It's a fair assumption they would've been considerably more happy if they had morphine. Or the right to get up out of their bed and step outside for a breath of fresh air and talked to their loved ones. Or, for the ones that weren't terminal, a cure instead of a grave. It's easier to assume these people were not happy, much as it's easy to assume the victim of a hit and run didn't have a good day.
She made her fame via a hospice in Calcutta. Please show me evidence that she ever personally made the decision to spend any of her millions on buying those poor people painkillers. If she didn't (and I haven't found any evidence that she ever did), your claim is bullshit. She was not a god to the poor. The number one fucking job of a hospice is to provide painkillers, not tell the sufferers that suffering will get them closer to Christ.
Here's another bit of *objective* evidence you could provide to back up your claim: an opinion poll of the poor people of Calcutta. Not an easily staged interview, an objective poll. And of Calcutta specifically, not any other projects she didn't personally work on. None exists to my knowledge, probably because they would all say that the Protestants did a much, much, much better job of helping them out.
Dear lord, listen to yourself. I hate to be condescending, but how old are you? Figureheads don't get 'vetted' unless there's a political reason to. No one stood to win any battles by discrediting Thersa so for a very long time no one tried. You singled out the Nobel Peace Prize... why on earth do you think that is a good indicator of anything? This is the same prize they gave Obama for absolutely nothing. (Ok ok, basically just for not being Bush.) The same prize they gave to Kissinger after he arranged the illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos villages, and set up a failed cease fire in Vienam. The same prize they gave to people who advocated and/or coordinated terrorist attacks against civillians, such as Arafat and Mandela. The latter is another great example of someone who has a squeaky clean image in the mainstream media despite clear evidence to the contrary for anyone who cares to look.
Protip: reality isn't a democracy, and most people haven't the slightest idea what's going on and what they're meant to be doing. Take a quick look around, tell me you can't spot at least one naked emperor with at least a hundred thousand people cooing over his beautiful clothes. That isn't tin foil. That's a fact. That's society. That's reality. This isn't just me saying this, this is backed up by decades of psychological/sociological studies. Sadly, we are pack creatures. We can choose not to be, but it does take a little bit of effort. Start small, use Wikipedia and start clicking, paying close attention to those little citation numbers as you go.
I'll get you started: Fan death. Look up "fan death" on wikipedia and explain to me how those MILLIONS of Koreans, including tons of doctors, ministers of health, etc., could all be wrong.
"But I'm not arguing she's a model human being... Those twenty-odd rewards, public opinion polls, and numerous committees and governments are arguing she's a model human being are."
Those are not 'arguments'. Those are statements, and the apparent unanimity you highlight emphasizes just how much they are NOT arguments at all, but blind, popular adoration on par with Bieber fever.
If you wish I could drag out a very long laundry list of once-popular things (people, social customs, 'scientific' ideas, whatever) that are in hindsight clearly very stupid or undesirable, but I hope you get my point.
Theresa was famous specifically for supposedly alleviating the suffering of the dying. All evidence shows that she did an incredibly bad job at this, with no painkillers (even after she had millions in donations), dehumanizing policies (enforced bed rest, discouraged visitors), and no attempt to separate the curable from the dying. Running a hospice without painkillers and claiming you're doing good is like... I don't know, running a barber shop and claiming you're doing fine because you're successfully cutting hair along with the steady rain of earlobes. She took money that could have gone to actual caring hospices/charities instead. If you have any evidence she ran a rather good hospice we're all ears. Right now, your argument is the equivalent of pointing at the view counter on a youtube video.
I forgot to mention, not only did she not return stolen money but she wrote a letter to the judge asking him to be lenient on the thief who took it. I can't think of a more vile way to handle such a situation, especially when you are a promenent member of such a fabulously wealthy institution.
And was any of that money spent on painkillers for the people dying in agony (apparently not all of whom came in with fatal injuries) in her hospice? No. Didn't you know that suffering brings you closer to Jesus? Her words, not Hitchens'. If you have evidence that she did eventually use any of her (hundreds of?) millions of dollars to buy even aspirin for the poor bastards dying in Calcutta, I would honestly like to hear about it.
