Re:www.dieoff.org - depressing news for you
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
No, but the experts who are paid a huge pile of money note the rate of discovery of new oil is far below the consumption rate of existing reserves.
That can be explained, as you are suggesting, by reserves being more difficult to find.
Unfortunately, that phenomenon can also be explained by simple economics. For the past few decades it has been (nearly) financial suicide to engage in oil exploration. Domestic (U.S.A.) exploration has continued to dwindle. The decline can largely be explained by price uncertainty.
It costs 6 or 7 figures to bring a single well online.
Will it produce? Dunno for sure until it is online.
How much will it produce? Dunno for sure until it is online.
How long will it produce? Dunno for sure until it is online.
How much water will need to be removed from the oil? Dunno for sure until it is online.
How much will it cost to extract the oil? Dunno for sure until it is online.
Here's the killer:
What will the spot price of oil be if and when I get my well online?
Dunno.
Will I ever get my money back from the well?
Dunno.
Exploration is risky. Right now there is plenty of known oil. Until the price volatility gets removed from crude prices, few will explore. Those (not well funded) groups that do explore will get killed the next time OPEC gluts the market and shakes out the weaker competitors.
None of this has anything to do with how much oil is underground.
Re:www.dieoff.org - depressing news for you
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Ignorant people think gasoline is unlimited. I'll see the end of it, and the inevitable disaster is not going to be pretty.
No you won't. You won't see the end of petroleum any more than I will see the last tree chopped down. It simply won't happen.
Also, no one really believes that gasoline is unlimited. No one really believes that the water in the ocean is unlimited. No one really believes solar energy will last forever, since the sun will eventually go dark.
Here's the thing, no one knows how much oil we have left. All that we really know is how much we have found so far, and we know that we always keep finding and extracting more than we would have predicted.
Will oil run out? Yes. Will it run out today? Tomorrow? Next year? April 17, 2045 at 11:42 a.m. PDT? No one knows. What we do know is that the last drop (or barrel, or millions of barrels) will never be used.
Just like the last cell of whale blubber was never used.
Royalty - cellphone manufacturers must pay royalty for each cellphone running either Palm, Symbian or CE
Though I don't know how much royalty they charge, because it's a purely business secret
It's not that big of a secret. The average revenue per handset for symbian is
$6.70.
I don't care who you are, you are going to have a difficult time readying and deploying a full OS faster and less expensively than licensing one. It makes sense that Nokia uses Symbian instead of continuing to roll their own.
Not a week ago I was at a seminar where Sun was discussing this very thing. Maybe I can fill in some gaps.
but I still wonder what their server strategy is
Vertically large (single box) applications = Solaris Sparc
Horizontally large (clusterable) applications = Solaris x86
I actually prefer linux on the server to solaris for a lot of reasons
Solaris 10 x86 will be indistinguishable from Solaris 10 Sparc at the admin level. It will run Linux binaries. It should be the best of all worlds.
I want an end to end solution, and Sun is making it difficult.
End to end is the selling point of these. Sun hopes the whole data center, from the edge web servers to the core mainframe will be Sun gear.
When I went to price out one of Sun's new AMD systems, I was somewhat disappointed.
The guy speaking was some regional-something-or-other, and he claimed that he has yet to lose a deal based on price. I suspect that the web site is a guide and not the final price. Remember that these are part of Sun's Volume Systems Group. I doubt they care a whole lot about selling one or two of these per transaction. If you are talking 100+ servers in a transaction, they will pay close attention to you.
Your understanding is wrong. I'm a licensed dealer -- I've worked on the inside! I've seen guys like you lose fortunes; some days it made me feel like crap, and others it made me laugh my ass off.
Guys like me lose fortunes? Where did that come from?
If you work on the inside, then either:
You don't see the numbers and make the decisions, or
Your gaming market is atypical.
Look
here for a discussion about slots vs. table games.
f you knew any probability theory you'd realize that any uneven distribution of the shuffle does not affect card-counting at all unless the shuffle is designed systematically to defeat card-counting
If you have done much card counting, you would know from painful experience that the whole premise of counting cards is to predict what will be coming in the shoe, based on what has been seen from the shoe. This assumes random distribution of the remaining cards.
