Peter Muller, a friend of Mr. Rao's who has played against the same bot, said the approximations in the game-theory model left a weakness and limited the bot's chances to do more than break even. Game-theory models usually assume that every player uses the best possible strategy, something that rarely if ever happens with humans.
"An optimal game theoretic strategy might ensure that you don't lose, but it won't be effective at exploiting an opponent's weaknesses," Mr. Muller said. "The best players learn how to exploit predictability, but don't do it often enough so that the opponents catch on."
In other words, it's easy to bluff a computer; you just play strongly and it'll assume you have a good hand and probably fold to you. Unless it's got a good hand, in which case you're screwed. Or if it has adoptive modelling that remembers how often you bluff, then you're REALLY screwed. Generally, though, it sounds like the Alberta AI just plays tightly, using "classes" of hands to avoid getting confused by the billions of possible hands, which does limit losses, but doesn't generally win big.
Yes and no. For limit hold 'em, there is an (approximately) "correct" way to play based on pot odds, likelihood of drawing the hand you need, etc. Early rounds of no-limit tournies approximate this, with the occasional all-in raise to shake things up, but I'd have to agree with you that in later rounds against clearly competent players, no-limit is very much a social game.
Which leads to the larger issue: poker is a game of incomplete information; you don't KNOW what your opponent holds. You can make estimations based on past play and game conventions (eg, a bet from early position usually indicates AA, KK, or AK), but you don't know for sure, and this raises the possibility of deception.
The problem with that is, game theory generally models strategies to combat players who are playing (rationally) to win. Not all players play like this, or at least not apparently based on the strength of cards. I think most emulators are going to get screwed on bluffs.
But still, in lower-limit games, people are loose enough that bluffing doesn't really help (Lee Jones: "generally, you're going to have to show down with the best hand to win"), so a decent AI could at least maintain a winning margin, and so could an actual human who played tightly enough to take advantage of this. I don't know. You sure can't make zillions playing cards online, and it's definitely a while before the "deep blue" of poker.
I remember a story (urban legend maybe) about a small plane that was whort on landing and crashed into a restaurant just across the street from the airport.
"A Southwest Airlines jet carrying 137 passengers and five crew members careened off a Burbank Airport runway Sunday night, skidding to a stop on an adjacent street where it hit a car. Three people were slightly injured."
It's more likely that the decent shows will be sponsored instead of saturated with ads. Firefly, brought to you by Preparation H!
When I read this, the idea of firefly presented by a hemmeroids ointment was so ridiculous, it made me laugh. But not, I realized, much more than regular product placement.
Advertising agencies have still got it all wrong. Why doesn't one of the characters on Friends, for instance, have a thing for coke? I know enough people in the real world who are adamantly "addicted" to certain brands and foods that it wouln't even stretch the imagination to see a TV character with that trait.
But instead they do horribly klutzy things like "the doritos picnic" on the original survivor, or the painfully akward Coke placement on American Idol. It's actually disarmingly honest; "hey look, we're a show you like and we're pushing a product, don't you want to BUY it??"
No. No we don't. We're over advertising as a social contract, where we tolerate it with the abiding satisfaction of receiving the accompanying content as a "reward." We no longer feel any obligation to this system. Advertising dollars spent on that very mechanism are terribly wasted, even if it works sometimes. Better to assign the desired buy-craziness to a TV character we can empathize with and desire to emulate. At least this will catch us off guard for a couple of years.
OK, I should've qualified: the perception of RSI as a programmer's illness is an excuse for affluent whites to complain about jobs they're not "satisfied" with.
There are many people who are seriously afflicted with RSI, most of whom fall outside of said demographic, and get no respect or treatment for it.
Sorry for any confusion, but all I really meant to imply is that RSI being trumped up and getting lots of attention as a disease afflicting programmers, is perhaps a result of which demographic those people happen to come from: white middle class.
Whereas other, non-white groups affected way more, statistically, don't receive recognition as RSI sufferers, and also don't receive adequate treatment or ergonomic concessions.
Hispanic meat packers aren't the children of affluent Mexican-American business owning families, they're (frequently) recent immigrants of questionable legality who have no official political voice. And because of this they're constantly intimidated at work, especially to remain silent about on-the-job injuries.
It's a correlation thing; of course there's no race check before a IS technician gets treated for RSI, but they're largely white and middle class. You know this, pretending anything else is disingenuous.
With all due respect to my computer-using brethren, I can entirely understand this and have long suspected the same.
Carpal-Tunnel and RSI were originally diagnosed in women who worked at "sweatshop" textile factories in the early part of the industrial revolution. Sewing is WAY harder on your hands than typing, and so it probably ran rampant in that environment. But there was almost no treatment; women were by and large told to "suck it up" and stop complaining, because it was "just" pain afterall, it's not like they broke anything.