As I alluded, the nasty fact most libertarians don't want to face is that a lot of these expenditures, regardless of whether or not they're constitutional, have large hidden costs if they are eliminated. If many federal programs are eliminated at once the hidden costs will synergize and easily outweigh the savings at least locally, possibly even nationally eventually (especially as rich people flee the country and take their taxable wealth with them.) In theory you could shift this all onto state governments and/or private instead but the inefficiencies during the interim would be severe enough that the libertarians would never stay in office long enough to see positive results.
Poor people do have skin in the game. They've given the government and upper classes consent to keep on doing their thing instead of slitting our throats in our sleep. This is a very important kind of 'skin' you would do well to remember. They came into this world with almost all of the best bits of it already claimed by people on the basis that their mommies and daddies claimed it from their mommies and daddies and so on. There is no natural or universal moral law that says they have to respect that claim, just a few men with guns who say they have to respect it. And regardless of whether or not you recognize it, this has been and always will be a rather heavy tax.
I'm asserting it. Marginal tax rates, period, done. Money is taxed when you receive it. Finance law is revised to eliminate all entities and instruments that allow people to spend money as if it were theirs without it becoming taxable (this is actually much simpler than it sounds but it would still take far too long to explain.) No need for AMT crap: Write offs and tax credit limits are specified in an marginal manner, eventually hitting a hard limit. No special corner cases, no pork, no helping or incentivizing people through tax breaks, any contractor is treated exactly like an employee not a "company of one", done.
The corner cases are entirely artificial, primarily stemming from fancy instruments and entities that can be either simply outlawed or altered to prevent abuse.
Hitchens was not the only one. I've seen interviews with people who worked at her hospice were shocked at the degrading, restrictive, at times deadly treatment of people who weren't always terminally ill. Her and her church's despicable decision not to return stolen money (they probably could and would have been criminally charged if they weren't the Catholic Church) is a matter of public record, not anyone's opinion. Her decision to not spent the donations she received on improving her original hospice's conditions, but instead on a religious-geared order modestly bearing her name, is also public record.
The fact that there was virtually no controversy over these events is not evidence that they didn't happen. It is evidence that the public at large didn't care because once she reached a certain level of fame she was far more useful as a figurehead for anyone to bother looking at what she'd actually done.
Well I'm simplifying, of course. I wouldn't just want a band-aid. It's entirely possible to close loopholes like this while making the tax code much less complicated, though the neocon and libertarian ideas of how to do this always seem to involve dramatically shifting much of the burden back onto the poorer 50% of society, which is not a financially sound concept even if you are a dyed in the wool sink-or-swim capitalist. (Consider the increased police costs, for example.)
I think you mistake what the argument is actually for. Companies are in direct competition with one another. If it weren't for so-called "intellectual property" (which enables the creation of partial monopolies), companies would have to compete pretty much on price alone. On those terms, it's a Darwinian certainty that the shit will eventually float to the top. That's right, this is a *competition*, just like a sport. And when something is legal in a sport and it works, the players are going to use it. You can bitch and moan and boycott and maybe the fans will care for a week or two but in the end if it's allowed and it works, they're going to do it.
The solution is not to expect every single one of the thousands of players to voluntarily adhere to what you consider to be wrong. The solution is not to try to keep on eye on these players and shame or boycott them into playing honorably. The solution is to outlaw the tactic.
Too many people seem to view this argument as trying to morally excuse the behavior of the executives in charge of the company, but that shouldn't be the point. I couldn't care less whether the accountants of Apple are going to hell or not. The point is: right or wrong it's going to keep happening as long as it's legal, so let's make it illegal, k?
They keep adding more and more slow loading interactive crap to the interface, and making more and more crazy barriers to actually being able to save any of the pictures (short of a screenshot.) And it used to be the uploader had to opt-out of letting people see the original-sized picture, now it's opt-in. Apparently letting people have access to nice wallpaper-sized pics is just too useful a feature.
It's one thing to encourage users to stay on your site by disabling the right-click menu and using 'favorite' lists and such, it's quite another to continuously update your protocols to break compatibility with third party tools, offer lower resolution pictures, and make it slower and slower to actually view said pictures.
As you say, it's mathematically the same. Which one you find more philosophically appealing is less important that which one is easier for the public to swallow. I think incentives are easier to pass than penalties, but I could be mistaken.
That's simple enough, just offer a significant tax break for people who elect to maintain their vaccines. The conspiracy theorists will still scream their heads off while everyone else says "$250 tax credit? Shoot me up!"
