I know I'm in the minority here--particularly on Slashdot, I'm sure--but I absolutely hate books.
Before getting my kindle, I read only while in high school and college, and only during class. After graduating, I read almost nothing. Since getting my kindle, I read on my commutes, and even take out time to read when I'm at home and could be on the Internet or playing a game.
Books are bulky. It's a pain to keep your place. The feel of the paper in paperback books gives me goosebumps. I find the smell of books unpleasant. You have to hold the books open, making reading one-handed challenging (a necessity on subways, and also helpful for reading in bed). Holding books open is particularly annoying at the start and end of the book, when the two halves are quite lopsided.
Like I said, I know I'm in the minority, but as far as I'm concerned books are almost singularly unsuitable as a medium for recreational reading.
How often does this really happen in gaming? I mainly do MMOs and FPSes, which AFAIK are the most keyboard-intensive types of games, and I have a hard time figuring out how you'd hit more than 6 at a time.
I can really only think of the following "sustained" keypresses:
1. Movement forward/backward 2. Strafing 3. Turning 4. Crouching or Jumping (if jump height is tied to how long the key is held) 5. Display info (e.g. scoreboard)
Everything else you would do is a momentary keypress, which assuming you're doing all 5 of the above simultaneously, maxes you out at 6 keys. I'm not aware of any MMOs where you'd hold down a key to attack, and although that does happen in FPSes, you'd be using a mouse button, not the keyboard.
I'm genuinely curious, how would you end up hitting more than 6 keys at once? Maybe flight sims?
Venn diagrams do not show proportion (what I assume you mean by amounts)!
If you draw a Venn diagram with a tiny little overlap, or a huge overlap, in order to make some point, [b]you are doing it wrong[/b].
Now it's one thing to do this for comedic effect, but I see this all the time when people are trying to be serious and it makes me stabby.
Venn diagrams are a way of visualizing overlaps in sets; the ONLY thing that matters is what region an element is placed, not how big that region is.
A Venn diagram is a precise tool which displays particular information with no ambiguity, and trying to shoehorn proportions into it just makes it muddy. Plus, humans are fucking terrible at telling how much larger one roughly circular area is than another; make those areas slightly different shapes, and it's even less helpful.
Digital books, even those encumbered with DRM, are more resilient than paper books.
Every book I buy for my Kindle, I also crack the DRM, convert it into a more generic format, and back it up.
It's trivial for anyone to have an entire library and to share that library, and there will always be a way to update the format to whatever's most convenient.
Books, on the other hand, are relatively fragile and limited. If you have a book, you can't give that book to everyone. You can't zap it around the world. In five hundred years, if it still exists, it will be locked away in a museum and handled delicately by archaeologists with flipping it page by page with tweezers.
Certainly the same can be said about any physical media ebooks might happen to be stored on, but the difference is it's trivial to update, and there WILL be people updating the ebooks, and as long as at least one copy exists then that particular work continues to exist and be easily accessible for all of society.
The only leg up that physical books might have on paper books is if either the human race ceases to exist, and can no longer maintain the knowledge, or if somehow all electronics simultaneously cease to function. In the former case, who gives a shit, we're dead; in the latter case, you just walk off the set of the contrived Hollywood production you're on and return to real life.
Just to play devil's advocate, I actually think I got bored with the first one because the traps were too effective. In particular, I hit upon a combination that could be laid out on most maps that would basically kill anything (force them to run along the path of a swinging mace over tar pits); the game devolved into..
1. Find the spot to put my killbox 2. Get enough money to set up my killbox 3. Rarely, shoot a normal guy who somehow managed to make it through the tar between mace swings 4. For large enemies, use the crossbow to keep them stun-locked until dead.
The only requirement to set this up is a low 1x3 section of ceiling going across the middle of a 3x3 section of floor, which you could find on most maps.
OMD2 has felt a lot more to me like the way you're describing the first game. In particular, there aren't a lot of chokepoints with low ceilings, and the sorceress doesn't have access to the tar pit trap.
I think it's a sign of a well-balanced game that you don't feel like you have enough resources to win, but you pull it off anyways, and this feeling comes across a lot in OMD2.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Blade dueling was pretty much all we ever did (I do recall a rough CTF sort of mod being under construction around the time I stopped playing), but I don't remember anything about a giant chicken.
