Now Social Democrats are a completely different animal, they are a much kinder and gentler form of Socialism and are mostly just out to tax everyone in to the ground to provide universal health care, education, pensions etc. I'm cool with that if its what you want out of your government, just me personally I'd rather not pay the high taxes, drown in red tape to get rationed health care, etc. and would rather fend for myself.
I don't think I've been called "right wing" on Slashdot lately. If you read my posts in the past you find the right wingers rail at me as hard or harder than you just did. I am a libertarian when it comes to personal freedoms and Progressive only when it comes to the need to regulate and check big corporations and the rich, but am totaly opposed to everything else socialists and progressives stand for because government is inherently incompetent and big government is just more so.
Not sure there is a name for my idealogy or that I fit on any of the idealogy charts.
"These storms are part of a natural Hurricane cycle. These cycles have been seen going back centuries"
Don't think 90 degree water surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are normal, even cyclically though I'd be curious if anyone can point me to a historical record of Gulf water temperatures.
"If so wouldn't it have been more far for a massive hurricane to have hit California and New York where lots if this oil and gas is burned?"
America's oil, coal and car companies are far more to blame for the situation we are in than individual Americans. They are like crack dealers who've gotten extraordinarily wealthy pushing cheap gasoline and fuel guzzling cars first on Americans and now the world, most recently China and India. They are also guilty, at every turn, of suppressing development of alternative energy and transportation mechanisms.
You don't have to look much further than who is going to be doing the most profiteering on the disaster that is Katrina. Gasoline prices are jumping 10-15 cents this week. Exxon Mobile, Conoco, Shell and BP all garnered record profits last quarter and will probably set records this quarter. Why aren't you indignant about the extent they, and speculators, are profiteering on this disaster. Its about as bad as price gouging by people selling water and generators in the disaster region. There are some people getting mighty rich who helped create a world dependent on fossil fuels and are now exploiting the dependence they are creating and doing things like creating artificial shortage of refining capacity to insure inflated prices for their products.
All in all there is just some massive bad karma there and most of it is eminating from the states of Texas and Louisiana. Certainly it is unfortunate a lot of innocent people got caught in the middle of it, but there is a natural balance in the world, if you do something wrong continuously for long periods, and our fossil fuel economy is clearly wrong, you eventually have to pay a price for it. The fossil fuel industry and the Bush administration rather than trying to move away from it are in denial that its a problem and just trying to propagate our complete dependence on fossil fuels, are waging wars for control of it, and profiting mightily from the current scarcity. I saw in the news a couple days ago a civil servant with the Army Corps of Engineers who testified before Congress recently about the blatant impropriety of the sole source, five year contract given to Halliburton to develop Iraq's oil fields was demoted and transfered by Cheney, Rumsfeld and friends, for stating the obvious fact, the people in the Bush administration are profiteering on the Iraq war and control of Iraq's oil fields. Again there is some really bad karma there.
People can't just keep doing something wrong indefinitely and never face the music. You would hope a disaster on the scale of Katrina will wake people up and will break the world out of its fossil fuel death spiral. If it doesn't you run the risk of letting it run for another 50 years and maybe do real and irreversible damage, both economic and environmental, damage far worse than you see today in the South.
"We as Americans may not totally agree with their government policies, however that doesn't mean we cannot get along and help one another, we are pretty clost to them."
Yea it can. The U.S., especially America's right wing hate Socialists with a passion and that isn't going to change any time soon. Socialists are the antithesis of everything free marketers believe it, though there is irony that the New Republican party seems extremely enamored with big spending and big government which is constantly intervening in markets, and looks pretty socialist to me too. Its just Fascist leaning Socialism where its to the benefit of the wealthy and loyal party members. China is also more Fascist leaning Socialism than Communism these days.
Cuba and Venezuela by contrast are left leaning Socialism which is focused on things like universal health care, education, elimination of poverty, land reform and Republican's in particular HATE people that do nasty stuff like that.
Me personally I prefer small government that stays out of my life so I don't like the New Republican or Cuba/Venezuela styles of Socialism. About the only use I see for government is minimal self defense, maybe building roads, and regulating unscrupulous business who if left unregulated would take over the world and for the most part already have.
"Either that or maybe the United States will actually address and attempt to fix global warming with this hurricane blow?"
There is certainly a lesson in karma that Louisiana has built it's fortunes in recent decades on being the hub of America's oil and gas based fossil fuel industry, and was devastated by a hurricane whose intensity was fueled by global warming which may be due in part to CO2 emissions. I imagine the wells in the gulf and all those refineries flare off massive quantities of natural gas as CO2.
A big part of the New Orleans problem is that the levees have been abused. There is a plan on the table where they would have started intentionally flooding the wetlands around New Orleans from the Mississippi and start depositing mud there and building them up so they are a better buffer from storms. Not sure about pumping the ground water but the soil in the region is alluvial and its natural for it to sink. It was OK when the Mississippi flooded it routinely and deposited fresh silt on it to keep building it back up. Unfortunately the Army Corps of Engineers undid this natural restoration on a large scale with levees and flood control. Something about the hubris of man seems appropriate in this case. Of course this solution doesn't work for the city of New Orleans. It is probably a doomed city unless you spend billions constantly building up the levees, and the levees are very vulnerable to the increasingly intense Hurricanes in the region. Its going to continue sinking due to the nature of the soil under it, you can't flood it to naturally replenish it with silt, the sea level is going to continue rising due to global warming. You have to wonder if maybe this event isn't an indicator that it should be abandoned and relocated to a site with a more viable long term future.
There is also some karma in play here that an intense hurricane which was probably intensified by CO2 induced global warming, thanks to abnormally warm temperatures in the Atlantic and Gulf, would lead to devastation in Louisiana which is at the heart of the oil and gas part of the fossil fuel industry in the U.S. and is responsible for much of America's CO2 pollution capacity.