Of course this makes the neocon/libertarian baby Jesus cry, nevermind the fact that we'll all save money (and lives) in the long run.
Couldn't they just give the safe one first and the older, more effective one a few months later? And if not, why not just do the weaker one yearly? I think an elegant solution for a lot of these weaker vaccines is to simply do them yearly, around the same time you get your flu shot. Other than further aggravating the Jenny McCarthys of the world, I think this would be a fine solution.
Or flamebait. The difference between the two can be pretty subtle. Anyway, here is your proof:
"...without impunity."
Citation fucking needed. Drug dealing is much lower than it was in the 70s and 80s. Successful terrorists haven't used cryptographic methods to coordinate their activities. And pedophiles are captured every day thanks to the false security of these tools, which don't work if you don't fully understand them and in any case can never protect you in the offline world. In all of these areas, the false security of cryptography has proved to be a fabulous tool for setting up stings.
It's not an "on topic opinion" to casually claim that something is needed because people are committing crimes "with impunity" and claiming that we currently have "no solution" for this supposed problem. There is no problem. The crimes mentioned have had a negative correlation with the availability of cryptography.
But a video is not the same thing as a videogame. How can you breach a copyright by simply showing a product? By the same logic it's theft from Toyota if you show one of their cars in your video. Hell, by the same logic it would be 'theft' even if you couldn't see the logo.
...seriously, I had to turn off adblock and go check. That's obscene. I mean, that's really fucked up. Video ads AND pop-overs? Didn't we go through all of this in the early 2000s and then Mozilla and a few others invented the 'popup blocker'. Then Google came along and revolutionized the ad industry by showing how much money you could make by staying low profile but relevant? Google was supposed to be the intelligent alternative to 'punch the monkey'.
I don't get it. You goddamn kids have had like a decade to learn how to install adblock on everything. Ethical questions aside (I find them to be very silly questions... it's been so long since I ever considered buying anything based on an ad), why is this generation putting up with this shit? I know they're lazily lounging in their walled gardens but this is really, really easy. It's like sliding your car seat back instead of driving with your knees in your face.
Um. Maybe you should read the article? Or at least the summary. There is such a thing as criminal fraud and these guys are apparently going to be charged with it. Civil rights can and are revoked for felons even after they serve their sentence. My point is if it's ok to arrest people for taking advantage of mistakes made by the producers/owners of the gambling devices, it should also be ok to arrest members of "the house" if it takes advantage of a mistake made by a player.
"If you're complaining that the courts tend to be biased in favor of the casino, I agree, but that's a separate problem."
That's not a separate problem at all. That was the whole point of my posts. It's not merely 'biased'... enforcement of this kind (oh no, you took advantage of a mistake the other guy made) is nonexistant against the house but has been repeatedly been used against players taking advantage of the house's mistakes, despite the fact that the house obviously has more resources and has an absolute advantage in the big picture.
Neither windows 95 nor any other widely deployed desktop (to my knowledge) made this the default. And even today it often breaks stuff. Latest version of XFCE apparently removed the ability to rotate some panel widgets.
As I said elsewhere, if I understand the bug correctly it's worth noting that it was still technically possible for him to lose. If he lost every game he would walk away with nothing but empty pockets. Therefore the fundamental nature of game wasn't changed--it was still gambling, but with the odds/payouts dramatically changed.
And to be strictly clear here, this *was* technically just a statistical edge, since it apparently required the player to accumulate some winnings before activating the bug. It's possible for the player to continually lose. It's still a game of chance, just with the odds dramatically shifted.
Ok. So by extension, if you mix up a $100 chip for a $10 chip and it's obvious you did so (saying "I'm betting ten dollars" to the people around you. And maybe you're colorblind, etc.), do you think that you'd stand a chance in hell getting your $90 back? And yet there was no 'meeting of minds'! So, do believe the owners/operators of the casino should be charged with criminal fraud, sending them in prison for years, permanently nullifying their civil rights, screwing them over whenever they try to apply for jobs for the rest of their lives?