Then again, I don't really remember what I had for dinner last night. *shrug*
Don't get me started on GFWL. That's burned me so many times... I must have saved $100 over the Steam Summer Sale from this script warning me that the game I was about to buy had GFWL in it.
I didn't think I'd live to see the day where I found a DRM scheme I was happy with, and Steam is it. Unlikely other DRM schemes, Steam actually adds some new incentives, so it's worth considering.
Cons: I can't lend or sell games. My GF can't play a game I bought on her computer at the same time I'm playing one on mine. If I lose internet connection, it's a crapshoot whether I'll be able to play or not (you usually can, but I've had issues where Steam's offline mode didn't work) Hypothetically possible that Steam could shut down in the future, causing me to lose access to everything I've bought.
Pros: Always have access to all the games I've bought Easy to install any game I want on any computer I want Don't have to keep track of any physical media, license keys, download links, or other paraphernalia. Frequent sales and competitive pricing for older content.
In my case, I decided that the pros outweigh the cons, and I'm willing to trade those rights away for the benefits I receive. I feel that it's a fair trade.
Incidentally, you do need to be careful when buying games on Steam that they're not encumbered with additional DRM above and beyond Steam itself. Here's an excellent user script (for Chrome or FF w/Greasemonkey) that warns you of any mention of additional DRM on a game page. It's saved me numerous times from buying something I really would have regretted. That's one big issue I have with Steam, that they allow this bullshit and that they don't make it more obvious when it exists.
Let men and women, and anyone who doesn't fall neatly into one of those categories compete together, in the same events, against each other. We're all humans. Is one sex being marginally better at a particular category of events any different from, say, people native to high-altitude countries being better runners?
Not allowing everyone to compete together is discrimination, plain and simple.
$large_company "accidentally" overcharges its customers $0.50 per month. Joe Blow sits there and calculates that, hey, his widget bill this month was $65.63, and it should have been $65.13. Joe Blow then goes and checks last months bills, same deal; he goes online and the oldest bills he can see online are 2 years old, and he's been charged this $0.50 every month for at least the last 2 years. Joe Blow's lost at least $12 dollars to this.
Joe Blow signed away his arbitration rights, so he takes $large_company to small claims court. $large_company says, "Oh, dear me, terribly sorry. Here's $50." and they flip a switch on Joe's account so that he alone won't get charged the $0.50 in the future.
Of course, amongst all its 10 million customers, $large_company has stolen $120 million in the last two years alone because of this $0.50 cent "accident," and because there was no big class action suit and no publicity they just continue on stealing from their customers because even if someone notices, what are the chances they'll care enough to actually go through the hassle of small claims court?
Well, that works great for the one, two, or twenty dudes who actually do it, but a large corporation (Sony, MS, etc) will just laugh as they write off a check and continue doing whatever it was they were doing. Small claims court isn't a deterrent.
Even if the lawyers are the only ones that walk away rich, the defendant is still going to feel the sting.
Lawsuits aren't about winning money (though that's often a motivating factor for the plaintiff); the threat of a potential lawsuit may be the only thing keeping a company in check. And when that company deals in transactions with tiny individual costs, where no rational person would file an individual lawsuit over it, a class action lawsuit is the only way to give the threat teeth.
I'm sure there are rich people who choose not to have health insurance, but there are exceptions in every large group of data. Of course, to be fair, I haven't exactly done any studies either, so for all I know your friend could actually be very representative of his tax bracket.
On the topic of educating yourself, in 2009 NPR's Planet Money podcast did some fantastic pieces on the economics of health insurance. Here are the ones I was able to find with a bit of searching... There might be more that I missed; they were chronologically close together, but not done all in a row. Each podcast is about 15 minutes long.
Polygamy should be legal, for all the reasons you suggest. As long as all the participants are of sound mind and everything's consensual, who has any right to tell people they can't engage in polygamy?
The government shouldn't have any say in this sort of thing whatsoever.
Actually, each party is happy to raise taxes on the other party, they just don't call it raising taxes.
Democrats are happy to raise taxes on rich people who are unlikely to vote democrat. The individual mandate is an example, as well as the fight over raising taxes during the budget struggles last year.
Uhh... How is the individual mandate affecting "rich people," exactly? The individual mandate requires everyone to purchase health insurance (or pay a penalty). It only affects people without health insurance. Presumably, rich people have health insurance. Therefore, rich people are unaffected by the individual mandate.
There are probably other parts of the bill that do disproportionately affect rich people (the "Cadillac plan" stuff, for example), but the individual mandate does not.