It wasn't until millions of white men started working with keyboards and a VERY SMALL percentage of them got RSI, that it became worthy of national attention. And so now, if you get diagnosed with RSI, you can get disability pay, early retirement, or at least many ergonomic adjustments to facilitate your recovery... IF you're white.
One of the groups who suffer RSI at a much higher rate than computer users: meat packers. Today's meat packing plants run 2-3 times faster, sometimes more, than their historical counterparts, and some cutters have to slice through 60-80 pounds of meat over 100 times an hour. I promise, this will burn out your wrists WAY faster than writing an ActiveX module. But most meat plant workers are Hispanic, and/or non-English speakers. They get $9 an hour, minimal benefits, and, like women in textile factories of old, are usually told to shut up and quit if they don't like it when their wrists are in searing pain.
So, by and large CT/RSI is an affluent white excuse to complain about jobs we aren't "satisfied" with. The people who are truly suffering from these conditions are largely ignored and always have been.
Hey, I'm not quite sure what your perspective is, but I think it was pretty clear from the context, especially given that I referenced including material from the EFF, that I'm also against UCITA, and in favor of laws against it. Just for the record.
Hey, if you live in Mass, write your state representative already! Barely anyone does, so they'll probably even listen to you! I'm going to dump some information I found on the Mass.gov site, and you can use it to find your reps and write them.
If you don't know who to write to, visit the Who are my elected officials? page and type in your addres. And be sure to pick the STATE reps, as they're listed alongside your US reps in a way that's less-than-clear (to me anyway).
I haven't cooked up a boilerplate letter or anything... I figure I'll just synthesize something from this article and the EFF page regarding UCITA. If anyone is more familiar than me with the Mass state legislature, and can let me know if House 1622 is actually what we want, please get in touch.
OK, the parent post sounds kind of hysteric, but it could be (sort of) true.
It's difficult to overstate the importance of having a fully auditable voting process. That's the main advantage of paper ballots, be they punch cards, "check the box," whatever: you can recount them. Someone else can recount them. We can disagree on the interpretations of those recounts, but we can at least observe the "primary source" and make a call one way or another.
Now, electronic voting would certainly have advantages. If people could walk through a "voting app" where they could see all of the choices for each office, and do a confirmation step before "submitting" their vote, that would be awesome, and way more accurate than what we do now. However, think of the system which will be used to achieve this: if it's good, the designing company will want to sell it everywhere. So the application will become one hell of a valuable peice of "intellectual property." Do you think we'll be allowed to see the code for it? No way! So no error checking that way; we just have to trust that every vote counted was processed correctly. That's a lot of trust. I don't suspect that any voting-machine-manufacurer would insert deliberate bias, but the lack of ability to examine the process for correctness is just unacceptable. It's too important to just trust some private company, whose interest isn't necessarily coincident with accuracy.
An open-source voting app would be somewhat better; any independent person could audit the code for correctness, but to verify its performance on an actual dataset would require re-establishing the same exact platform later, and of course maintaining a digital copy of the inputs.
In either of these scenarios, it seems outright necessary that there be a physical record of votes cast using the system that independent, non-computer-expert people could examine. Ideally, the machine would print a small "receipt" for each vote cast which could be collected and, if necessary, recounted and compared against the digital tally.
Alright, this is just kind of another wrinkle in the story, not really an "answer" to your question. I figure you'll want references, so here are the 2 pages I used as a basis for this post:
US Treasury Currency FAQ: http://www.ustreas.gov/education/faq/currenc y/prod uction.html
Bureau of Engraving and Printing FAQ: http://www.moneyfactory.com/section.cfm/19 Basically, 2 important points from there: 1) No, there will not be a "recall" like the EU countries did when switching to the euro, and 2) "about 95%" of money printed by the US replaces worn-out bills (which are taken out of circulation and destroyed).
The point about people stockpiling bills in foreign countries is a good one; some huge portion (I want to say 2/3?) of US bills, particularly hundreds, are circulating outside of the US. Frankly, we LOVE this phenomenon, because for each amount that's printed, the government takes out an interest-bearing security which is cashed in as the note is destroyed. Of course, it's not "the same" security that's cashed in when a bill is destroyed, but a corresponding number are redeemed as bills are taken out of circulation (which probably has a lot more to do with removing currency from circulation than "the bills wore out"). So basically, the widespread use of US currency outside the US amounts to a free loan to us by everyone else in the world.