If you are counting cards, nearing the shuffle card in the shoe, and have a very high count (mostly tens remain), but all of those tens are beyond the shuffle card (because the dealer "inspired" that), you will go down in flames quickly.
You will bet large wagers and stand where you should have hit, while the dealer will constantly get 17+ with no busting. Your bankroll will disappear.
Blackjack dealers don't have a lot of discretion in how they deal or play their hands.
They have a lot of discretion on how the shoe is broken into stacks, which stacks are shuffled with which, and how the stacks are reassembled into the new shoe.
Bzzzt. Wrong. The job of the pitboss is to make sure that no laws are being broken and to verify that large payouts are correct.
Bzzt. Wrong. From what I understand, table games make relatively little money for a casino. They exist as a loss leader. The real money is in the slot machines. That's why you have to walk by hundreds of slot machines on the way to the tables and walk back by the slots on your way out.
While there are many demographics of gamblers, a more profitable one is the "group of friends" on an outing. Several friends or family will get together for their monthly/quarterly/yearly outing to the casinos to spend some cash. Often, some of the guys will think they can beat the dealer (although they have not done so with any consistency over the last $20,000 wagered) so these guys of the group want to play table games. Which casino will the group gamble in? A casino with table games, of course.
I have been told that casinos only want three things from table games:
Be relatively self funding
Generate traffic for the slots (see above)
Not spark any investigations for the casino (see below)
Table profitability is carefully tracked and the gaming commission charts every table result by shift/day of week/dealer/pit boss/etc. The results are also compared to those of other casinos. Any underperforming or overperforming tables are investigated. Underperformance might mean that there is an inside scam. Overperformance might mean that the casino is cheating players. Either way there is an investigation and a smear on the pit boss' resume.
If a table isn't making money, rest assured that the one beside it is making double.
Probably, but this is the same problem all over again. They avoid this situation also.
Actually, your whole comment is complete BS! Nice work on the moderation +Informative when it is all lies...
I've seen shuffles that generally involve putting the cards to be shuffled on the table, smearing them all around randomly, then stacking them back up.
That's called washing the cards. It shuffles very well. It is also fairly rare, although any player can request to wash the shoe at any time.
Card counting does indeed work, I know a number of people who have been barred from casinos for previously making a living playing blackjack.
Yes, it does... If you:
Know the strategy
Keep the count well
Don't drink
Don't tip
Play perfectly
Have outstanding self discipline (this is where most people fall down).
Those restrictions generally suck the joy out of playing and it becomes just another job.
I don't understand it either, but it does happen. I realize the slashdot crowd turns on their BS detector with words like "flow" and tend to assume the whole concept is therefore invalid.
The human brain is amazing at instinctual pattern recognition and a dealer who deals thousands of hours per year for several years will start to notice this pattern.
Unfortunatley, there are few (any?) statisticians with a doctorate in mathematics that wind up as full time blackjack dealers, so we see very little statistical theory on blackjack from the dealers perspective.
While I cannot prove it, I suspect that this has something to do with how clumped together are the low, neutral and high cards. Many low cards stacked together tend to favor the house, since the dealer will draw to a high card. Many high cards together also tend to favor the house since the dealer will likely have a 10 showing and a 10 in the hole, causing the player to draw until he busts. A nice mix of low and high cards tends to favor the player, since the dealer will likely have either a bust card showing or in the hole.
I seem to recall that in normal game play, low cards tend to get clumped together. A person with low cards will hit and hit again while getting low cards, make his hand a stack of low cards, which is swept as a unit by the dealer at the end of play (or when the player busts). I think that high cards have the same tendency. If all of this is true, then the discards will tend toward the high and low cards clumping together. The shuffle is supposed to undo this and randomize the cards. The last part of the shoe, past the shuffle point, remains as it was -- the low and high cards are not clumped together, since those cards are never played.
The difference in the shuffle is very subtle. Watch a dealer. The shoe is split into many stacks which are shuffled and then reassembled, sometimes this is done multiple times. While it varies from casino to casino, the different shuffle is usually as little as which of two stacks is on top and which is on bottom. In other words, whenever a dealer combines two stacks of cards, the left hand will grab a stack, the right hand will grab a stack and the two are combined, usually in the center. The casino usually mandates that one stack (right or left) goes on top and the other stack goes on bottom when reassembling cards. If a dealer knows when to do it, he can put the left stack on top when the right stack is supposed to be on top, or vice versa. The camera, gaming commission, players and pit bosses almost never notice. This is often enough to alter the card distribution for the coming shoe.
