Eh? Planes are inferior to birds. Planes stall, birds NEVER do.
What are you talking about? If a hummingbird stops flapping, it will stall. Watch a bird landing sometime; it will deliberately stall -- lose forward momentum -- in order to land safely.
Planes are limited in maneuverability relative to birds.
And birds are limited in speed and carrying capacity relative to planes. Planes are not an inferior-performing model, just a different one.
Me three. Many times I've hit the filter when trying to post a snippet of relevant code or carefully quoting parts of the comment I'm replying to.
Usually I get past the filter by deleting useful content which makes my posting MORE lame, less relevant, and harder to put in context. Sometimes I just give up and don't post because the thing the lameness filter blocks is the core of the comment.
I lived in San Francisco last year and saw Keanu and Lawrence (just to name two) all the damn time in the city.
My question is, why were these guys always in the city hanging out? Did they ever get any filming done?
I worked as an extra during some of the filming of the sequels. A lot of of the stuff they were filming around here didn't involve Keanu's character, so he was "around" but not actively involved in most of it.
As for the other actors, sometimes you need them, other times a stand-in or stunt double is sufficent. During some of the stunt-heavy sequences the real Carrie-Anne Moss was only on our set once or twice a week at most; ditto for The Fish. But their stunt doubles were around constantly. It depends on what you're filming.
assuming that the only genetically engineered apes in the universe were not on Marky's Mothership, would it not be conceiveable that the genetically engineered apes on earth could have a revolution as well?
That would be true to the spirit of the book. In the book on which these movies are all loosely based, our hero takes a long trip to a planet far away. He discovers that the humans on that planet did themselves in and were replaced by apes. Our hero breaks free and flies home only to discover that the same phenomenon independently happened here during his travel time. Incidentally, there wasn't any "time rift" in the book; every trip took centuries of real time but relatively little "ship time" due to relativity.
The sci-fi premise of the book is that it is natural for human civilization to destroy itself (think of the cold war mentality; many folks in the 50s through the 70s regarded a nuclear world war as pretty much inevitable) and gentle tool-using apes might be able to take over the reins.
Nowadays we know apes are about as warlike as people are, so the premise that ape civilization could be more fundamentally stable than human civilization, doesn't make much sense.
The Burton movie preserved the animal-rights aspect (arguing that it's wrong to exploit near-human species) but extended the argument to genetic manipulation and didn't focus so much on civil rights allegory.
Some of the movie reviewers were looking for a civil rights statement and disappointed not to find one. I'd rather take the example of that little girl being used as a pet literally. Baby chimps _are_ used as pets, while adult chimps are too dangerous to have around. The essence of the animal-rights argument is that it's morally justified to treat animals as you would treat a human being, and that to treat them otherwise is equivalent to engaging in slavery.
With that in mind, a lot of scenes make more sense. The youngsters throwing rocks, the human organ-grinder assistant, and the caged kid all fit that mold; we are invited to see these things from the animal's point of view.
We are not merely putting CO2 into the atmosphere (we do that anyway just by breathing), we are putting HUGE AMOUNTS of CO2 into the air.
So if it turns out to be a problem, we'll just have to build some machines that take HUGE AMOUNTS of CO2 out of the air. All sorts of interesting experiments are underway as to how one might do this. Such as by seeding the oceans with iron filings.
We don't yet have a _good_ solution to the problem, so we should spend some more time thinking about it until we do. Making grand, ludicrously expensive symbolic gestures that have no significant impact on actually fixing the problem (Kyoto), is not a good idea.
I can only assume that the programmers of the online video poker games are morons.. all COMMERCIAL video poker machines have net house gain...
I'm sorry, but your information is not correct. The "full pay" version of Deuces Wild and of Jokers Wild have net player gain with optimum play.
Video poker machines offer among the WORST payout expectation in casinos, except for certain progressives.
This might be true generally, especially for players who don't play perfect basic strategy. But players who are very careful about game selection and learn the proper strategy can indeed find games with a slim edge for the player in Southern Nevada. Perhaps there aren't any positive expectation games where you live, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
(Another way people make money at video poker is to find a casino where the slot club offers money-back bonuses that make up for the house edge.)
The online casinos were just offering the same sorts of games that are found in the casinos. The game I attacked was a full-pay Deuces Wild.
And you don't need a computer to play "perfect" video poker. It is an extremely trivial game.
It's certainly true that you don't need a computer. You do need a chart or table of rules to follow which is different for each game and somewhat sensitive to the payout schedule, but it's possible to memorize this table, and many people have. (I haven't, and I doubt you have either.)
Anyone who is really interested in becoming a video poker expert will probably want to do one or more of the following:
It lost because the low-odds, high-payoff hands didn't come out as often as I needed them to.