So of course we're interested in maintaining this state of affairs. But this isn't the cause for *not* collecting old bills. It is the cause for *designing new ones*. If our bills were easy to forge, do you think they would remain the preferred currency of the world, and yes, the underworld as well? No! Drug dealers don't want to have their money devalued any more than anyone else. And it's partly (perhapts primarily) their demand that keeps the amount of US currency so high. Drug dealers probably prefer the new bills when they can be had -- they don't forge money from whole cloth, they launder real money that people have given them illegally.
So basically, the old money does come out of ciculation, just not all at once. I for one have noticed it getting rarer; this past weekend at the casino was the first time I'd seen old 20's and 100's in a long time (in the sheer volume of currency I saw, it was inevitable to spot a few). The money with increased security features is in demand because it's in almost everyone's best interest to have it that way, from US citizens to foreign drug dealers.
This is true, he even admitted to selling anti-virus software just for comfort, and the software prolly dosen't even do anything except show a splash screen.
I really doubt that's the case. If you read that answer more closely, he says (to paraphrase; the article isn't visible from this posting window) "some of our users see value in not passing on virii that infect their MS colleagues." I gather from this that it flags / cleans messages that have VB attacks attached, even though they don't directly affect your system.
It's a good point; it's nice to not pass on viruses even if they don't harm YOU. Plus now that the architecture is there, you can also install checks for linux viruses as time goes on and they crop up (which they will, and mightily, since Lindows runs as root).
First of all, there will definitely, incontrovertibly, be a contraction in the industry (already well underway) and reduction in salaries. The NYT coverage of this same interview didn't focus on the software industry dying, but more on the power shifting towards customers -- no longer can you wave around technology words and expect people to snap up your product. You have to deliver rock-solid software that works, at an affordable price (of course, the definition of "affordable" is flexible; lots of people buy SAP).
It was kind of inevitable, really. Getting a CS degree was the thing to do to ensure yourself a job after college, at least when I was there, and I think for a time after I left. It seems like there's a glut of people who are "in IT." Maybe they're not all GOOD, but they are plentiful. And add to that, outsourcing to India. Lots of people complain about how remote Indian coders aren't up to snuff, but that won't last; as the firms over there mature and improve their training, they'll only get better.
As for the argument "you'll always need software," well that's true. But you also always need electricity and telephones, and no one really considers those to be premium fields to go into. That said, you can make a lot of money over the course of your life as a bonded electrician. And I think this is the way that IT is headed: it's going to become a commodified, buyer's market.
Which is why I also think it would be a good idea to get some sort of unionization or guild system up and running now, before there's a total glut and everyone's layed off and miserable. The days of high-flying super coders demanding 100K a year plus options, are over. We've come down to earth, some a lot harder than others, and I think we need to deal with the reality of a computer industry that's a lot less glamorous (come on, we all started out as nerds anyway) and less in-demand than we got used to.
My requirements aren't too bad: I need PHP, MySQL, the ability to configure my server somewhat (htpasswd, htaccess), raw log files, SSH, FTP, crontab, decent bandwidth (~10 GB), POP accounts, around 300 MB disk space (I host the bulk of my images/videos elsewhere)... and I wouldn't mind paying what I pay for DSL every month (~$50).
Sounds like you're a relatively sophisticated user, so I'll describe what some friends and I did, and you see if it sounds reasonable.
It started off with 5 guys discussing similar concerns to the ones you're having, eg reliable webhosting, databases, a place to put up some webapps... and we kept coming back to "I wish I had my own server so I could" do whatever.
So... we bought our own server and CoLo'd it. Putting together a reasonable (ie, not Xeon with RAID) system on pricewatch put us out about $500, so it's not something I would do alone, but if you have a few similarly competent friends and you can handle the admin tasks, it's certainly feasible. And having 5+ people should keep the costs per person at even *less* than the $50 you said you were willing to spend.
Since setting the server up, we've gotten about 3 new "equity" members who chipped in for hardware and stuff, and we've distributed 20 or so friends and family accounts, most of whom just use email or 5-10M of web hosting. We're almost as stable as the big guys in terms of uptime, but way more responsive to requests for webmail and other features *and* we keep spamassassin well-tuned.
The biggest pain with this approach is going to be administration. On our server, it's basically 2 people who do the bulk of the work, with the other experts chipping in from time to time in their various domains of specialty. As long as you and your friends can come up with a reasonable admin structure, where no one feels left out or needs to be a power hog, then it can work really well. Something to consider, anyway.
But when I finally got fed up with my current host (phpwebhosting.com, which many people really like, but I found to be unusably unresponsive and lacking)
Huh. I was actually searching the page for that name so I could second any compliments it may have gotten...