Again, you don't have to take my word for it, since I really don't give a rat's ass if you lose your shirt at the casino or not. Go watch a set of tables for several days and decide for yourself.
Card counting, and the computer simulations used to justify it, fail in two fatal ways:
1. They assume a random distribution of the cards at shuffle. This is so far from the truth it is unreal. Each casino has a different way to shuffle the shoe. It does redistribute the cards, but it is not at all random.
Since casino has its own shuffle any strategy will be casino-specific. The distribution of high and low cards gets slowly shifted at each shuffle. At the beginning of the day every deck is in a pre-set order. Each shuffle modifies that order in a predictable way. If you have a card counting strategy, it would be best to include, as part of your strategy, the number of times a shoe has been shuffled. When they break open new decks of cards, the shuffle count starts anew.
2. They assume that the dealer is neutral. This is, at best, naive. The dealer will break a table to run off obnoxious guests and to make room for players that tip well. The dealer will reward players that do tip well. Can't be done legally? Think again.
Any experienced dealer will tell you that a shoe has a "flow" to it. The shoe will either be rewarding the house or the players. When the dealer shuffles the cards, they can either shuffle in a way that generally preserves the flow or shuffle in a way that generally reverses the flow. This does not work 100% of the time, but it does work.
The dealer cannot target a particular player, but they can target the table as a whole.
Got a dickhead at your table? Watch out! The dealer will break him to make him go away. The house will take all of your money, too.
Is everybody at the table nice, cool, and tipping the dealer and waitresses well? Keep it up and watch your fortunes multiply.
Is the table down (losing money) for the shift? Better leave, because the pit boss gets in trouble when this happens, so he will lean on the dealers to raise some cash for the table.
Is it the end of the night and the dealers want to close the table, but you are persistent and wish to play? Get ready to lose your bankroll at a breathtaking rate.
When a new dealer comes to the table, he or she will generally ask how the game is going. They are trying to ascertain the flow of the current shoe. Sometimes when you lose a hand, they will tell you, "Just wait until the next shoe, it will be better." They are telling you that the shoe flow is favoring the house and they will attempt to reverse it at the shuffle. While waiting for the current shoe to run out, bet low (to keep from losing too much) and tip well (so the dealer doesn't change his mind).
If you don't believe this, just go to a set of blackjack tables and watch for a while.
but really, what in the hell are you going to do with 40 hours of MacGyver?
That's not the point. How many pickup trucks run around with a fully loaded bed? What percentage of your disk space do consistently consume?
Until my (ex)wife took my Tivo, I had one for almost three years, two and a half of those years it was a 100 hour model.
That let me record ALL stargate episodes at the highest quality. I would sit down one night (the night of my choosing) to watch the episodes. I could delete the one's I had seen and watch the rest. I never had to worry about making sure the thing only recorded the episodes I had already seen, just get them all.
The other nice thing is that we could go on a two week vacation and miss nothing.
Did we really watch 100 hours of Tivo? No, but it sure was nice having the space.
The more I think about it, the spam problem is quite easy to solve.
Everyone agrees spam is a problem because the cost/benefit ratio supports it.
Instead of raising costs (e-mail postage), we could accomplish the same thing by reducing the benefit to spammers.
Think about this: all mail clients from now on (are they listening in redmond?) could stop honoring image anchors. If everone had to click on a text link instead of an image, the number of click-throughs would go down, reducing spam.
If that doesn't work, make ALL anchors in e-mail un-clickable. If everybody had to type in an URL to take advantage of a spam offer, then almost no one would. Then, the spammers would lose their business case.
Of course, this solution requires unprecedented collaboration among software providers, so it has no chance of working.
My *guess* is that NANPA assigns NXX blocks (prefix/exchanges) to carriers, who then assign them to end nodes. Portability simply means that when someone wants to move to another carrier, the ported number gets put into an exception database someplace that is shared among carriers. Numbers not in the exception database are routed to whoever was assigned the NXX block originally. When service ends for a number, an exception database entry is removed if it exists, and the number "returns" to the NXX block assignee it originated from.