My real goal at the time was just to see if the player-bot could be done and to practice C++ programming. Yes, it would be interesting to check whether the free program's odds are accurate. But running under emulation was _really slow_ at the time and the client software tended to crash a lot so it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
Regarding "developing an effective counter": if the house is cheating at all, there is probably no way to develop an effective counter. It would be stupid to assume the only way they cheat is to tweak the odds in mechanically predictable ways. People have suggested modifying the bot player to make mistakes, but what if their cheating algorithm is win-based rather than strategy-based? It would be simple to have two payout schedules and switch to the bad one only after the player has - through luck or skill - won $500.
Or perhaps the payout schedule was just wrong from the beginning.Drop the chance of a Royal Flush to nothing, and no amount of skilled play will consistently win.
>Maybe if I'd been willing to lose $10k I'd
>have eventually gone positive.
Wow, it sounds like not only did you write a program to simulate video poker playing, but also to simulate a gambling addiction!
No, the fact that I cut my losses at something that for me was perfectly affordable indicates I was following a rational speculative investment strategy. I decided upfront how much I was willing to lose, and when I lost that I quit.
But skilled players who want to make money playing video poker really do need a huge bankroll and need to be willing to withstand a long losing run before they go positive. That's not wishful thinking, it's just the way the math works.
The main difficulty with playing video poker is that it takes an average of 60
hours of rapid play to hit a royal flush, and it takes a _huge_ bankroll to
survive long enough to win. During this time, the casino enjoys an advantage of
approximately 5%. Straight flushes can be expected about once every 6 hours on
average, but these contribute only about 0.5% to the player's return. 4-of-kind
hands occur only about once per hour, and these hands account for about 5% of
the player's return.
What this all means to the video poker player is that you will be playing with
about a 10% disadvantage while waiting for an occasional "boost" from a
4-of-kind or straight flush. On average, it will take a bankroll about as large
as the progressive jackpot to survive long enough to hit the royal flush (and
this assumes that the jackpot is large enough to give the player a reasonable
edge over the house).
In an honest game my "expected income" was positive but I had a low chance of a high payout and a high chance of a low loss, unless I was willing to invest many thousands of dollars. Were it just a matter of the money, I could have formed a partnership to spread the risk. But given my suspicion of cheating and the lack of reasons to think the game is honest, the smart thing was to just let it go.
Great... we hire him, and we're next on his list [to fold]
Regarding companies folding: It's really bad out there now, but it's been particularly bad in the PDA field, which has been my specialty until recently. The last four major companies I worked for (the Newton Group of Apple, the DataRover group of General Magic, PocketScience, and Red Jade) are all dead or on life support today. Generally I left a company because I could see the crash coming despite my best efforts to prevent it. Although in one case -- the Newton group at apple -- I left because I was actually optimistic about the product and wanted to have a bigger stake in its success than I could get as a low-level Apple employee. (So I became employee #4 of LandWare, a company which narrowly managed to survive the Newton crash by diversifying into Palm and Windows CE).
My logical next move would be Palm or Handspring, but they've both got hiring freezes on and Palm just had a couple rounds of layoffs. Had I gone the Windows route it wouldn't have been any better; none of the major players in the early days are still thriving today. The only player that has been somewhat stable throughout is Microsoft itself. I've thought about that too, but on the other hand, "once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.":-)
i'm no expert at resume writing but yours could use some work...[suggestions]
Thanks for the comments. I've changed some of it. I usually save the "what I want to bring to YOUR company" for the cover letter and just let the objective say what general area I'm interested in. But what I bring is the ability to spot and solve problems the company doesn't know it has. Problems with the product, problems with the process for producing it. I am really enthusiastic about producing a high quality user experience and have the tech background that lets me understand and figure out how to help the engineers fix the problems that might prevent that.
Something will turn up. And if not, there's always acting! (In the last couple months I worked as an extra on the two Matrix movies currently being filmed. I left that off the resume since I couldn't figure out how to make driving on a fake freeway relevant enough to a real job to be worth the distraction factor.)
I wrote a program that played online video poker several years ago when online casinos were just starting to become popular. I had been making money at blackjack and this seemed like a potentially worthwhile time and money investment. It was very easy to write the program. I tailored my program to a site called InterCasino because at the time they were offering a video poker game that was positive expectation for players with perfect basic strategy.
I only had a Mac handy but the casino client software was windows-only, so I ran the client under SoftWindows emulation figuring this would make it harder for the client to determine something untoward is going on.
Recognizing the cards involved nothing more complicated than hit-testing for colored points along lines with certain offsets. The card pictures never changed, so it was just a matter of partitioning the set appropriately. For instance, a "9" of anything has a pip in the top-left corner; an ace does not. The only thing that was at all tricky there was differentiating a couple of the face cards. For instance, I seem to recall that their Jack of Spades and Jack of Clubs looked very similar to my algorithm. Differentiating spades and clubs generally was hard but it was especially hard with the face cards.
As for the play, that also required no original work. There are people who play video poker professionally; you can order basic strategy charts for all the major games that detail what payout schedules have what expected value and tell you how to play the hands. Some common casino machines are positive expectation and the casinos don't care because the average player makes enough strategy errors to be a net loser. My program had to recognize the card values, categorize the hand, then run down a chart (either a table lookup or a series of if-thens) to determine what strategy to employ. Then it had to simulate a mouse click on the appropriate "hold" buttons, then on the "draw" button.