Japan's solution to disaster comm that I submitted on Slashdot a few weeks ago is a Geosync satellite with a 66 foot dish that will be able to communicate with essentially ordinary cell phones from space.
Satellites have issues like latency and bandwidth but one of the beauties of them is they are completely above most earthly disasters and this one can communicate to people on the ground without a satellite dish.
I forgot to mention Diem was a Catholic which made him look even more like a French/U.S. puppet. Catholicism being a largely French introduction in Vietnam. Buddhism was the dominant religion in Vietnam and Diem was rabidly anti Buddhist and a puritanical Christian. The U.S. installing a Christian puppet in a Buddhist country was just one more reason for U.S. policy to fail there.
If you want to see a picture of of the reason U.S. lost Vietnam, before the war even started its here.
Diem was assassinated by a U.S. backed coup in 1963 which led to a succession of short lived military dictators and interim presidents, an attempt at a constitution written out of the U.S. embassy, eventually leading to the rule of Nguyen Van Thieu, who presided over Vietnam during the heart of the war, another unpopular and very corrupt dictator. U.S. could never manage to back anyone popular or who had any chance of winning an election without rigging it.
Iyad Allawi is the same class of individual in Iraq, as Diem and Theiu in Vietnam. He was the U.S. chosen and appointed puppet and first Prime Minister in Iraq, though he was trounced by Shia fundamentalists in the first election. Allawi is a secular Shia, a former hitman in Saddam's secret police that Saddam tried to have assassinated by ax, and is widely suspected of being an agent for CIA and British intelligence since. The U.S. very much wants to encourage the next round of Iraqi elections to put him back in power though like Diem and Thieu its unlikely he can win an election unless its rigged.
I stopped running SETI once I figured out what a needle in a haystack search it is. They are looking for a few specific waveforms on a very narrow frequency band. There isn't a particularly strong chance that aliens would share in their thinking on what signal to send and happen to do it in the same time frame.
I'm all for donating spare CPU cycles but I would rather it went to something that had a better chance of having a point like molecular biology research.
"You can dissent all you want and you'll never see these tools. Start rioting and they'll be used on you."
Bullshit. Once you go down that road the government can classify any peaceful protest as a riot, especially ones that aren't government licensed and constrained in both time and location. Its already common in places like New York and Boston that cities wont license any protest anywhere close to a major and controversial event in the city like political convention or a G-8 summit (though lately these are in remote areas, with a 100 mile police state around them so they are hard to protest against). It isn't effective dissent when you let the government tell you what you can do and when. That is being herded.
"Surely they would do something about that one if they really so evil."
I think it caught them off guard. I think they were just going to ignore her and hope it didn't catch on or she gave up. Unfortunately for them August is a slow news month so it did catch on. By the time it got rolling it was to late to doing anything blatant to shut her down. At the moment I think she is on private land of a sympathizer which further constrains retaliation. She is also the mother of a dead veteran which again constrains their latitude in dealing with her without a backlash, all things your average protester doesn't have in their favor. Kudos to her for finally mounting an effective protest. The sadder commentary is it didn't happen before the war, or before the election, and that it took this long after it became obvious the Iraq war was a giant lie.
"They are there protection peoples lives and property"
The point you miss is whether they are protecting innocent bystanders, property and order or if they are protecting political power. They are two very different things.
Resorting to violence as part of a protest is counterproductive for the most part so I don't approve of it in the first place. Its a lot better tactic to engage in nonviolent tactics since you gain sympathy if you are peaceful and the police are the violent ones. What if you block doors or streets. Most people would call that nonviolent and relatively harmless. Most political and police authorties these days categorize it as rioting and will use force to stop it.
So to not get caught in the trap of your question the best out come is for the protesters to be peaceful, for example blocking doorways or streets, and have the police turn violent on camera with tear gas and clubs. The best outcome from a protesters standpoint who wants to effect change IS for the police to respond with excessive force and kill or wound peaceful protesters because it wakes up everyone to the fact that their government is out of control and is the most likely route to topple it.
The government and the military know they need to refrain from visibly wounding or killing people so instead they've developed insidious devices to effectively torture people en mass and in front of cameras without leaving any marks.
The people thinking these things up are ingenious, unfortunately they are creating tools that are extraordinarily ripe for abuse. Seems to me like the heat ray device would be a perfect torture device whether used in public on protesters or on the thousand of people the U.S. is holding in secret prisons around the globe. Intense and unbearable pain, maybe no long lasting damage, and no marks.
I'm ranting about the fact that a government is acquiring better tools to suppress dissent.
If you have a responsible government thats not abusing its power and is making sound decisions there maybe isn't much rationale for protests and but people should ALWAYS have them as an option in a country with freedom of speech. If you have a government like the one currently in the U.S. which is trampling civil rights, massively abusing its power, lying the nation in to wars and is actively seeking to suppress all forms of protest, then protests are the last resort of the people to express their dissatisfaction with an out of control government. Well there is the ballot box buts its pretty clear the American people thanks to their ever rising tide of ignorance about the world, are so easily manipulated they will vote in some spectacularly bad politicians.
The biggest problem with protest suppression lately is the government is suppressing all protests unless they are in cages out of sight and out of mind as was the case at the conventions last year. ANY protest that doesn't adhere to government restrictions is basically classified as illegal and ripe for suppression, so they have made most protests pointless and impotent.
"Police do have the ability to put down riots quite effetely with no high tech devices needed and if they had the type of crowd control weapons they're working on now maybe not as many people would have been hurt."
The new generation of weapons are substantially more intimidating than current ones. The lightning bolt is not a good example because its to spectacular and visible. The heat ray microwave weapon already deployed by the military is a better case study. Its a nearly perfect anti riot weapon which is why its already deployed.