This is both fascinating and offtopic.
Suppose a Verizon customer moves to Qworst and takes his number, which is part of the Verizon pool. He cancels his Verizon service.
How does Verizon know not to reissue that number?
If the guy flat cancels his Qworst service, do they notify Verizon that the number is now available for reissue?
If it makes you feel better, go ahead and call me an asshole. Flip me the bird, rant and rave, have a ball. Just hang up and drive (or eat, or watch the movie).
You self-centered, myopic retard.
I will comply with your demands as soon as I have the ability to jam your voice when you have a conversation with a passenger in your car, or I can mute your car radio, or I can stop you from chatting with a friend over lunch or tape over your mouth during a movie so that you don't laugh or gasp, or disable a pay phone outside a 7-11 so that you don't disturb me as I walk to my car, or...
why not just RAID a bunch of smaller cards together?
You laugh, but I am tempted to do this very thing. Since CF cards conform to the IDE interface, theoretically you could put 14 of them onto one of these.
Oracle log files, which demand fast access, but not super high transfer speeds, would benefit greatly.
I agree, the Xbox looks more promising from a hacking point of view.
I want to use Xboxes to replace our aging X stations across our company (about 50 seats).
Why?
1. They are cheap 2. They have a consistent architecture, so I can image each drive and not config a thing 3. It would be cool to have xboxen under or next to everyone's desk 4. And most importantly, it will cost M$ a good chunk of change every time we buy one!
Slashdot Mirror
No, but the experts who are paid a huge pile of money note the rate of discovery of new oil is far below the consumption rate of existing reserves.
That can be explained, as you are suggesting, by reserves being more difficult to find.
Unfortunately, that phenomenon can also be explained by simple economics. For the past few decades it has been (nearly) financial suicide to engage in oil exploration. Domestic (U.S.A.) exploration has continued to dwindle. The decline can largely be explained by price uncertainty.
It costs 6 or 7 figures to bring a single well online.
Will it produce? Dunno for sure until it is online.
How much will it produce? Dunno for sure until it is online.
How long will it produce? Dunno for sure until it is online.
How much water will need to be removed from the oil? Dunno for sure until it is online.
How much will it cost to extract the oil? Dunno for sure until it is online.
Here's the killer:
What will the spot price of oil be if and when I get my well online?
Dunno.
Will I ever get my money back from the well?
Dunno.
Exploration is risky. Right now there is plenty of known oil. Until the price volatility gets removed from crude prices, few will explore. Those (not well funded) groups that do explore will get killed the next time OPEC gluts the market and shakes out the weaker competitors.
None of this has anything to do with how much oil is underground.
Ignorant people think gasoline is unlimited. I'll see the end of it, and the inevitable disaster is not going to be pretty.
No you won't. You won't see the end of petroleum any more than I will see the last tree chopped down. It simply won't happen.
Also, no one really believes that gasoline is unlimited. No one really believes that the water in the ocean is unlimited. No one really believes solar energy will last forever, since the sun will eventually go dark.
Here's the thing, no one knows how much oil we have left. All that we really know is how much we have found so far, and we know that we always keep finding and extracting more than we would have predicted.
Will oil run out? Yes. Will it run out today? Tomorrow? Next year? April 17, 2045 at 11:42 a.m. PDT? No one knows. What we do know is that the last drop (or barrel, or millions of barrels) will never be used.
Just like the last cell of whale blubber was never used.
we certainly expect that the wheels don't fall off our cars just after we drive off the new car lot.
Elitist pig! You clearly never bought a Yugo.
This guy had family with a problem
/. headlines.
I have family with a problem, too!
Actually, it's more like my ex-wife's family that has a problem, but either way, I usually don't discuss it in
Different strokes for different folks, I 'spose.
Royalty - cellphone manufacturers must pay royalty for each cellphone running either Palm, Symbian or CE
Though I don't know how much royalty they charge, because it's a purely business secret
It's not that big of a secret. The average revenue per handset for symbian is $6.70.
I don't care who you are, you are going to have a difficult time readying and deploying a full OS faster and less expensively than licensing one. It makes sense that Nokia uses Symbian instead of continuing to roll their own.