Or, you know, maybe it's the responsibility of the gamblers to be aware of the world around them. To accept responsibilities for their own fuckups. And by the same token, perhaps someone who set up a faulty gambling device that mistakenly gives a statistical edge to the player (when normally the edge always goes to the owner) should be expected to suffer the consequences of their own ineptitude instead of blaming others. It's sickeningly twisted to argue it's legal for casinos to profit from player ignorance/incompetence/misunderstandings (without these things the gambling industry would shrink dramatically) but illegal for the reverse to ever occur.
and to once again emphasize: the bank is supposed to be staffed with professionals who are supposed to notice these things. They use technology specifically designed to catch mistakes. The customer has neither of these advantages, yet is for some reason held to a much higher standard when it comes to errors.
As per my correction, I meant to say "mistakes", with the quotes. There have been multiple studies done on pricing mistakes in retail stores, phone billing errors, etc. and it's always the case that the large majority of them favor the company. From the news stories I've read about (including one here on slashdot a few years back), if a banking error happens in the favor of an account holder that account holder seems to be required, under threat of felony charges, to detect, report, and return the extra money promptly. But if it's the bank's error, you have to argue and argue and ask to speak to a manager and threaten to sue them (which *might* succeed but at best you'll recover. They're not going to give you punative damages for what the bank will insist was a "mistake".) If they notice the mistake and fail to inform you, nothing happens. The police certainly aren't going to arrest them. They're bankers. Bankers don't get arrested; poor people 'abusing' the banks do.
I've definitely not been a fan of their track record these past few years, but they do occasionally hit on some really good ideas (if somehow managing to screw up their implementations: Upstart was a good in principle, and so was making a verical launcher/taskbar instead of making our widescreens even shorter.) This is another one. Well, sort of. Maybe not 'no dependencies' but at least 'no dependency conflicts, ever.' It's two thousand thirteen, why are we still tolerating this shit? There's absolutely no reason why the package manager can't chroot/symlink the little fuckers and make them see what they need to see so they can coexist with any other package. If the package manager is informed enough to recognize a conflict, it's also smart enough to resolve it without the user doing anything beyond confirming the installation of the extra required dependencies, and yet for some reason none of the current crop of package mangers do this.
I'd rather have a bad solution from Ubuntu inspiring people to do it the right way (see: Mir lighting a fire under GNOME's ass to help out with Wayland) than have no solution at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a fair assumption they would've been considerably more happy if they had morphine. Or the right to get up out of their bed and step outside for a breath of fresh air and talked to their loved ones. Or, for the ones that weren't terminal, a cure instead of a grave. It's easier to assume these people were not happy, much as it's easy to assume the victim of a hit and run didn't have a good day.
She made her fame via a hospice in Calcutta. Please show me evidence that she ever personally made the decision to spend any of her millions on buying those poor people painkillers. If she didn't (and I haven't found any evidence that she ever did), your claim is bullshit. She was not a god to the poor. The number one fucking job of a hospice is to provide painkillers, not tell the sufferers that suffering will get them closer to Christ.
Here's another bit of *objective* evidence you could provide to back up your claim: an opinion poll of the poor people of Calcutta. Not an easily staged interview, an objective poll. And of Calcutta specifically, not any other projects she didn't personally work on. None exists to my knowledge, probably because they would all say that the Protestants did a much, much, much better job of helping them out.
Dear lord, listen to yourself. I hate to be condescending, but how old are you? Figureheads don't get 'vetted' unless there's a political reason to. No one stood to win any battles by discrediting Thersa so for a very long time no one tried. You singled out the Nobel Peace Prize... why on earth do you think that is a good indicator of anything? This is the same prize they gave Obama for absolutely nothing. (Ok ok, basically just for not being Bush.) The same prize they gave to Kissinger after he arranged the illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos villages, and set up a failed cease fire in Vienam. The same prize they gave to people who advocated and/or coordinated terrorist attacks against civillians, such as Arafat and Mandela. The latter is another great example of someone who has a squeaky clean image in the mainstream media despite clear evidence to the contrary for anyone who cares to look.
Protip: reality isn't a democracy, and most people haven't the slightest idea what's going on and what they're meant to be doing. Take a quick look around, tell me you can't spot at least one naked emperor with at least a hundred thousand people cooing over his beautiful clothes. That isn't tin foil. That's a fact. That's society. That's reality. This isn't just me saying this, this is backed up by decades of psychological/sociological studies. Sadly, we are pack creatures. We can choose not to be, but it does take a little bit of effort. Start small, use Wikipedia and start clicking, paying close attention to those little citation numbers as you go.