In particular its invisible. It causes intense pain, you can sweep a large crowd with it from a distance and relatively concealed location. There aren't any images of tear gas, or cops wielding clubs and shields. It will just put a crowd down writhing in pain. Its pretty much a very clean torture device, no marks, and it's not clear what happened.
Protesters subjected to it probably would think twice before coming back for more so not only would you break up a protest you would intimidate future ones once you start using it.
If you want to live in a police state then great keep building ever better high tech weapons to suppress protest. Apparently that's position you are taking.
"Stop a rioting crowd that is really there for no other reason to riot."
One persons "riot" is another persons free speech and protest against an out of out of control government. if you are in government and want to turn a peaceful protest in to a riot so you can aggressively suppress it you just put a few undercover cops in the crowd to act as provocateurs or as in the case of Chicago in 1968 you have the police start the riot and try to blame it on the protesters.
Don't think we are close to the point of armed revolt. We have, since the first WTO riot in Seattle, already achieved the point that people are willing to engage in aggressive protests up to the point of riots and governments around the world are constantly seeking new measures to suppress WTO and G-8 protests.
I'm willing to bet the Bush administration is looking at the rate anti war sentiment is rising against the Iraq war and weighing the possibility of anti war protests on the scale of Kent State or Chicago in 1968 and are planning to insure that they are suppressed without killing people. Killing people at Kent State more than any other event turned the American people against the government and the war.
Right wingers who insist that anti war protests lost the Vietnam war are likely to seek to suppress them this time around.
Not sure you will ever see protests on that scale this time around because they Bush administration has already used the fear of "terrorism" to suppress most demonstrations, at the party conventions last year for example.
Buy beach front property on the North coast of Canada and Russia, especially in areas that will make good harbors. The only challenge is to guess how much sea level will rise after all the ice sheets melt on Greenland, Antarctica, etc. You guess to low and your land ends up underwater, you guess to high is not quit so bad but you do want beach front and harbor real estate.
It will be a prime vacation spot in the summer when the tropics are unlivable and are being wiped by one Cat 5 hurricane after another.
Ocean temperatures and hurricanes are the leading indicator of global warming.
"Most of the people of South Vietnam did not want to be taken over by the North... or at the most live in a communist country. (It was a civil war.)"
Most of the Vietnamese people were sick of foreign domination after a century of brutal colonial occupation by the French that began in 1883, and which in many cases pushed the Vietnamese in to virtual slavery to colonial masters. When the French abandoned the place the U.S. stepped in and picked up the colonial baton.
The U.S. proceeded to install a wildly silly and unpopular dictator named Ngo Dinh Diem, who'd been living in exile in New Jersey. Like every dictator the U.S. installed after World War II, Diem's one redeeming quality was he was a staunch anticommunist. The U.S. didn't care what these dictators were for, they just had to be anticommunist and willing to arrest, torture or kill anyone suspected of being a leftists.
Diem's government was a mass of nepotism, cronyism, and corruption. The South Vietnamese army was the basket case it was because the officers were promoted based on connections, not ability. It was universally known Diem was a U.S. puppet so when he invited in U.S. troops it was basically the U.S. inviting itself in to the conflict. Many Vietnamese hated him with a passion which is why the Viet Cong had no problem garnering recruits and support from the South Vietnamese people. If an insurgency has support from a significant percentage of the population its nearly impossible to beat.
The U.S. lost Vietnam because the U.S. framed the choice as one between the nationalist forces of Ho Chi Mien and the likes of Diem.
Ho Chi Mien opted for Communism because the Soviet Union was the only place that would support them in throwing off colonial occupation. The North Vietnamese were first and foremost fighting a ware based on nationalism not Communism. I'm sure lots of Vietnamese didn't want Communism but many of them preferred it over Diem and French/U.S. domination.
It would be interesting to have seen what would have happened in Vietnam if instead of installing a puppet dictator, the South Vietnamese despised if, the U.S. had helped the U.S. to free elections, nationalism and independence and if they voted to unify with the North and for Socialism so be it.
Vietnam was just the biggest and bloodiest round of this exact same sad saga that happened in dozens of countries as the U.S. and U.S.S.R fought there proxy wars at the expense of the rest of the world. The U.S. would have a lot better standing in the world if it hadn't opted for oppressive anti communist dictators time after time.
"In the event that he's forced everybody out, it doesn't matter what he had in the hole"
It sure does matter. It totally violates the concept of the game. You gain vast insight in to the winner's strategy if you can see if the winner was bluffing, slow betting a strong hand, or went all in with a strong hand.
In a meat space game its entirely the winners discretion if they show their cards if they forced everyone out. Sometimes you do show them to play mind games on your opponent who folded but most of the time you don't.
When you hear the term "non-lethal" next to "weapon" they may be claiming its to fight terrorism because its an easy way to get the U.S. government to throw money your way, but its more likely its going end up actually used for crowd control. You know all of those annoying protests at WTO and G-8 summits.
That was clearly what the DOD's Humvee mounted heat ray technology was for.
Its one of the more disturbing sides of the U.S. government these days, they seem to be spending way to much time thinking about, and spending money, on how to suppress dissent, institute martial law and protect themselves from their own unhappy population.
Yea like Las Vegas casinos or carnies would never cheat. LOL!!!
Not sure I've met to many people if any, who wouldn't take money if its laying there to be taken. Fact is if its easy to cheat, and Internet poker looks ripe for it, I wager somebody will. The per hand fees they levy are bad enough but they have to keep them down to compete with other sites. If they skim a bunch more off the top with no little or no risk of getting caught whose gonna know. Don't think there is any actual oversight authority is there, they are mostly self policing and off shore. If they were totally ripping people off, I imagine they close down overnight, clean out the bank and start over under a new name. Would seem to me like its subject to debate if they could even be held civilly or criminally responsible for skimming, since you are pretty much at their mercy for the rules they decide to play by when you charge up your account with them with your plastic.