So instead, I'll present a counterpoint. I've always found phpwebhosting to have reasonable prices and excellent policies on disk and bandwidth usage (basically, keep it sane and there will be no problems. This is subject, hypothetically, to bias about what's "problematic," but I've found their case-by-case method to be effective so far).
I think they have migrated to a new server recently; I actually signed up twice, and my old account got very dodgy, with tons of down time, which I later discovered was due to the/home volume filling up all the time. My newer account (resolved to a different IP address) never had these problems.
So, if your complaint about "responsiveness" is re: server response times, that could be the issue. If you mean their people are slow to respond to change requests, that may be; I've had very few, though they were dealt with quickly. They spell out their no-phone policy quite reasonably, and at a steady price of $10 a month, I think I get what I pay for.
So, I'm not a shill, but I think the service is very reasonable; I hope people at least put it on their list of things to check out.
There is actually a section where he describes the deflating of value of tournament chips, though you're correct that throughout he uses a dollar sign on the values. I suspect, though, that it's because he's actually *thinking* this way, and psyching himself out in the process (even after reading it, I'm still not sure how he got to the final table -- some really questionable draws in there!)
Here's a tip which I freely admit I have stolen from Lee Jones' Winning Low Limit Hold 'Em: this is known as (you probably already know) a "loose-aggressive" situation, where players play too freely and aren't afraid to bet all the way to the river on crazy draws like you describe. Like any other predictable situation in Poker, it can actually work to your advantage if you play it right. And in this case, "play it right" usually means "really tight," eg, don't bet anything pre-flop besides big pairs and big suited connectors. It requires a ton of patience (and even then you'll get some bad beats, with almost every hand being river'd), but you can make out like mad if you stick with it.
Anyway, I don't mean to be condescending; I don't know what level you're at, but that's how I'd handle some loose noobies. Definitely check out that Jones book if you haven't; it'll take your game to the next level, and it's easier to follow than any of the Sklansky books.
Right the hell ON. Of course, this is another in the long line of nebulous, acontextual "Ask Slashdot" questions, so maybe this guy *does* mean to bring in a team of 10 programmers to his basement next week.
But under any reasonable definition of "starting one's own software company at one's house," there are way more important things to think about. First and foremost, I would say, is getting your ducks in a row as far as taxes are concerned. While it's about a zillion to one against the local zoning inspector coming over, the odds are much higher that the IRS will audit you if you get some 1099's (you know, income) and don't report properly.
That said, it's probably as easy as getting a DBA from the town ($10-$50, probably) or, to get liability protection, filing for LLC or even a C-Corp at the state level (could cost hundreds of dollars). Then, before you worry about *zoning*, you still have to establish what kind of software you're going to write, who the hell is going to buy it in this toilet-bowl economy, etc etc etc. Take that "zoning" worry and put it way at the end of your list.
Heh. Good point. But the real math behind this is just about as silly: to double in 7 years, the industry would need to grow CONTINUOUSLY at about 11% annually. That's huge! According to the latest NY Times magazine, there has been more like a 17-25% staff reduction recently. That's more like LOSING 11% annually! I can't see any trends to indicated this would turn around so extremely any time soon enough to double tech jobs within 15 years, let alone 7.
... An over-clock deterrent mechanism of a chipset which comprises an over-clock detection circuit for detecting over-clocking of a system... and an over-clock prevention (thwarting) circuit.
Okay, to implement this, they're including a reference clock on the chip, which means that processors of different (marketed) speeds will have to be made with a different process (which has maybe been true for a long time, but I was lead to believe that, eg in the pIII days, the wafers that failed 1Ghz just got sold as 833MHz, etc).
So instead of doing all these calculations to decide if you're "speeding," and then doing even *more* calculations to penalize you, why don't they just expose this reference clock speed in a special interrupt call? And maybe even the relation to the operating speed (eg, "you are overclocked by 10%")? Then, they could release an app that would tell you how fast your computer was SUPPOSED to be, and how fast it IS.
Then, OC'ers could have their cake, and no one else could be taken advantage of by unscrupulous OEMs who overclock to bump up their margins. I concede the point that "most average people will never check anyway," but just having the information *available* should protect Intel from liability, which seems to be the essential idea. Plus, the threat of having the practice exposed at any time should stop at least some of the overclock-resellers.
Slashdot Mirror
When someone starts calling people "fascists" - intimating that they are dictators -- they are trashing the fundamental principle of this country.
Pointing out that the emporer has no clothes does not cause him to become naked.
You RTFA:
Peter Muller, a friend of Mr. Rao's who has played against the same bot, said the approximations in the game-theory model left a weakness and limited the bot's chances to do more than break even. Game-theory models usually assume that every player uses the best possible strategy, something that rarely if ever happens with humans.