A while back, I bought Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II on Steam. I didn't notice it was saddled with Games for Windows Live, or else I wouldn't have bought it. Oh well. So I go into it and hook it up with my existing Xbox Live gamer tag. And I play. And everything works fine.
A while later, my girlfriend decides she wants to watch a movie. So she turns on the Xbox in the living room. And I get kicked out of the game I'm playing on my PC, because the Xbox is set to automatically sign in under my name when it's turned on.
And so now I wrote a greasemonkey script that warns me whenever any Steam game mentions 3rd-party DRM or Games for Windows Live.
But... yeah. This is definitely something Valve needs to sort out if they're going to try and push a set-top box.
Also got one of these. I've been wearing it for 3 or 4 years now. It's comfortable, but most of its features are rather lackluster. The zippers on the pockets are rather persnickety and tend to stick, and there are little threads all over the place that come loose.
The biggest reason I bought it was for the headphone integration. It really doesn't work well. The velcro tabs to hold the cord are tiny and somehow manage to both be insecure and yet sometimes grip too tightly and cause snags. I now just keep the earbuds in my pocket when not in use, and wear them normally when in use.
I still use it, though. It's warm, comfortable, and I love that the main pockets are magnet-fastened. I don't use any of the other pockets at all.
My next vest won't be by them, and I wouldn't recommend it.
Video games really just shift the problem. The ESA (which until very recently supported SOPA, against many of its largest members' public whims) could very well be the MAFIAA of the future.
The problem isn't Hollywood, the problem isn't even industry groups... The problem is publishers. Music labels, in particular, need to die a quick death.
Kill the book publishers. Kill the music labels. Kill the movie studios. Kill the video game publishers. The latter two, I realize, might not quite be feasible yet, as the economics are such that it's really not possible for an unknown group to fund themselves for a large movie or game project, but in the case of books and music? They serve no purpose whatsoever anymore, and are just parasites sucking money out of those they represent, putting impediments in front of those they sell to, and slowing down the pace of technology and innovation.
I really enjoyed the This American Life episode mentioned in the summary, and one of the things I found really interesting was the second part.
The first part was all about the terrible conditions the guy found at Foxcon and other manufacturers. The second part was all about what we should take away from this.
The general concensus is that, yeah, these factories are terrible, but they're actually a step up from the abject poverty the 3rd world would otherwise be in. Even more surprising, things are improving. Factories are starting, ever so slowly, to compete with each other for workers, and that means they're easing off on hours and otherwise making incremental improvements to the workers' quality of life.
This isn't to say that we should be okay with how the workers are treated. Simply that, given a choice between no sweatshops or sweatshops as they currently exist, the workers are actually better off with the sweatshops. And sweatshops are really the first step on the ladder of development. The industrialized Western countries went through very similar pains during the industrial revolution. In a few generations, Chinese working conditions might actually look a lot more like turn-of-the-century American working conditions, even without outside pressure.
Not a direct quote, done from memory, but yes, American Gods. The key thing here, in my mind, is the point of pride. That, if nothing else, is unique to Gaiman's anecdote.
The two of you are eating at a restaurant, separately. The first of you is dressed decently--not super well, but not shabby-- and has an old-looking violin. Personally, I make it a point of pride never to spend more than $10 on the violin. Anyways, after the meal, lament that you've forgotten your wallet, but here, hold onto my violin as collateral, and I'll be back in an hour.
After you leave, the second fellow pulls aside the waiter and asks to inspect the violin. He then declares that this is a genuine so-and-so, worth thousands, and you'd be ever-so-interested in buying it and when did the violinist say he'd return? Oh no! I can't wait that long, I've a plane to catch. Here, give the man my card and let him know that I'm very interested in his violin.
When the first person returns, the waiter in all likelihood will offer whatever he can scrounge up, perhaps a few hundred dollars, for the violin, keeping the other gentleman's offer to himself. The worst case scenario, the waiter simply passes the card along and you're out no more than the cost of lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I'm in the minority here--particularly on Slashdot, I'm sure--but I absolutely hate books.
Before getting my kindle, I read only while in high school and college, and only during class. After graduating, I read almost nothing. Since getting my kindle, I read on my commutes, and even take out time to read when I'm at home and could be on the Internet or playing a game.