Your hand wouldn't be statistically worse than expected. Your hand would be totally legitimate. The house would either:
- Change its hand after the fact out of the pool of undealt cards. Its had would be statistically superior but you will never be able to get a statistical track on it long enough to spot it.
- Even better they don't need to stack the deck at all. All they need is a back door to let them see all the players cards so they know if they are winning or losing. Though they would only want to take advantage of this insider knowledge on a semi random basis. They are just going to look like a superior player.
Not sure I even understand your last paragraph. If there was such a statistical certainty in outcome of the game there wouldn't be any point in playing. If the house is cheating its just going to look like the house player is a better player, and you are never going to know who the house player is or encounter it long enough in one sitting to develop a statistical track on it. It would just look like some good players you run in to once in a while.
To be honest the way this thread is going I think it comes down to there are a bunch of people who are so fond of Internet poker they are going to insist until their dieing day that its impossible for it to be crooked. If Internet poker is 100% trustworthy it would be the only form of gambling in history that ever was.
If you are playing for fun with a $20 or $50 buy in go for it. I just wouldn't in a million years play high stakes poker relying on software to deal virtual cards.
"I have a database with 30,000 hands and everything is pretty much inline with what I should get dealt, given that sample size."
Uh... server side cheating wouldn't stack the deck for what you get dealt. That would be to easy to spot statistically. It would deal all the sucker...players legit hands. Periodically a house player, one you would never know is a house player would get dealt a winning hand. If properly done you would never be able to build a statistical analysis to spot the house player or that it was getting a better hand. If the house player plays aggressively and pushes everyone out you would never even see their winning hand to build a statistical case. After an hour or two the house player disappears and a pops up elswhere or under a new name so even if you saw all the house player's cards you wouldn't get enough to build a statistical case.
Interesting concept though by relying on a client to do it would seem to open up great potential for anyone to mess with it instead of just the server owner.
In particular how do you make a client trustworthy without resorting to something Palladium like.
Slashdot Mirror
"They didn't even nationalize arms manufacture in the midst of total war, for pete's sake."
They didn't nationalize it but it was completely state dominated. We are really splitting semantic hairs here. I'm pretty sure we've established China is more Fascist than Communist today and the fact that they jump from one side of the spectrum to the other in a few years without anyone noticing show how much the same the two idealogies are. I think we also established that the Republican party is pretty closer to Fascism than anything elseeconomically, they just haven't managed a full blown police state just yet.
I appreciate the yearning in some circles for Marxist-Leninist Socialism to introduce a workers paradise unfortunately in practice it ends up not being a collective or a workers paradise. It ends up being party members seizing all the power and wealth for themselves, and screwing all of the working stiffs, just like like the moneyed elites do in Capitalism and Fascism. Unfortunately all people who aspire to power are inherently corrupt or end up that way when they gain power and it leads to all governments of any size turning in to steaming piles of shit.
Another great example of bad karma in play, I'll go nuts if hear the Katrina news coverage comment another hundred times about the fact that Mississippi is losing $500,000 a day because their gambling barges are all wrecked. like that counts for anything in the middle of a disaster zone. There is another completely bad karma industry, one designed to drain money out of the pockets of people to ignorant to realize that gambling is a carefully designed strategy for states governments and corporations to separate them from their hard earned money in exchange for exactly nothing.
"Oil companies only sell what people buy. "
That is completely nuts. Oil companies, in particular Standard Oil created the fossil fuel economy, hand in hand with Ford and GM, who marketed it and suckered Americans in to buying in to it. It's created horrible urban environments like the ones in California, and nearly ever urban, suburban nightmare in the U.S. which make it nearly impossible to exist without owning a car. It created massive expanses of concrete where pedestrians are an endangered species and mass transit largely non existent. Most American cities have turned in hell holes where no one wants to live surrounded by a massive suburban sprawl. Ironically the quality of life in such an environment is horrible but people do it anyway. No one in their right mind would spend 2-4 hours a day commuting on traffic clogged and polluted freeways. I'll take life in the country or in a real city with subways, and corner markets you walk to any day. The karma of the American life style is nearly all bad and it will be world killing and unsustainable as the billions of people in China and India start buying in to it which they are.
Everything Americans do is driven by nonstop advertising and marketing campaigns. Most cars are a truly horrible place to invest money because, with a few exceptions, their value craters in a few years and the marketing machine starts telling you to mortgage your soul to buy a new one though its a horrible investment.
The oil companies have year after year artificially inflated gasoline prices to pad their profit margins, and then dropped prices just as the backlash develops. Chances are it will go that way this time too. Oil companies simply can't let prices stay at current levels indefinitely because everyone will start flocking to alternatives to their product. They might let it stay high just long enough for people to start investing in alternatives, then drop prices and put all those alternatives out of business so investors in them get doubly burned. Oil companies have for 100 years done nothing but manipulate America and the world.
"our AC running"
Air conditioning karma is just as bad. Its led to mass migrations in to places where people shouldn't be living like the Southwestern deserts and the deep south. AC is why so many people are living in the path of devastating Hurricanes in the South and in the deserts without enough water in the Southwest. Florida was not a place you wanted to live before AC. AC fueled the massive growth in coal fired power plants which is one of the worst parts of the fossil fuel karma.
Computers I wouldn't judge so harshly. Its enabled communication and learning on an unprecedented scale. It give people something to do besides drive around in cars or vegetate passively in front of the TV. They have a down side but their karma is at least a wash.