"An optimal game theoretic strategy might ensure that you don't lose, but it won't be effective at exploiting an opponent's weaknesses," Mr. Muller said. "The best players learn how to exploit predictability, but don't do it often enough so that the opponents catch on."
In other words, it's easy to bluff a computer; you just play strongly and it'll assume you have a good hand and probably fold to you. Unless it's got a good hand, in which case you're screwed. Or if it has adoptive modelling that remembers how often you bluff, then you're REALLY screwed. Generally, though, it sounds like the Alberta AI just plays tightly, using "classes" of hands to avoid getting confused by the billions of possible hands, which does limit losses, but doesn't generally win big.
Yes and no. For limit hold 'em, there is an (approximately) "correct" way to play based on pot odds, likelihood of drawing the hand you need, etc. Early rounds of no-limit tournies approximate this, with the occasional all-in raise to shake things up, but I'd have to agree with you that in later rounds against clearly competent players, no-limit is very much a social game.
Which leads to the larger issue: poker is a game of incomplete information; you don't KNOW what your opponent holds. You can make estimations based on past play and game conventions (eg, a bet from early position usually indicates AA, KK, or AK), but you don't know for sure, and this raises the possibility of deception.
The problem with that is, game theory generally models strategies to combat players who are playing (rationally) to win. Not all players play like this, or at least not apparently based on the strength of cards. I think most emulators are going to get screwed on bluffs.
But still, in lower-limit games, people are loose enough that bluffing doesn't really help (Lee Jones: "generally, you're going to have to show down with the best hand to win"), so a decent AI could at least maintain a winning margin, and so could an actual human who played tightly enough to take advantage of this. I don't know. You sure can't make zillions playing cards online, and it's definitely a while before the "deep blue" of poker.
I remember a story (urban legend maybe) about a small plane that was whort on landing and crashed into a restaurant just across the street from the airport.
Maybe it was this?
"Jet Skids Off Runway in L.A., Stops Yards from Gas Station:
"A Southwest Airlines jet carrying 137 passengers and five crew members careened off a Burbank Airport runway Sunday night, skidding to a stop on an adjacent street where it hit a car. Three people were slightly injured."
It's more likely that the decent shows will be sponsored instead of saturated with ads. Firefly, brought to you by Preparation H!
When I read this, the idea of firefly presented by a hemmeroids ointment was so ridiculous, it made me laugh. But not, I realized, much more than regular product placement.
Advertising agencies have still got it all wrong. Why doesn't one of the characters on Friends, for instance, have a thing for coke? I know enough people in the real world who are adamantly "addicted" to certain brands and foods that it wouln't even stretch the imagination to see a TV character with that trait.
But instead they do horribly klutzy things like "the doritos picnic" on the original survivor, or the painfully akward Coke placement on American Idol. It's actually disarmingly honest; "hey look, we're a show you like and we're pushing a product, don't you want to BUY it??"
No. No we don't. We're over advertising as a social contract, where we tolerate it with the abiding satisfaction of receiving the accompanying content as a "reward." We no longer feel any obligation to this system. Advertising dollars spent on that very mechanism are terribly wasted, even if it works sometimes. Better to assign the desired buy-craziness to a TV character we can empathize with and desire to emulate. At least this will catch us off guard for a couple of years.
OK, I should've qualified: the perception of RSI as a programmer's illness is an excuse for affluent whites to complain about jobs they're not "satisfied" with.
There are many people who are seriously afflicted with RSI, most of whom fall outside of said demographic, and get no respect or treatment for it.
Sorry for any confusion, but all I really meant to imply is that RSI being trumped up and getting lots of attention as a disease afflicting programmers, is perhaps a result of which demographic those people happen to come from: white middle class.
Whereas other, non-white groups affected way more, statistically, don't receive recognition as RSI sufferers, and also don't receive adequate treatment or ergonomic concessions.
Hispanic meat packers aren't the children of affluent Mexican-American business owning families, they're (frequently) recent immigrants of questionable legality who have no official political voice. And because of this they're constantly intimidated at work, especially to remain silent about on-the-job injuries.
It's a correlation thing; of course there's no race check before a IS technician gets treated for RSI, but they're largely white and middle class. You know this, pretending anything else is disingenuous.
With all due respect to my computer-using brethren, I can entirely understand this and have long suspected the same.
Carpal-Tunnel and RSI were originally diagnosed in women who worked at "sweatshop" textile factories in the early part of the industrial revolution. Sewing is WAY harder on your hands than typing, and so it probably ran rampant in that environment. But there was almost no treatment; women were by and large told to "suck it up" and stop complaining, because it was "just" pain afterall, it's not like they broke anything.