I'll get you started: Fan death. Look up "fan death" on wikipedia and explain to me how those MILLIONS of Koreans, including tons of doctors, ministers of health, etc., could all be wrong.
"But I'm not arguing she's a model human being... Those twenty-odd rewards, public opinion polls, and numerous committees and governments are arguing she's a model human being are."
Those are not 'arguments'. Those are statements, and the apparent unanimity you highlight emphasizes just how much they are NOT arguments at all, but blind, popular adoration on par with Bieber fever.
If you wish I could drag out a very long laundry list of once-popular things (people, social customs, 'scientific' ideas, whatever) that are in hindsight clearly very stupid or undesirable, but I hope you get my point.
Theresa was famous specifically for supposedly alleviating the suffering of the dying. All evidence shows that she did an incredibly bad job at this, with no painkillers (even after she had millions in donations), dehumanizing policies (enforced bed rest, discouraged visitors), and no attempt to separate the curable from the dying. Running a hospice without painkillers and claiming you're doing good is like... I don't know, running a barber shop and claiming you're doing fine because you're successfully cutting hair along with the steady rain of earlobes. She took money that could have gone to actual caring hospices/charities instead. If you have any evidence she ran a rather good hospice we're all ears. Right now, your argument is the equivalent of pointing at the view counter on a youtube video.
I forgot to mention, not only did she not return stolen money but she wrote a letter to the judge asking him to be lenient on the thief who took it. I can't think of a more vile way to handle such a situation, especially when you are a promenent member of such a fabulously wealthy institution.
And was any of that money spent on painkillers for the people dying in agony (apparently not all of whom came in with fatal injuries) in her hospice? No. Didn't you know that suffering brings you closer to Jesus? Her words, not Hitchens'. If you have evidence that she did eventually use any of her (hundreds of?) millions of dollars to buy even aspirin for the poor bastards dying in Calcutta, I would honestly like to hear about it.
As I alluded, the nasty fact most libertarians don't want to face is that a lot of these expenditures, regardless of whether or not they're constitutional, have large hidden costs if they are eliminated. If many federal programs are eliminated at once the hidden costs will synergize and easily outweigh the savings at least locally, possibly even nationally eventually (especially as rich people flee the country and take their taxable wealth with them.) In theory you could shift this all onto state governments and/or private instead but the inefficiencies during the interim would be severe enough that the libertarians would never stay in office long enough to see positive results.
Poor people do have skin in the game. They've given the government and upper classes consent to keep on doing their thing instead of slitting our throats in our sleep. This is a very important kind of 'skin' you would do well to remember. They came into this world with almost all of the best bits of it already claimed by people on the basis that their mommies and daddies claimed it from their mommies and daddies and so on. There is no natural or universal moral law that says they have to respect that claim, just a few men with guns who say they have to respect it. And regardless of whether or not you recognize it, this has been and always will be a rather heavy tax.
I'm asserting it. Marginal tax rates, period, done. Money is taxed when you receive it. Finance law is revised to eliminate all entities and instruments that allow people to spend money as if it were theirs without it becoming taxable (this is actually much simpler than it sounds but it would still take far too long to explain.) No need for AMT crap: Write offs and tax credit limits are specified in an marginal manner, eventually hitting a hard limit. No special corner cases, no pork, no helping or incentivizing people through tax breaks, any contractor is treated exactly like an employee not a "company of one", done.
The corner cases are entirely artificial, primarily stemming from fancy instruments and entities that can be either simply outlawed or altered to prevent abuse.
Hitchens was not the only one. I've seen interviews with people who worked at her hospice were shocked at the degrading, restrictive, at times deadly treatment of people who weren't always terminally ill. Her and her church's despicable decision not to return stolen money (they probably could and would have been criminally charged if they weren't the Catholic Church) is a matter of public record, not anyone's opinion. Her decision to not spent the donations she received on improving her original hospice's conditions, but instead on a religious-geared order modestly bearing her name, is also public record.
The fact that there was virtually no controversy over these events is not evidence that they didn't happen. It is evidence that the public at large didn't care because once she reached a certain level of fame she was far more useful as a figurehead for anyone to bother looking at what she'd actually done.