"and saying that these poor people somehow where asking for it"
The poor people were unfortunate victims but a big chunk of the Louisiana economy, and the people living there are completely intertwined with and dependent on the fossil fuel economy. You can't drive far in Louisiana without smelling the stench of refineries.
Wow that was a lot of links. The key point I got out of it is they really don't have data over a long enough period to really identify a cyclic pattern. There is sort of one but the history isn't long enough to prove it. It is clear, and they admit, that there has been a large spike in Hurricanes since 1995 up to now which is 10 years, and the last two years have been exceptionally bad in the Atlantic and gulf.
Taking the same data I think I could just as easily conclude that there has in fact been a big spike in Hurricane activity in the last ten years and I could depending on whim or prejudice either say its cyclic or its indicative of a new and dangerous trend which might get even worse than it already is.
One school of global warming theorists contend the oceans have been sinking both heat and carbon dioxide, they may be approaching their limit, and when they reach their limit climate change might accelerate.
Let me be clear I'm the first to admit there isn't enough evidence to declare human induced global warming to be a fact, or that recent weather extremes may be a by product, but there certainly isn't enough evidence to dismiss it either. Maybe it is due to increases in solar output or something natural.
Its hard to deny though that our climate is changing rapidly. We could stick our heads in the sand and hope its not man caused and keep doing what we are doing.
The other option is a simple recognition that use of fossil fuels is almost universally bad. Burning coal slowly poisons everything down wind. Burning gasoline poisons the air in cities. Oil is getting scarce and that scarcity is going to start doing major damage to our economy and lead to vicious global competition for control of the remaining reserves.
All in all it seems to me like maybe starting to rapidly pursue alternatives would be a really good idea. I'd sure like to hear someone make a case that just sticking our head in the sand continuing the status quo is a good idea, someone other than Exxon Mobile and the Bush administration because their case is based on their own wealth creation not on objective consideration of the issues.
Thats almost the data I'd like to see, you just wish they had more current temperature readings and more data from buoys out in the middle where the hurricane's build. Only thing I could garner was that the few current reports in the West Gulf near Texas seem to be running higher than the average, in the 90 degree range, and the few near Florida reporting are more on average. Wish they had graphs for all the historical data collected from the buoys along with where they are located.
Of course then to many of the stations in the Gulf might have been taken out by Katrina.
Dude if you reread your post you find you are agreeing with what I said more than disagreeing I think you were just to busy going off the deep end to notice.
"The only thing they arguably have similar is their penchant towards ruthless oppression"
Gee thats pretty big common ground, that and massive state intervention in everyone's lives and in all aspects of economics.
"There is no such thing as fascist-leaning Socialism."
epends on how you define Socialism. You may have heard of this thing called National Socialism. Yes the Nazi's referred to themselves as Socialists.
Socialism is in essence a form of government featuring a big, all controlling state. It really has two forms, on the left Communism and on the right Fascism. When they both reach their extremes they actually wrap around and become more the same than different. Only real difference in Communism there is state ownership of everything and in Fascism the party elite tend to own everything and there is a facade of free market capitalism, though the state intervenes in it at every turn to create artificial winners and loser much like you see today's Republican party doing, and it happens the winners they tend to pick are the party faithful just like in Germany and today in China.
In practice you find they end up being almost exactly the same, the only difference is bureaucrats and politicians garner all the power and wealth in Communism while Fascism doles some of it out to corporations and wealthy party members who run them.
Now Social Democrats are a completely different animal, they are a much kinder and gentler form of Socialism and are mostly just out to tax everyone in to the ground to provide universal health care, education, pensions etc. I'm cool with that if its what you want out of your government, just me personally I'd rather not pay the high taxes, drown in red tape to get rationed health care, etc. and would rather fend for myself.
I don't think I've been called "right wing" on Slashdot lately. If you read my posts in the past you find the right wingers rail at me as hard or harder than you just did. I am a libertarian when it comes to personal freedoms and Progressive only when it comes to the need to regulate and check big corporations and the rich, but am totaly opposed to everything else socialists and progressives stand for because government is inherently incompetent and big government is just more so.
Not sure there is a name for my idealogy or that I fit on any of the idealogy charts.
"These storms are part of a natural Hurricane cycle. These cycles have been seen going back centuries"
Don't think 90 degree water surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are normal, even cyclically though I'd be curious if anyone can point me to a historical record of Gulf water temperatures.
"If so wouldn't it have been more far for a massive hurricane to have hit California and New York where lots if this oil and gas is burned?"
America's oil, coal and car companies are far more to blame for the situation we are in than individual Americans. They are like crack dealers who've gotten extraordinarily wealthy pushing cheap gasoline and fuel guzzling cars first on Americans and now the world, most recently China and India. They are also guilty, at every turn, of suppressing development of alternative energy and transportation mechanisms.
You don't have to look much further than who is going to be doing the most profiteering on the disaster that is Katrina. Gasoline prices are jumping 10-15 cents this week. Exxon Mobile, Conoco, Shell and BP all garnered record profits last quarter and will probably set records this quarter. Why aren't you indignant about the extent they, and speculators, are profiteering on this disaster. Its about as bad as price gouging by people selling water and generators in the disaster region. There are some people getting mighty rich who helped create a world dependent on fossil fuels and are now exploiting the dependence they are creating and doing things like creating artificial shortage of refining capacity to insure inflated prices for their products.