It wasn't until millions of white men started working with keyboards and a VERY SMALL percentage of them got RSI, that it became worthy of national attention. And so now, if you get diagnosed with RSI, you can get disability pay, early retirement, or at least many ergonomic adjustments to facilitate your recovery... IF you're white.
One of the groups who suffer RSI at a much higher rate than computer users: meat packers. Today's meat packing plants run 2-3 times faster, sometimes more, than their historical counterparts, and some cutters have to slice through 60-80 pounds of meat over 100 times an hour. I promise, this will burn out your wrists WAY faster than writing an ActiveX module. But most meat plant workers are Hispanic, and/or non-English speakers. They get $9 an hour, minimal benefits, and, like women in textile factories of old, are usually told to shut up and quit if they don't like it when their wrists are in searing pain.
So, by and large CT/RSI is an affluent white excuse to complain about jobs we aren't "satisfied" with. The people who are truly suffering from these conditions are largely ignored and always have been.
Hey, I'm not quite sure what your perspective is, but I think it was pretty clear from the context, especially given that I referenced including material from the EFF, that I'm also against UCITA, and in favor of laws against it. Just for the record.
Hey, if you live in Mass, write your state representative already! Barely anyone does, so they'll probably even listen to you! I'm going to dump some information I found on the Mass.gov site, and you can use it to find your reps and write them.
First of all, I believe the matter under discussion is House 1622, Petition of Ronald Mariano relative to the interpretation of computer information agreement contracts. Though as you can see from the JCCL homepage, there's lots to choose from and I'm not shocked they didn't act at the hearing on June 2.
If you don't know who to write to, visit the Who are my elected officials? page and type in your addres. And be sure to pick the STATE reps, as they're listed alongside your US reps in a way that's less-than-clear (to me anyway).
I haven't cooked up a boilerplate letter or anything... I figure I'll just synthesize something from this article and the EFF page regarding UCITA. If anyone is more familiar than me with the Mass state legislature, and can let me know if House 1622 is actually what we want, please get in touch.
No way man. This just means that 1/12 of p2p transfer (5% of total bandwidth) is people trading Windows Update files. ... Right?
OK, the parent post sounds kind of hysteric, but it could be (sort of) true.
It's difficult to overstate the importance of having a fully auditable voting process. That's the main advantage of paper ballots, be they punch cards, "check the box," whatever: you can recount them. Someone else can recount them. We can disagree on the interpretations of those recounts, but we can at least observe the "primary source" and make a call one way or another.
Now, electronic voting would certainly have advantages. If people could walk through a "voting app" where they could see all of the choices for each office, and do a confirmation step before "submitting" their vote, that would be awesome, and way more accurate than what we do now. However, think of the system which will be used to achieve this: if it's good, the designing company will want to sell it everywhere. So the application will become one hell of a valuable peice of "intellectual property." Do you think we'll be allowed to see the code for it? No way! So no error checking that way; we just have to trust that every vote counted was processed correctly. That's a lot of trust. I don't suspect that any voting-machine-manufacurer would insert deliberate bias, but the lack of ability to examine the process for correctness is just unacceptable. It's too important to just trust some private company, whose interest isn't necessarily coincident with accuracy.
An open-source voting app would be somewhat better; any independent person could audit the code for correctness, but to verify its performance on an actual dataset would require re-establishing the same exact platform later, and of course maintaining a digital copy of the inputs.
In either of these scenarios, it seems outright necessary that there be a physical record of votes cast using the system that independent, non-computer-expert people could examine. Ideally, the machine would print a small "receipt" for each vote cast which could be collected and, if necessary, recounted and compared against the digital tally.
Alright, this is just kind of another wrinkle in the story, not really an "answer" to your question. I figure you'll want references, so here are the 2 pages I used as a basis for this post:
c y/prod uction.html
US Treasury Currency FAQ:
http://www.ustreas.gov/education/faq/curren
Bureau of Engraving and Printing FAQ:
http://www.moneyfactory.com/section.cfm/19
Basically, 2 important points from there:
1) No, there will not be a "recall" like the EU countries did when switching to the euro, and
2) "about 95%" of money printed by the US replaces worn-out bills (which are taken out of circulation and destroyed).
The point about people stockpiling bills in foreign countries is a good one; some huge portion (I want to say 2/3?) of US bills, particularly hundreds, are circulating outside of the US. Frankly, we LOVE this phenomenon, because for each amount that's printed, the government takes out an interest-bearing security which is cashed in as the note is destroyed. Of course, it's not "the same" security that's cashed in when a bill is destroyed, but a corresponding number are redeemed as bills are taken out of circulation (which probably has a lot more to do with removing currency from circulation than "the bills wore out"). So basically, the widespread use of US currency outside the US amounts to a free loan to us by everyone else in the world.