When Big Oil spends money researching renewable energy, I start imagining that their intent is to scuttle development.
These posts always make me laugh.
Try this one: Big Oil companies make money on refining and distributing oil, natural gas and any other form of widely used, energy dense fuel.
I seriously doubt they care if they are moving around oil, ethanol or heavy water, just as long as they are buried deep into the distribution chain.
but I still wonder what their server strategy is
- Vertically large (single box) applications = Solaris Sparc
- Horizontally large (clusterable) applications = Solaris x86
I actually prefer linux on the server to solaris for a lot of reasonsSolaris 10 x86 will be indistinguishable from Solaris 10 Sparc at the admin level. It will run Linux binaries. It should be the best of all worlds.
I want an end to end solution, and Sun is making it difficult.
End to end is the selling point of these. Sun hopes the whole data center, from the edge web servers to the core mainframe will be Sun gear.
When I went to price out one of Sun's new AMD systems, I was somewhat disappointed.
The guy speaking was some regional-something-or-other, and he claimed that he has yet to lose a deal based on price. I suspect that the web site is a guide and not the final price. Remember that these are part of Sun's Volume Systems Group. I doubt they care a whole lot about selling one or two of these per transaction. If you are talking 100+ servers in a transaction, they will pay close attention to you.
Guys like me lose fortunes? Where did that come from?
If you work on the inside, then either:
- You don't see the numbers and make the decisions, or
- Your gaming market is atypical.
Look here for a discussion about slots vs. table games.Need more info? Look here.
For an actual revenue breakdown of slots vs. tables and their growth rate (or decline), look here.
I don't know what axe you're grinding.
f you knew any probability theory you'd realize that any uneven distribution of the shuffle does not affect card-counting at all unless the shuffle is designed systematically to defeat card-counting
If you have done much card counting, you would know from painful experience that the whole premise of counting cards is to predict what will be coming in the shoe, based on what has been seen from the shoe. This assumes random distribution of the remaining cards.
If you are counting cards, nearing the shuffle card in the shoe, and have a very high count (mostly tens remain), but all of those tens are beyond the shuffle card (because the dealer "inspired" that), you will go down in flames quickly.
You will bet large wagers and stand where you should have hit, while the dealer will constantly get 17+ with no busting. Your bankroll will disappear.
Blackjack dealers don't have a lot of discretion in how they deal or play their hands.
They have a lot of discretion on how the shoe is broken into stacks, which stacks are shuffled with which, and how the stacks are reassembled into the new shoe.
Go to a casino and watch.
Bzzt. Wrong. From what I understand, table games make relatively little money for a casino. They exist as a loss leader. The real money is in the slot machines. That's why you have to walk by hundreds of slot machines on the way to the tables and walk back by the slots on your way out.
While there are many demographics of gamblers, a more profitable one is the "group of friends" on an outing. Several friends or family will get together for their monthly/quarterly/yearly outing to the casinos to spend some cash. Often, some of the guys will think they can beat the dealer (although they have not done so with any consistency over the last $20,000 wagered) so these guys of the group want to play table games. Which casino will the group gamble in? A casino with table games, of course.
I have been told that casinos only want three things from table games:
- Be relatively self funding
- Generate traffic for the slots (see above)
- Not spark any investigations for the casino (see below)
Table profitability is carefully tracked and the gaming commission charts every table result by shift/day of week/dealer/pit boss/etc. The results are also compared to those of other casinos. Any underperforming or overperforming tables are investigated. Underperformance might mean that there is an inside scam. Overperformance might mean that the casino is cheating players. Either way there is an investigation and a smear on the pit boss' resume.If a table isn't making money, rest assured that the one beside it is making double.
Probably, but this is the same problem all over again. They avoid this situation also.
Actually, your whole comment is complete BS! Nice work on the moderation +Informative when it is all lies...
Actually, no.
That's called washing the cards. It shuffles very well. It is also fairly rare, although any player can request to wash the shoe at any time.
Card counting does indeed work, I know a number of people who have been barred from casinos for previously making a living playing blackjack.
Yes, it does... If you:
- Know the strategy
- Keep the count well
- Don't drink
- Don't tip
- Play perfectly
- Have outstanding self discipline (this is where most people fall down).