All in all there is just some massive bad karma there and most of it is eminating from the states of Texas and Louisiana. Certainly it is unfortunate a lot of innocent people got caught in the middle of it, but there is a natural balance in the world, if you do something wrong continuously for long periods, and our fossil fuel economy is clearly wrong, you eventually have to pay a price for it. The fossil fuel industry and the Bush administration rather than trying to move away from it are in denial that its a problem and just trying to propagate our complete dependence on fossil fuels, are waging wars for control of it, and profiting mightily from the current scarcity. I saw in the news a couple days ago a civil servant with the Army Corps of Engineers who testified before Congress recently about the blatant impropriety of the sole source, five year contract given to Halliburton to develop Iraq's oil fields was demoted and transfered by Cheney, Rumsfeld and friends, for stating the obvious fact, the people in the Bush administration are profiteering on the Iraq war and control of Iraq's oil fields. Again there is some really bad karma there.
People can't just keep doing something wrong indefinitely and never face the music. You would hope a disaster on the scale of Katrina will wake people up and will break the world out of its fossil fuel death spiral. If it doesn't you run the risk of letting it run for another 50 years and maybe do real and irreversible damage, both economic and environmental, damage far worse than you see today in the South.
"We as Americans may not totally agree with their government policies, however that doesn't mean we cannot get along and help one another, we are pretty clost to them."
Yea it can. The U.S., especially America's right wing hate Socialists with a passion and that isn't going to change any time soon. Socialists are the antithesis of everything free marketers believe it, though there is irony that the New Republican party seems extremely enamored with big spending and big government which is constantly intervening in markets, and looks pretty socialist to me too. Its just Fascist leaning Socialism where its to the benefit of the wealthy and loyal party members. China is also more Fascist leaning Socialism than Communism these days.
Cuba and Venezuela by contrast are left leaning Socialism which is focused on things like universal health care, education, elimination of poverty, land reform and Republican's in particular HATE people that do nasty stuff like that.
Me personally I prefer small government that stays out of my life so I don't like the New Republican or Cuba/Venezuela styles of Socialism. About the only use I see for government is minimal self defense, maybe building roads, and regulating unscrupulous business who if left unregulated would take over the world and for the most part already have.
"Either that or maybe the United States will actually address and attempt to fix global warming with this hurricane blow?"
There is certainly a lesson in karma that Louisiana has built it's fortunes in recent decades on being the hub of America's oil and gas based fossil fuel industry, and was devastated by a hurricane whose intensity was fueled by global warming which may be due in part to CO2 emissions. I imagine the wells in the gulf and all those refineries flare off massive quantities of natural gas as CO2.
A big part of the New Orleans problem is that the levees have been abused. There is a plan on the table where they would have started intentionally flooding the wetlands around New Orleans from the Mississippi and start depositing mud there and building them up so they are a better buffer from storms. Not sure about pumping the ground water but the soil in the region is alluvial and its natural for it to sink. It was OK when the Mississippi flooded it routinely and deposited fresh silt on it to keep building it back up. Unfortunately the Army Corps of Engineers undid this natural restoration on a large scale with levees and flood control. Something about the hubris of man seems appropriate in this case. Of course this solution doesn't work for the city of New Orleans. It is probably a doomed city unless you spend billions constantly building up the levees, and the levees are very vulnerable to the increasingly intense Hurricanes in the region. Its going to continue sinking due to the nature of the soil under it, you can't flood it to naturally replenish it with silt, the sea level is going to continue rising due to global warming. You have to wonder if maybe this event isn't an indicator that it should be abandoned and relocated to a site with a more viable long term future.
There is also some karma in play here that an intense hurricane which was probably intensified by CO2 induced global warming, thanks to abnormally warm temperatures in the Atlantic and Gulf, would lead to devastation in Louisiana which is at the heart of the oil and gas part of the fossil fuel industry in the U.S. and is responsible for much of America's CO2 pollution capacity.
Japan's solution to disaster comm that I submitted on Slashdot a few weeks ago is a Geosync satellite with a 66 foot dish that will be able to communicate with essentially ordinary cell phones from space.
Satellites have issues like latency and bandwidth but one of the beauties of them is they are completely above most earthly disasters and this one can communicate to people on the ground without a satellite dish.
I forgot to mention Diem was a Catholic which made him look even more like a French/U.S. puppet. Catholicism being a largely French introduction in Vietnam. Buddhism was the dominant religion in Vietnam and Diem was rabidly anti Buddhist and a puritanical Christian. The U.S. installing a Christian puppet in a Buddhist country was just one more reason for U.S. policy to fail there.
If you want to see a picture of of the reason U.S. lost Vietnam, before the war even started its here.
Diem was assassinated by a U.S. backed coup in 1963 which led to a succession of short lived military dictators and interim presidents, an attempt at a constitution written out of the U.S. embassy, eventually leading to the rule of Nguyen Van Thieu, who presided over Vietnam during the heart of the war, another unpopular and very corrupt dictator. U.S. could never manage to back anyone popular or who had any chance of winning an election without rigging it.
Iyad Allawi is the same class of individual in Iraq, as Diem and Theiu in Vietnam. He was the U.S. chosen and appointed puppet and first Prime Minister in Iraq, though he was trounced by Shia fundamentalists in the first election. Allawi is a secular Shia, a former hitman in Saddam's secret police that Saddam tried to have assassinated by ax, and is widely suspected of being an agent for CIA and British intelligence since. The U.S. very much wants to encourage the next round of Iraqi elections to put him back in power though like Diem and Thieu its unlikely he can win an election unless its rigged.
I stopped running SETI once I figured out what a needle in a haystack search it is. They are looking for a few specific waveforms on a very narrow frequency band. There isn't a particularly strong chance that aliens would share in their thinking on what signal to send and happen to do it in the same time frame.
I'm all for donating spare CPU cycles but I would rather it went to something that had a better chance of having a point like molecular biology research.
"You can dissent all you want and you'll never see these tools. Start rioting and they'll be used on you."