So of course we're interested in maintaining this state of affairs. But this isn't the cause for *not* collecting old bills. It is the cause for *designing new ones*. If our bills were easy to forge, do you think they would remain the preferred currency of the world, and yes, the underworld as well? No! Drug dealers don't want to have their money devalued any more than anyone else. And it's partly (perhapts primarily) their demand that keeps the amount of US currency so high. Drug dealers probably prefer the new bills when they can be had -- they don't forge money from whole cloth, they launder real money that people have given them illegally.
So basically, the old money does come out of ciculation, just not all at once. I for one have noticed it getting rarer; this past weekend at the casino was the first time I'd seen old 20's and 100's in a long time (in the sheer volume of currency I saw, it was inevitable to spot a few). The money with increased security features is in demand because it's in almost everyone's best interest to have it that way, from US citizens to foreign drug dealers.
[ Printer-friendly Version of this Article ] ... Yes, that's from the CNN article.
This is true, he even admitted to selling anti-virus software just for comfort, and the software prolly dosen't even do anything except show a splash screen.
I really doubt that's the case. If you read that answer more closely, he says (to paraphrase; the article isn't visible from this posting window) "some of our users see value in not passing on virii that infect their MS colleagues." I gather from this that it flags / cleans messages that have VB attacks attached, even though they don't directly affect your system.
It's a good point; it's nice to not pass on viruses even if they don't harm YOU. Plus now that the architecture is there, you can also install checks for linux viruses as time goes on and they crop up (which they will, and mightily, since Lindows runs as root).
... and of course not.
First of all, there will definitely, incontrovertibly, be a contraction in the industry (already well underway) and reduction in salaries. The NYT coverage of this same interview didn't focus on the software industry dying, but more on the power shifting towards customers -- no longer can you wave around technology words and expect people to snap up your product. You have to deliver rock-solid software that works, at an affordable price (of course, the definition of "affordable" is flexible; lots of people buy SAP).
It was kind of inevitable, really. Getting a CS degree was the thing to do to ensure yourself a job after college, at least when I was there, and I think for a time after I left. It seems like there's a glut of people who are "in IT." Maybe they're not all GOOD, but they are plentiful. And add to that, outsourcing to India. Lots of people complain about how remote Indian coders aren't up to snuff, but that won't last; as the firms over there mature and improve their training, they'll only get better.
As for the argument "you'll always need software," well that's true. But you also always need electricity and telephones, and no one really considers those to be premium fields to go into. That said, you can make a lot of money over the course of your life as a bonded electrician. And I think this is the way that IT is headed: it's going to become a commodified, buyer's market.
Which is why I also think it would be a good idea to get some sort of unionization or guild system up and running now, before there's a total glut and everyone's layed off and miserable. The days of high-flying super coders demanding 100K a year plus options, are over. We've come down to earth, some a lot harder than others, and I think we need to deal with the reality of a computer industry that's a lot less glamorous (come on, we all started out as nerds anyway) and less in-demand than we got used to.
My requirements aren't too bad: I need PHP, MySQL, the ability to configure my server somewhat (htpasswd, htaccess), raw log files, SSH, FTP, crontab, decent bandwidth (~10 GB), POP accounts, around 300 MB disk space (I host the bulk of my images/videos elsewhere)... and I wouldn't mind paying what I pay for DSL every month (~$50).
Sounds like you're a relatively sophisticated user, so I'll describe what some friends and I did, and you see if it sounds reasonable.
It started off with 5 guys discussing similar concerns to the ones you're having, eg reliable webhosting, databases, a place to put up some webapps... and we kept coming back to "I wish I had my own server so I could" do whatever.
So... we bought our own server and CoLo'd it. Putting together a reasonable (ie, not Xeon with RAID) system on pricewatch put us out about $500, so it's not something I would do alone, but if you have a few similarly competent friends and you can handle the admin tasks, it's certainly feasible. And having 5+ people should keep the costs per person at even *less* than the $50 you said you were willing to spend.
Since setting the server up, we've gotten about 3 new "equity" members who chipped in for hardware and stuff, and we've distributed 20 or so friends and family accounts, most of whom just use email or 5-10M of web hosting. We're almost as stable as the big guys in terms of uptime, but way more responsive to requests for webmail and other features *and* we keep spamassassin well-tuned.