Those restrictions generally suck the joy out of playing and it becomes just another job.Is there anything that OpenOffice does that is new?
It runs under Solaris. My users can now read and compose MS documents without having to install a Wintel box next to their X station.
As sick as it sounds, we would have probably licensed Office if MS would release a Solaris version.
Wow, my post drew a lot of fire.
I don't understand it either, but it does happen. I realize the slashdot crowd turns on their BS detector with words like "flow" and tend to assume the whole concept is therefore invalid.
The human brain is amazing at instinctual pattern recognition and a dealer who deals thousands of hours per year for several years will start to notice this pattern.
Unfortunatley, there are few (any?) statisticians with a doctorate in mathematics that wind up as full time blackjack dealers, so we see very little statistical theory on blackjack from the dealers perspective.
While I cannot prove it, I suspect that this has something to do with how clumped together are the low, neutral and high cards. Many low cards stacked together tend to favor the house, since the dealer will draw to a high card. Many high cards together also tend to favor the house since the dealer will likely have a 10 showing and a 10 in the hole, causing the player to draw until he busts. A nice mix of low and high cards tends to favor the player, since the dealer will likely have either a bust card showing or in the hole.
I seem to recall that in normal game play, low cards tend to get clumped together. A person with low cards will hit and hit again while getting low cards, make his hand a stack of low cards, which is swept as a unit by the dealer at the end of play (or when the player busts). I think that high cards have the same tendency. If all of this is true, then the discards will tend toward the high and low cards clumping together. The shuffle is supposed to undo this and randomize the cards. The last part of the shoe, past the shuffle point, remains as it was -- the low and high cards are not clumped together, since those cards are never played.
The difference in the shuffle is very subtle. Watch a dealer. The shoe is split into many stacks which are shuffled and then reassembled, sometimes this is done multiple times. While it varies from casino to casino, the different shuffle is usually as little as which of two stacks is on top and which is on bottom. In other words, whenever a dealer combines two stacks of cards, the left hand will grab a stack, the right hand will grab a stack and the two are combined, usually in the center. The casino usually mandates that one stack (right or left) goes on top and the other stack goes on bottom when reassembling cards. If a dealer knows when to do it, he can put the left stack on top when the right stack is supposed to be on top, or vice versa. The camera, gaming commission, players and pit bosses almost never notice. This is often enough to alter the card distribution for the coming shoe.
Again, you don't have to take my word for it, since I really don't give a rat's ass if you lose your shirt at the casino or not. Go watch a set of tables for several days and decide for yourself.
Disclaimer: My ex-wife is a blackjack dealer.
Card counting, and the computer simulations used to justify it, fail in two fatal ways:
1. They assume a random distribution of the cards at shuffle. This is so far from the truth it is unreal. Each casino has a different way to shuffle the shoe. It does redistribute the cards, but it is not at all random.
Since casino has its own shuffle any strategy will be casino-specific. The distribution of high and low cards gets slowly shifted at each shuffle. At the beginning of the day every deck is in a pre-set order. Each shuffle modifies that order in a predictable way. If you have a card counting strategy, it would be best to include, as part of your strategy, the number of times a shoe has been shuffled. When they break open new decks of cards, the shuffle count starts anew.
2. They assume that the dealer is neutral. This is, at best, naive. The dealer will break a table to run off obnoxious guests and to make room for players that tip well. The dealer will reward players that do tip well. Can't be done legally? Think again.
Any experienced dealer will tell you that a shoe has a "flow" to it. The shoe will either be rewarding the house or the players. When the dealer shuffles the cards, they can either shuffle in a way that generally preserves the flow or shuffle in a way that generally reverses the flow. This does not work 100% of the time, but it does work.
The dealer cannot target a particular player, but they can target the table as a whole.
Got a dickhead at your table? Watch out! The dealer will break him to make him go away. The house will take all of your money, too.
Is everybody at the table nice, cool, and tipping the dealer and waitresses well? Keep it up and watch your fortunes multiply.
Is the table down (losing money) for the shift? Better leave, because the pit boss gets in trouble when this happens, so he will lean on the dealers to raise some cash for the table.
Is it the end of the night and the dealers want to close the table, but you are persistent and wish to play? Get ready to lose your bankroll at a breathtaking rate.