Well I'm simplifying, of course. I wouldn't just want a band-aid. It's entirely possible to close loopholes like this while making the tax code much less complicated, though the neocon and libertarian ideas of how to do this always seem to involve dramatically shifting much of the burden back onto the poorer 50% of society, which is not a financially sound concept even if you are a dyed in the wool sink-or-swim capitalist. (Consider the increased police costs, for example.)
I think you mistake what the argument is actually for. Companies are in direct competition with one another. If it weren't for so-called "intellectual property" (which enables the creation of partial monopolies), companies would have to compete pretty much on price alone. On those terms, it's a Darwinian certainty that the shit will eventually float to the top. That's right, this is a *competition*, just like a sport. And when something is legal in a sport and it works, the players are going to use it. You can bitch and moan and boycott and maybe the fans will care for a week or two but in the end if it's allowed and it works, they're going to do it.
The solution is not to expect every single one of the thousands of players to voluntarily adhere to what you consider to be wrong. The solution is not to try to keep on eye on these players and shame or boycott them into playing honorably. The solution is to outlaw the tactic.
Too many people seem to view this argument as trying to morally excuse the behavior of the executives in charge of the company, but that shouldn't be the point. I couldn't care less whether the accountants of Apple are going to hell or not. The point is: right or wrong it's going to keep happening as long as it's legal, so let's make it illegal, k?
They keep adding more and more slow loading interactive crap to the interface, and making more and more crazy barriers to actually being able to save any of the pictures (short of a screenshot.) And it used to be the uploader had to opt-out of letting people see the original-sized picture, now it's opt-in. Apparently letting people have access to nice wallpaper-sized pics is just too useful a feature.
It's one thing to encourage users to stay on your site by disabling the right-click menu and using 'favorite' lists and such, it's quite another to continuously update your protocols to break compatibility with third party tools, offer lower resolution pictures, and make it slower and slower to actually view said pictures.
As you say, it's mathematically the same. Which one you find more philosophically appealing is less important that which one is easier for the public to swallow. I think incentives are easier to pass than penalties, but I could be mistaken.
That's simple enough, just offer a significant tax break for people who elect to maintain their vaccines. The conspiracy theorists will still scream their heads off while everyone else says "$250 tax credit? Shoot me up!"
Of course this makes the neocon/libertarian baby Jesus cry, nevermind the fact that we'll all save money (and lives) in the long run.
Couldn't they just give the safe one first and the older, more effective one a few months later? And if not, why not just do the weaker one yearly? I think an elegant solution for a lot of these weaker vaccines is to simply do them yearly, around the same time you get your flu shot. Other than further aggravating the Jenny McCarthys of the world, I think this would be a fine solution.
Or flamebait. The difference between the two can be pretty subtle. Anyway, here is your proof:
"...without impunity."
Citation fucking needed. Drug dealing is much lower than it was in the 70s and 80s. Successful terrorists haven't used cryptographic methods to coordinate their activities. And pedophiles are captured every day thanks to the false security of these tools, which don't work if you don't fully understand them and in any case can never protect you in the offline world. In all of these areas, the false security of cryptography has proved to be a fabulous tool for setting up stings.
It's not an "on topic opinion" to casually claim that something is needed because people are committing crimes "with impunity" and claiming that we currently have "no solution" for this supposed problem. There is no problem. The crimes mentioned have had a negative correlation with the availability of cryptography.
Thus, troll.
But a video is not the same thing as a videogame. How can you breach a copyright by simply showing a product? By the same logic it's theft from Toyota if you show one of their cars in your video. Hell, by the same logic it would be 'theft' even if you couldn't see the logo.
Youtube has ads?
...seriously, I had to turn off adblock and go check. That's obscene. I mean, that's really fucked up. Video ads AND pop-overs? Didn't we go through all of this in the early 2000s and then Mozilla and a few others invented the 'popup blocker'. Then Google came along and revolutionized the ad industry by showing how much money you could make by staying low profile but relevant? Google was supposed to be the intelligent alternative to 'punch the monkey'.
I don't get it. You goddamn kids have had like a decade to learn how to install adblock on everything. Ethical questions aside (I find them to be very silly questions... it's been so long since I ever considered buying anything based on an ad), why is this generation putting up with this shit? I know they're lazily lounging in their walled gardens but this is really, really easy. It's like sliding your car seat back instead of driving with your knees in your face.