Books are bulky. It's a pain to keep your place. The feel of the paper in paperback books gives me goosebumps. I find the smell of books unpleasant. You have to hold the books open, making reading one-handed challenging (a necessity on subways, and also helpful for reading in bed). Holding books open is particularly annoying at the start and end of the book, when the two halves are quite lopsided.
Like I said, I know I'm in the minority, but as far as I'm concerned books are almost singularly unsuitable as a medium for recreational reading.
How often does this really happen in gaming? I mainly do MMOs and FPSes, which AFAIK are the most keyboard-intensive types of games, and I have a hard time figuring out how you'd hit more than 6 at a time.
I can really only think of the following "sustained" keypresses:
1. Movement forward/backward
2. Strafing
3. Turning
4. Crouching or Jumping (if jump height is tied to how long the key is held)
5. Display info (e.g. scoreboard)
Everything else you would do is a momentary keypress, which assuming you're doing all 5 of the above simultaneously, maxes you out at 6 keys. I'm not aware of any MMOs where you'd hold down a key to attack, and although that does happen in FPSes, you'd be using a mouse button, not the keyboard.
I'm genuinely curious, how would you end up hitting more than 6 keys at once? Maybe flight sims?
I've got two of the Das Ultimate keyboards, one at work and one at home. I love them.
Using the blue cherry switches. They're really not all that loud at all, despite the company selling earplugs for your coworkers. :)
Venn diagrams do not show proportion (what I assume you mean by amounts)!
If you draw a Venn diagram with a tiny little overlap, or a huge overlap, in order to make some point, [b]you are doing it wrong[/b].
Now it's one thing to do this for comedic effect, but I see this all the time when people are trying to be serious and it makes me stabby.
Venn diagrams are a way of visualizing overlaps in sets; the ONLY thing that matters is what region an element is placed, not how big that region is.
A Venn diagram is a precise tool which displays particular information with no ambiguity, and trying to shoehorn proportions into it just makes it muddy. Plus, humans are fucking terrible at telling how much larger one roughly circular area is than another; make those areas slightly different shapes, and it's even less helpful.
Digital books, even those encumbered with DRM, are more resilient than paper books.
Every book I buy for my Kindle, I also crack the DRM, convert it into a more generic format, and back it up.
It's trivial for anyone to have an entire library and to share that library, and there will always be a way to update the format to whatever's most convenient.
Books, on the other hand, are relatively fragile and limited. If you have a book, you can't give that book to everyone. You can't zap it around the world. In five hundred years, if it still exists, it will be locked away in a museum and handled delicately by archaeologists with flipping it page by page with tweezers.
Certainly the same can be said about any physical media ebooks might happen to be stored on, but the difference is it's trivial to update, and there WILL be people updating the ebooks, and as long as at least one copy exists then that particular work continues to exist and be easily accessible for all of society.
The only leg up that physical books might have on paper books is if either the human race ceases to exist, and can no longer maintain the knowledge, or if somehow all electronics simultaneously cease to function. In the former case, who gives a shit, we're dead; in the latter case, you just walk off the set of the contrived Hollywood production you're on and return to real life.
Just to play devil's advocate, I actually think I got bored with the first one because the traps were too effective. In particular, I hit upon a combination that could be laid out on most maps that would basically kill anything (force them to run along the path of a swinging mace over tar pits); the game devolved into..
1. Find the spot to put my killbox
2. Get enough money to set up my killbox
3. Rarely, shoot a normal guy who somehow managed to make it through the tar between mace swings
4. For large enemies, use the crossbow to keep them stun-locked until dead.
The only requirement to set this up is a low 1x3 section of ceiling going across the middle of a 3x3 section of floor, which you could find on most maps.
OMD2 has felt a lot more to me like the way you're describing the first game. In particular, there aren't a lot of chokepoints with low ceilings, and the sorceress doesn't have access to the tar pit trap.
I think it's a sign of a well-balanced game that you don't feel like you have enough resources to win, but you pull it off anyways, and this feeling comes across a lot in OMD2.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Blade dueling was pretty much all we ever did (I do recall a rough CTF sort of mod being under construction around the time I stopped playing), but I don't remember anything about a giant chicken.
Then again, I don't really remember what I had for dinner last night. *shrug*
Plus, y'know... Pole vaulting. :)
Man, I miss Heretic 2 sometimes... The online multiplayer community for it was small and very tight-knit.
Don't get me started on GFWL. That's burned me so many times... I must have saved $100 over the Steam Summer Sale from this script warning me that the game I was about to buy had GFWL in it.