Bullshit. Once you go down that road the government can classify any peaceful protest as a riot, especially ones that aren't government licensed and constrained in both time and location. Its already common in places like New York and Boston that cities wont license any protest anywhere close to a major and controversial event in the city like political convention or a G-8 summit (though lately these are in remote areas, with a 100 mile police state around them so they are hard to protest against). It isn't effective dissent when you let the government tell you what you can do and when. That is being herded.
"Surely they would do something about that one if they really so evil."
I think it caught them off guard. I think they were just going to ignore her and hope it didn't catch on or she gave up. Unfortunately for them August is a slow news month so it did catch on. By the time it got rolling it was to late to doing anything blatant to shut her down. At the moment I think she is on private land of a sympathizer which further constrains retaliation. She is also the mother of a dead veteran which again constrains their latitude in dealing with her without a backlash, all things your average protester doesn't have in their favor. Kudos to her for finally mounting an effective protest. The sadder commentary is it didn't happen before the war, or before the election, and that it took this long after it became obvious the Iraq war was a giant lie.
"They are there protection peoples lives and property"
The point you miss is whether they are protecting innocent bystanders, property and order or if they are protecting political power. They are two very different things.
Resorting to violence as part of a protest is counterproductive for the most part so I don't approve of it in the first place. Its a lot better tactic to engage in nonviolent tactics since you gain sympathy if you are peaceful and the police are the violent ones. What if you block doors or streets. Most people would call that nonviolent and relatively harmless. Most political and police authorties these days categorize it as rioting and will use force to stop it.
So to not get caught in the trap of your question the best out come is for the protesters to be peaceful, for example blocking doorways or streets, and have the police turn violent on camera with tear gas and clubs. The best outcome from a protesters standpoint who wants to effect change IS for the police to respond with excessive force and kill or wound peaceful protesters because it wakes up everyone to the fact that their government is out of control and is the most likely route to topple it.
The government and the military know they need to refrain from visibly wounding or killing people so instead they've developed insidious devices to effectively torture people en mass and in front of cameras without leaving any marks.
The people thinking these things up are ingenious, unfortunately they are creating tools that are extraordinarily ripe for abuse. Seems to me like the heat ray device would be a perfect torture device whether used in public on protesters or on the thousand of people the U.S. is holding in secret prisons around the globe. Intense and unbearable pain, maybe no long lasting damage, and no marks.
I'm ranting about the fact that a government is acquiring better tools to suppress dissent.
If you have a responsible government thats not abusing its power and is making sound decisions there maybe isn't much rationale for protests and but people should ALWAYS have them as an option in a country with freedom of speech. If you have a government like the one currently in the U.S. which is trampling civil rights, massively abusing its power, lying the nation in to wars and is actively seeking to suppress all forms of protest, then protests are the last resort of the people to express their dissatisfaction with an out of control government. Well there is the ballot box buts its pretty clear the American people thanks to their ever rising tide of ignorance about the world, are so easily manipulated they will vote in some spectacularly bad politicians.
The biggest problem with protest suppression lately is the government is suppressing all protests unless they are in cages out of sight and out of mind as was the case at the conventions last year. ANY protest that doesn't adhere to government restrictions is basically classified as illegal and ripe for suppression, so they have made most protests pointless and impotent.
"Police do have the ability to put down riots quite effetely with no high tech devices needed and if they had the type of crowd control weapons they're working on now maybe not as many people would have been hurt."
The new generation of weapons are substantially more intimidating than current ones. The lightning bolt is not a good example because its to spectacular and visible. The heat ray microwave weapon already deployed by the military is a better case study. Its a nearly perfect anti riot weapon which is why its already deployed.
In particular its invisible. It causes intense pain, you can sweep a large crowd with it from a distance and relatively concealed location. There aren't any images of tear gas, or cops wielding clubs and shields. It will just put a crowd down writhing in pain. Its pretty much a very clean torture device, no marks, and it's not clear what happened.
Protesters subjected to it probably would think twice before coming back for more so not only would you break up a protest you would intimidate future ones once you start using it.
If you want to live in a police state then great keep building ever better high tech weapons to suppress protest. Apparently that's position you are taking.
"Stop a rioting crowd that is really there for no other reason to riot."
One persons "riot" is another persons free speech and protest against an out of out of control government. if you are in government and want to turn a peaceful protest in to a riot so you can aggressively suppress it you just put a few undercover cops in the crowd to act as provocateurs or as in the case of Chicago in 1968 you have the police start the riot and try to blame it on the protesters.
Don't think we are close to the point of armed revolt. We have, since the first WTO riot in Seattle, already achieved the point that people are willing to engage in aggressive protests up to the point of riots and governments around the world are constantly seeking new measures to suppress WTO and G-8 protests.
I'm willing to bet the Bush administration is looking at the rate anti war sentiment is rising against the Iraq war and weighing the possibility of anti war protests on the scale of Kent State or Chicago in 1968 and are planning to insure that they are suppressed without killing people. Killing people at Kent State more than any other event turned the American people against the government and the war.
Right wingers who insist that anti war protests lost the Vietnam war are likely to seek to suppress them this time around.
Not sure you will ever see protests on that scale this time around because they Bush administration has already used the fear of "terrorism" to suppress most demonstrations, at the party conventions last year for example.
Buy beach front property on the North coast of Canada and Russia, especially in areas that will make good harbors. The only challenge is to guess how much sea level will rise after all the ice sheets melt on Greenland, Antarctica, etc. You guess to low and your land ends up underwater, you guess to high is not quit so bad but you do want beach front and harbor real estate.
It will be a prime vacation spot in the summer when the tropics are unlivable and are being wiped by one Cat 5 hurricane after another.
Ocean temperatures and hurricanes are the leading indicator of global warming.
"Most of the people of South Vietnam did not want to be taken over by the North... or at the most live in a communist country. (It was a civil war.)"