Um. Maybe you should read the article? Or at least the summary. There is such a thing as criminal fraud and these guys are apparently going to be charged with it. Civil rights can and are revoked for felons even after they serve their sentence. My point is if it's ok to arrest people for taking advantage of mistakes made by the producers/owners of the gambling devices, it should also be ok to arrest members of "the house" if it takes advantage of a mistake made by a player.
"If you're complaining that the courts tend to be biased in favor of the casino, I agree, but that's a separate problem."
That's not a separate problem at all. That was the whole point of my posts. It's not merely 'biased'... enforcement of this kind (oh no, you took advantage of a mistake the other guy made) is nonexistant against the house but has been repeatedly been used against players taking advantage of the house's mistakes, despite the fact that the house obviously has more resources and has an absolute advantage in the big picture.
Neither windows 95 nor any other widely deployed desktop (to my knowledge) made this the default. And even today it often breaks stuff. Latest version of XFCE apparently removed the ability to rotate some panel widgets.
As I said elsewhere, if I understand the bug correctly it's worth noting that it was still technically possible for him to lose. If he lost every game he would walk away with nothing but empty pockets. Therefore the fundamental nature of game wasn't changed--it was still gambling, but with the odds/payouts dramatically changed.
And to be strictly clear here, this *was* technically just a statistical edge, since it apparently required the player to accumulate some winnings before activating the bug. It's possible for the player to continually lose. It's still a game of chance, just with the odds dramatically shifted.
Ok. So by extension, if you mix up a $100 chip for a $10 chip and it's obvious you did so (saying "I'm betting ten dollars" to the people around you. And maybe you're colorblind, etc.), do you think that you'd stand a chance in hell getting your $90 back? And yet there was no 'meeting of minds'! So, do believe the owners/operators of the casino should be charged with criminal fraud, sending them in prison for years, permanently nullifying their civil rights, screwing them over whenever they try to apply for jobs for the rest of their lives?
Or, you know, maybe it's the responsibility of the gamblers to be aware of the world around them. To accept responsibilities for their own fuckups. And by the same token, perhaps someone who set up a faulty gambling device that mistakenly gives a statistical edge to the player (when normally the edge always goes to the owner) should be expected to suffer the consequences of their own ineptitude instead of blaming others. It's sickeningly twisted to argue it's legal for casinos to profit from player ignorance/incompetence/misunderstandings (without these things the gambling industry would shrink dramatically) but illegal for the reverse to ever occur.
and to once again emphasize: the bank is supposed to be staffed with professionals who are supposed to notice these things. They use technology specifically designed to catch mistakes. The customer has neither of these advantages, yet is for some reason held to a much higher standard when it comes to errors.
As per my correction, I meant to say "mistakes", with the quotes. There have been multiple studies done on pricing mistakes in retail stores, phone billing errors, etc. and it's always the case that the large majority of them favor the company. From the news stories I've read about (including one here on slashdot a few years back), if a banking error happens in the favor of an account holder that account holder seems to be required, under threat of felony charges, to detect, report, and return the extra money promptly. But if it's the bank's error, you have to argue and argue and ask to speak to a manager and threaten to sue them (which *might* succeed but at best you'll recover. They're not going to give you punative damages for what the bank will insist was a "mistake".) If they notice the mistake and fail to inform you, nothing happens. The police certainly aren't going to arrest them. They're bankers. Bankers don't get arrested; poor people 'abusing' the banks do.
I've definitely not been a fan of their track record these past few years, but they do occasionally hit on some really good ideas (if somehow managing to screw up their implementations: Upstart was a good in principle, and so was making a verical launcher/taskbar instead of making our widescreens even shorter.) This is another one. Well, sort of. Maybe not 'no dependencies' but at least 'no dependency conflicts, ever.' It's two thousand thirteen, why are we still tolerating this shit? There's absolutely no reason why the package manager can't chroot/symlink the little fuckers and make them see what they need to see so they can coexist with any other package. If the package manager is informed enough to recognize a conflict, it's also smart enough to resolve it without the user doing anything beyond confirming the installation of the extra required dependencies, and yet for some reason none of the current crop of package mangers do this.
I'd rather have a bad solution from Ubuntu inspiring people to do it the right way (see: Mir lighting a fire under GNOME's ass to help out with Wayland) than have no solution at all.