I didn't think I'd live to see the day where I found a DRM scheme I was happy with, and Steam is it. Unlikely other DRM schemes, Steam actually adds some new incentives, so it's worth considering.
Cons:
I can't lend or sell games.
My GF can't play a game I bought on her computer at the same time I'm playing one on mine.
If I lose internet connection, it's a crapshoot whether I'll be able to play or not (you usually can, but I've had issues where Steam's offline mode didn't work)
Hypothetically possible that Steam could shut down in the future, causing me to lose access to everything I've bought.
Pros:
Always have access to all the games I've bought
Easy to install any game I want on any computer I want
Don't have to keep track of any physical media, license keys, download links, or other paraphernalia.
Frequent sales and competitive pricing for older content.
In my case, I decided that the pros outweigh the cons, and I'm willing to trade those rights away for the benefits I receive. I feel that it's a fair trade.
Incidentally, you do need to be careful when buying games on Steam that they're not encumbered with additional DRM above and beyond Steam itself. Here's an excellent user script (for Chrome or FF w/Greasemonkey) that warns you of any mention of additional DRM on a game page. It's saved me numerous times from buying something I really would have regretted. That's one big issue I have with Steam, that they allow this bullshit and that they don't make it more obvious when it exists.
This is what I came here to say.
Let men and women, and anyone who doesn't fall neatly into one of those categories compete together, in the same events, against each other. We're all humans. Is one sex being marginally better at a particular category of events any different from, say, people native to high-altitude countries being better runners?
Not allowing everyone to compete together is discrimination, plain and simple.
$large_company "accidentally" overcharges its customers $0.50 per month. Joe Blow sits there and calculates that, hey, his widget bill this month was $65.63, and it should have been $65.13. Joe Blow then goes and checks last months bills, same deal; he goes online and the oldest bills he can see online are 2 years old, and he's been charged this $0.50 every month for at least the last 2 years. Joe Blow's lost at least $12 dollars to this.
Joe Blow signed away his arbitration rights, so he takes $large_company to small claims court. $large_company says, "Oh, dear me, terribly sorry. Here's $50." and they flip a switch on Joe's account so that he alone won't get charged the $0.50 in the future.
Of course, amongst all its 10 million customers, $large_company has stolen $120 million in the last two years alone because of this $0.50 cent "accident," and because there was no big class action suit and no publicity they just continue on stealing from their customers because even if someone notices, what are the chances they'll care enough to actually go through the hassle of small claims court?
Well, that works great for the one, two, or twenty dudes who actually do it, but a large corporation (Sony, MS, etc) will just laugh as they write off a check and continue doing whatever it was they were doing. Small claims court isn't a deterrent.
Even if the lawyers are the only ones that walk away rich, the defendant is still going to feel the sting.
Lawsuits aren't about winning money (though that's often a motivating factor for the plaintiff); the threat of a potential lawsuit may be the only thing keeping a company in check. And when that company deals in transactions with tiny individual costs, where no rational person would file an individual lawsuit over it, a class action lawsuit is the only way to give the threat teeth.
I'm sure there are rich people who choose not to have health insurance, but there are exceptions in every large group of data. Of course, to be fair, I haven't exactly done any studies either, so for all I know your friend could actually be very representative of his tax bracket.
On the topic of educating yourself, in 2009 NPR's Planet Money podcast did some fantastic pieces on the economics of health insurance. Here are the ones I was able to find with a bit of searching... There might be more that I missed; they were chronologically close together, but not done all in a row. Each podcast is about 15 minutes long.
http://castroller.com/Podcasts/TheEconomyExplained/1195248
http://castroller.com/Podcasts/TheEconomyExplained/1205007
http://castroller.com/Podcasts/TheEconomyExplained/1224698
Polygamy should be legal, for all the reasons you suggest. As long as all the participants are of sound mind and everything's consensual, who has any right to tell people they can't engage in polygamy?
The government shouldn't have any say in this sort of thing whatsoever.
Actually, each party is happy to raise taxes on the other party, they just don't call it raising taxes.
Democrats are happy to raise taxes on rich people who are unlikely to vote democrat. The individual mandate is an example, as well as the fight over raising taxes during the budget struggles last year.
Uhh... How is the individual mandate affecting "rich people," exactly? The individual mandate requires everyone to purchase health insurance (or pay a penalty). It only affects people without health insurance. Presumably, rich people have health insurance. Therefore, rich people are unaffected by the individual mandate.