Most of the Vietnamese people were sick of foreign domination after a century of brutal colonial occupation by the French that began in 1883, and which in many cases pushed the Vietnamese in to virtual slavery to colonial masters. When the French abandoned the place the U.S. stepped in and picked up the colonial baton.
The U.S. proceeded to install a wildly silly and unpopular dictator named Ngo Dinh Diem, who'd been living in exile in New Jersey. Like every dictator the U.S. installed after World War II, Diem's one redeeming quality was he was a staunch anticommunist. The U.S. didn't care what these dictators were for, they just had to be anticommunist and willing to arrest, torture or kill anyone suspected of being a leftists.
Diem's government was a mass of nepotism, cronyism, and corruption. The South Vietnamese army was the basket case it was because the officers were promoted based on connections, not ability. It was universally known Diem was a U.S. puppet so when he invited in U.S. troops it was basically the U.S. inviting itself in to the conflict. Many Vietnamese hated him with a passion which is why the Viet Cong had no problem garnering recruits and support from the South Vietnamese people. If an insurgency has support from a significant percentage of the population its nearly impossible to beat.
The U.S. lost Vietnam because the U.S. framed the choice as one between the nationalist forces of Ho Chi Mien and the likes of Diem.
Ho Chi Mien opted for Communism because the Soviet Union was the only place that would support them in throwing off colonial occupation. The North Vietnamese were first and foremost fighting a ware based on nationalism not Communism. I'm sure lots of Vietnamese didn't want Communism but many of them preferred it over Diem and French/U.S. domination.
It would be interesting to have seen what would have happened in Vietnam if instead of installing a puppet dictator, the South Vietnamese despised if, the U.S. had helped the U.S. to free elections, nationalism and independence and if they voted to unify with the North and for Socialism so be it.
Vietnam was just the biggest and bloodiest round of this exact same sad saga that happened in dozens of countries as the U.S. and U.S.S.R fought there proxy wars at the expense of the rest of the world. The U.S. would have a lot better standing in the world if it hadn't opted for oppressive anti communist dictators time after time.
"In the event that he's forced everybody out, it doesn't matter what he had in the hole"
It sure does matter. It totally violates the concept of the game. You gain vast insight in to the winner's strategy if you can see if the winner was bluffing, slow betting a strong hand, or went all in with a strong hand.
In a meat space game its entirely the winners discretion if they show their cards if they forced everyone out. Sometimes you do show them to play mind games on your opponent who folded but most of the time you don't.
When you hear the term "non-lethal" next to "weapon" they may be claiming its to fight terrorism because its an easy way to get the U.S. government to throw money your way, but its more likely its going end up actually used for crowd control. You know all of those annoying protests at WTO and G-8 summits.
That was clearly what the DOD's Humvee mounted heat ray technology was for.
Its one of the more disturbing sides of the U.S. government these days, they seem to be spending way to much time thinking about, and spending money, on how to suppress dissent, institute martial law and protect themselves from their own unhappy population.
This coming from someone plugging online blackjack in their sig at 888.com. LOL!!!! I think you have a conflict of interest on this one, bud.
Yea like Las Vegas casinos or carnies would never cheat. LOL!!!
Not sure I've met to many people if any, who wouldn't take money if its laying there to be taken. Fact is if its easy to cheat, and Internet poker looks ripe for it, I wager somebody will. The per hand fees they levy are bad enough but they have to keep them down to compete with other sites. If they skim a bunch more off the top with no little or no risk of getting caught whose gonna know. Don't think there is any actual oversight authority is there, they are mostly self policing and off shore. If they were totally ripping people off, I imagine they close down overnight, clean out the bank and start over under a new name. Would seem to me like its subject to debate if they could even be held civilly or criminally responsible for skimming, since you are pretty much at their mercy for the rules they decide to play by when you charge up your account with them with your plastic.
Your hand wouldn't be statistically worse than expected. Your hand would be totally legitimate. The house would either:
- Change its hand after the fact out of the pool of undealt cards. Its had would be statistically superior but you will never be able to get a statistical track on it long enough to spot it.
- Even better they don't need to stack the deck at all. All they need is a back door to let them see all the players cards so they know if they are winning or losing. Though they would only want to take advantage of this insider knowledge on a semi random basis. They are just going to look like a superior player.
Not sure I even understand your last paragraph. If there was such a statistical certainty in outcome of the game there wouldn't be any point in playing. If the house is cheating its just going to look like the house player is a better player, and you are never going to know who the house player is or encounter it long enough in one sitting to develop a statistical track on it. It would just look like some good players you run in to once in a while.
To be honest the way this thread is going I think it comes down to there are a bunch of people who are so fond of Internet poker they are going to insist until their dieing day that its impossible for it to be crooked. If Internet poker is 100% trustworthy it would be the only form of gambling in history that ever was.
If you are playing for fun with a $20 or $50 buy in go for it. I just wouldn't in a million years play high stakes poker relying on software to deal virtual cards.
"I have a database with 30,000 hands and everything is pretty much inline with what I should get dealt, given that sample size."
... server side cheating wouldn't stack the deck for what you get dealt. That would be to easy to spot statistically. It would deal all the sucker...players legit hands. Periodically a house player, one you would never know is a house player would get dealt a winning hand. If properly done you would never be able to build a statistical analysis to spot the house player or that it was getting a better hand. If the house player plays aggressively and pushes everyone out you would never even see their winning hand to build a statistical case. After an hour or two the house player disappears and a pops up elswhere or under a new name so even if you saw all the house player's cards you wouldn't get enough to build a statistical case.
Uh
Interesting concept though by relying on a client to do it would seem to open up great potential for anyone to mess with it instead of just the server owner.
In particular how do you make a client trustworthy without resorting to something Palladium like.