When a new dealer comes to the table, he or she will generally ask how the game is going. They are trying to ascertain the flow of the current shoe. Sometimes when you lose a hand, they will tell you, "Just wait until the next shoe, it will be better." They are telling you that the shoe flow is favoring the house and they will attempt to reverse it at the shuffle. While waiting for the current shoe to run out, bet low (to keep from losing too much) and tip well (so the dealer doesn't change his mind).
If you don't believe this, just go to a set of blackjack tables and watch for a while.
but really, what in the hell are you going to do with 40 hours of MacGyver?
That's not the point. How many pickup trucks run around with a fully loaded bed? What percentage of your disk space do consistently consume?
Until my (ex)wife took my Tivo, I had one for almost three years, two and a half of those years it was a 100 hour model.
That let me record ALL stargate episodes at the highest quality. I would sit down one night (the night of my choosing) to watch the episodes. I could delete the one's I had seen and watch the rest. I never had to worry about making sure the thing only recorded the episodes I had already seen, just get them all.
The other nice thing is that we could go on a two week vacation and miss nothing.
Did we really watch 100 hours of Tivo? No, but it sure was nice having the space.
Whatever.
Rhapsody has nothing on this.
Ha! I got modded as a Troll!
Would anyone seriously consider TWM to be more attractive than anything from Apple?
ROTFLMAO!
The sarcasm-challenged are out tonight!
Whatever.
Rhapsody has nothing on this.
The more I think about it, the spam problem is quite easy to solve.
Everyone agrees spam is a problem because the cost/benefit ratio supports it.
Instead of raising costs (e-mail postage), we could accomplish the same thing by reducing the benefit to spammers.
Think about this: all mail clients from now on (are they listening in redmond?) could stop honoring image anchors. If everone had to click on a text link instead of an image, the number of click-throughs would go down, reducing spam.
If that doesn't work, make ALL anchors in e-mail un-clickable. If everybody had to type in an URL to take advantage of a spam offer, then almost no one would. Then, the spammers would lose their business case.
Of course, this solution requires unprecedented collaboration among software providers, so it has no chance of working.
How long before some hackers figure out how to hijack drones.
Seriously.
They know how to handle the acid.
They routinely handle these kinds of temperature and pressures.
What's the big deal?
Let's go to Venus!
My *guess* is that NANPA assigns NXX blocks (prefix/exchanges) to carriers, who then assign them to end nodes. Portability simply means that when someone wants to move to another carrier, the ported number gets put into an exception database someplace that is shared among carriers. Numbers not in the exception database are routed to whoever was assigned the NXX block originally. When service ends for a number, an exception database entry is removed if it exists, and the number "returns" to the NXX block assignee it originated from.
This is both fascinating and offtopic.
Suppose a Verizon customer moves to Qworst and takes his number, which is part of the Verizon pool. He cancels his Verizon service.
How does Verizon know not to reissue that number?
If the guy flat cancels his Qworst service, do they notify Verizon that the number is now available for reissue?
If it makes you feel better, go ahead and call me an asshole. Flip me the bird, rant and rave, have a ball. Just hang up and drive (or eat, or watch the movie).
You self-centered, myopic retard.
I will comply with your demands as soon as I have the ability to jam your voice when you have a conversation with a passenger in your car, or I can mute your car radio, or I can stop you from chatting with a friend over lunch or tape over your mouth during a movie so that you don't laugh or gasp, or disable a pay phone outside a 7-11 so that you don't disturb me as I walk to my car, or...
Jesus, get a grip.
why not just RAID a bunch of smaller cards together?
You laugh, but I am tempted to do this very thing. Since CF cards conform to the IDE interface, theoretically you could put 14 of them onto one of these. Oracle log files, which demand fast access, but not super high transfer speeds, would benefit greatly.
This has been coming for over 5 years. It is just the beginning.
X Stations!
I agree, the Xbox looks more promising from a hacking point of view.
I want to use Xboxes to replace our aging X stations across our company (about 50 seats).
Why?
1. They are cheap
2. They have a consistent architecture, so I can image each drive and not config a thing
3. It would be cool to have xboxen under or next to everyone's desk
4. And most importantly, it will cost M$ a good chunk of change every time we buy one!