There are probably other parts of the bill that do disproportionately affect rich people (the "Cadillac plan" stuff, for example), but the individual mandate does not.
A while back, I bought Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II on Steam. I didn't notice it was saddled with Games for Windows Live, or else I wouldn't have bought it. Oh well. So I go into it and hook it up with my existing Xbox Live gamer tag. And I play. And everything works fine.
A while later, my girlfriend decides she wants to watch a movie. So she turns on the Xbox in the living room. And I get kicked out of the game I'm playing on my PC, because the Xbox is set to automatically sign in under my name when it's turned on.
And so now I wrote a greasemonkey script that warns me whenever any Steam game mentions 3rd-party DRM or Games for Windows Live.
But... yeah. This is definitely something Valve needs to sort out if they're going to try and push a set-top box.
I loved The Brothers' War. Great novelization of some poorly-codified mythology.
Also got one of these. I've been wearing it for 3 or 4 years now. It's comfortable, but most of its features are rather lackluster. The zippers on the pockets are rather persnickety and tend to stick, and there are little threads all over the place that come loose.
The biggest reason I bought it was for the headphone integration. It really doesn't work well. The velcro tabs to hold the cord are tiny and somehow manage to both be insecure and yet sometimes grip too tightly and cause snags. I now just keep the earbuds in my pocket when not in use, and wear them normally when in use.
I still use it, though. It's warm, comfortable, and I love that the main pockets are magnet-fastened. I don't use any of the other pockets at all.
My next vest won't be by them, and I wouldn't recommend it.
Video games really just shift the problem. The ESA (which until very recently supported SOPA, against many of its largest members' public whims) could very well be the MAFIAA of the future.
The problem isn't Hollywood, the problem isn't even industry groups... The problem is publishers. Music labels, in particular, need to die a quick death.
Kill the book publishers. Kill the music labels. Kill the movie studios. Kill the video game publishers. The latter two, I realize, might not quite be feasible yet, as the economics are such that it's really not possible for an unknown group to fund themselves for a large movie or game project, but in the case of books and music? They serve no purpose whatsoever anymore, and are just parasites sucking money out of those they represent, putting impediments in front of those they sell to, and slowing down the pace of technology and innovation.
I really enjoyed the This American Life episode mentioned in the summary, and one of the things I found really interesting was the second part.
The first part was all about the terrible conditions the guy found at Foxcon and other manufacturers. The second part was all about what we should take away from this.
The general concensus is that, yeah, these factories are terrible, but they're actually a step up from the abject poverty the 3rd world would otherwise be in. Even more surprising, things are improving. Factories are starting, ever so slowly, to compete with each other for workers, and that means they're easing off on hours and otherwise making incremental improvements to the workers' quality of life.
This isn't to say that we should be okay with how the workers are treated. Simply that, given a choice between no sweatshops or sweatshops as they currently exist, the workers are actually better off with the sweatshops. And sweatshops are really the first step on the ladder of development. The industrialized Western countries went through very similar pains during the industrial revolution. In a few generations, Chinese working conditions might actually look a lot more like turn-of-the-century American working conditions, even without outside pressure.
Not a direct quote, done from memory, but yes, American Gods. The key thing here, in my mind, is the point of pride. That, if nothing else, is unique to Gaiman's anecdote.
Here's an old 2-man scam for you.
The two of you are eating at a restaurant, separately. The first of you is dressed decently--not super well, but not shabby-- and has an old-looking violin. Personally, I make it a point of pride never to spend more than $10 on the violin. Anyways, after the meal, lament that you've forgotten your wallet, but here, hold onto my violin as collateral, and I'll be back in an hour.
After you leave, the second fellow pulls aside the waiter and asks to inspect the violin. He then declares that this is a genuine so-and-so, worth thousands, and you'd be ever-so-interested in buying it and when did the violinist say he'd return? Oh no! I can't wait that long, I've a plane to catch. Here, give the man my card and let him know that I'm very interested in his violin.
When the first person returns, the waiter in all likelihood will offer whatever he can scrounge up, perhaps a few hundred dollars, for the violin, keeping the other gentleman's offer to himself. The worst case scenario, the waiter simply passes the card along and you're out no more than the cost of lunch.
(Kudos if you know where this is from)
Again, dude, you're talking to the wrong guy. I'm the one that gets the emails when you reply to me. You want to focus your ire up the thread a bit.