The biggest pain with this approach is going to be administration. On our server, it's basically 2 people who do the bulk of the work, with the other experts chipping in from time to time in their various domains of specialty. As long as you and your friends can come up with a reasonable admin structure, where no one feels left out or needs to be a power hog, then it can work really well. Something to consider, anyway.
But when I finally got fed up with my current host (phpwebhosting.com, which many people really like, but I found to be unusably unresponsive and lacking)
/home volume filling up all the time. My newer account (resolved to a different IP address) never had these problems.
Huh. I was actually searching the page for that name so I could second any compliments it may have gotten...
So instead, I'll present a counterpoint. I've always found phpwebhosting to have reasonable prices and excellent policies on disk and bandwidth usage (basically, keep it sane and there will be no problems. This is subject, hypothetically, to bias about what's "problematic," but I've found their case-by-case method to be effective so far).
I think they have migrated to a new server recently; I actually signed up twice, and my old account got very dodgy, with tons of down time, which I later discovered was due to the
So, if your complaint about "responsiveness" is re: server response times, that could be the issue. If you mean their people are slow to respond to change requests, that may be; I've had very few, though they were dealt with quickly. They spell out their no-phone policy quite reasonably, and at a steady price of $10 a month, I think I get what I pay for.
So, I'm not a shill, but I think the service is very reasonable; I hope people at least put it on their list of things to check out.
There is actually a section where he describes the deflating of value of tournament chips, though you're correct that throughout he uses a dollar sign on the values. I suspect, though, that it's because he's actually *thinking* this way, and psyching himself out in the process (even after reading it, I'm still not sure how he got to the final table -- some really questionable draws in there!)
Here's a tip which I freely admit I have stolen from Lee Jones' Winning Low Limit Hold 'Em: this is known as (you probably already know) a "loose-aggressive" situation, where players play too freely and aren't afraid to bet all the way to the river on crazy draws like you describe. Like any other predictable situation in Poker, it can actually work to your advantage if you play it right. And in this case, "play it right" usually means "really tight," eg, don't bet anything pre-flop besides big pairs and big suited connectors. It requires a ton of patience (and even then you'll get some bad beats, with almost every hand being river'd), but you can make out like mad if you stick with it.
Anyway, I don't mean to be condescending; I don't know what level you're at, but that's how I'd handle some loose noobies. Definitely check out that Jones book if you haven't; it'll take your game to the next level, and it's easier to follow than any of the Sklansky books.
Right the hell ON. Of course, this is another in the long line of nebulous, acontextual "Ask Slashdot" questions, so maybe this guy *does* mean to bring in a team of 10 programmers to his basement next week.
But under any reasonable definition of "starting one's own software company at one's house," there are way more important things to think about. First and foremost, I would say, is getting your ducks in a row as far as taxes are concerned. While it's about a zillion to one against the local zoning inspector coming over, the odds are much higher that the IRS will audit you if you get some 1099's (you know, income) and don't report properly.
That said, it's probably as easy as getting a DBA from the town ($10-$50, probably) or, to get liability protection, filing for LLC or even a C-Corp at the state level (could cost hundreds of dollars). Then, before you worry about *zoning*, you still have to establish what kind of software you're going to write, who the hell is going to buy it in this toilet-bowl economy, etc etc etc. Take that "zoning" worry and put it way at the end of your list.
Heh. Good point. But the real math behind this is just about as silly: to double in 7 years, the industry would need to grow CONTINUOUSLY at about 11% annually. That's huge! According to the latest NY Times magazine, there has been more like a 17-25% staff reduction recently. That's more like LOSING 11% annually! I can't see any trends to indicated this would turn around so extremely any time soon enough to double tech jobs within 15 years, let alone 7.
... An over-clock deterrent mechanism of a chipset which comprises an over-clock detection circuit for detecting over-clocking of a system ... and an over-clock prevention (thwarting) circuit.
Okay, to implement this, they're including a reference clock on the chip, which means that processors of different (marketed) speeds will have to be made with a different process (which has maybe been true for a long time, but I was lead to believe that, eg in the pIII days, the wafers that failed 1Ghz just got sold as 833MHz, etc).
So instead of doing all these calculations to decide if you're "speeding," and then doing even *more* calculations to penalize you, why don't they just expose this reference clock speed in a special interrupt call? And maybe even the relation to the operating speed (eg, "you are overclocked by 10%")? Then, they could release an app that would tell you how fast your computer was SUPPOSED to be, and how fast it IS.
Then, OC'ers could have their cake, and no one else could be taken advantage of by unscrupulous OEMs who overclock to bump up their margins. I concede the point that "most average people will never check anyway," but just having the information *available* should protect Intel from liability, which seems to be the essential idea. Plus, the threat of having the practice exposed at any time should stop at least some of the overclock-resellers.