To tune and debug the program, I had it play the hands but NOT hit draw until I verified the right cards were selected. I played through many hundreds of hands, discovering and fixing several bugs along the way. There were a couple of card-recognition bugs and a couple of play-related bugs, but eventually I got to the point where every time I questioned a play and looked it up in the rules, the computer was right. My program could play faster and more accurate video poker than I could.
InterCasino had two modes. You could play just for fun with fake money, or you could play for real money. To shake out the bugs, I played in the "just for fun mode", letting it run through the night while I slept. I had it preprogrammed to pause at random intervals for random amounts of time to simulate bathroom breaks or whatever, but mostly it just played.
In the morning, I'd won about a thousand dollars of fake money. As long as I played in "free" mode, I seemed to be earning about what was expected, occasionally hitting the big payoffs that make up for the long term negative grind.
So I switched to the real-money mode. I figured it was easily worth investing $500 or so of my blackjack earnings to see if I could institute a real money machine. The dream was to have a bank of PCs in my closet raking in the cybercash while I sleep, eat, read, or go to work... So I deposited the money and set the thing to work. Again I ran it in semi-interactive mode for a while before putting it into automatic.
And it lost. So long as I played with real money, it just wasn't hitting the big payoffs as often as I think it should have. I switched back to free mode and won again, switched back to paid mode and lost again. After losing several hundred dollars I decided to pull the plug.
I did not play enough hands to be sure I didn't have a run of bad luck. Video poker is a game with a very small edge and almost all of the edge you have comes from hitting that once-in-a-blue-moon royal flush or equivalent. Maybe if I'd been willing to lose $10k I'd have eventually gone positive. But there's no way to prove that the game is honest, so I couldn't count on the laws of probability being in my favor. My only protection was to have a reasonable stop-loss figure, and I hit it.
So I won't be retiring to the carribbean just yet.:-)
(In fact, I'm currently unemployed due to a recent dot.bomb event. Need a lead QA engineer, software engineer or otherwise just generally smart guy? My resume is here; check it out. Especially if you're doing something with handhelds.)
Well, persoal belief I have is that no matter how you gamble, you lose. Stocks, roulette, blackjack... Only some [games] screw you way less.
Er, no. The average player loses at all the games in the casino, or the casino wouldn't offer the game. But some games have a large enough skill factor that very good players can consistently make money at them.
There are two table games where a good player can actually make a living playing the game. The two games are blackjack and poker. With poker you just have to be enough better than the other players - one of the skill components is skill at selecting who to play against - to make up for the house cut. With blackjack you have to master basic strategy and one of any number of counting systems. If you have bankroll and self-discipline, it's easier to become a decent blackjack player than it is to become a decent chess player. Most people don't put in enough time to become skilled, so the casinos make enough money from the bad players to more than make up for what they lose to the few skilled players.
Firstly, no casinos use single decks anymore, foxwoods was eight, and they shuffle when it gets down to two decks.
That may be true of Foxwoods, but it's not true generally. Nevada is full of casinos that still have 1 and 2-deck games. For instance, the Horseshoe and Circus Circus in Las Vegas have single-deck.
Another problem, I suppose, is that there's no Mortal Kombat on the scenes right now. There's no incredible game only for arcades (meaning, when MK came out, you had to go to the arcades to play it).
Konami's Bemani series is the modern equivalent of Mortal Kombat. The games to look for are Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Freaks, Drum Freaks, and Para Para Paradise. Some of these are available in home versions but you can't get decent controllers in the US. Especially for the dancing games, where even the import home controllers aren't good enough to accomodate some of the showoff techniques.
DDR is one of the few arcade games that has a local fan base and regular tournaments. If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, they have DDR tournaments at the Metreon with prizes and judging expertise donated by Konami.
The scene was a lot better in Hong Kong, though. And Tokyo's not bad either.
But is it worth not having airbags in cars so a handfull of people aren't seriously injured or killed by airbags each year, or having the airbags in place and saving thousands of other lives?
I'd leave it up to the car buyers and sellers to decide whether airbags are worth the extra cost in dollars and risk. The benefits aren't the same for all people, nor are the risks. For instance, if you always wear your seatbelt there is essentially no benefit to having an airbag too; an airbag can be thought of as a substitute seatbelt that doesn't require buckling in but only helps you in a single-impact front-on crash. Lives saved by airbags are generally lives of people who didn't wear seatbelts. Which isn't to say it's a small group being protected, but it's a selective group; you know if you're in it when you buy the car.
Laws that require cars to have certain safety features often make consumers less safe. One obvious example is the airbag requirement that killed a few dozen kids who otherwise would have survived their minor fender-benders. Less obvious is the way federal regulations limit innovation: Once the government declares some safety feature to be the government-approved standard, there's not much incentive to improve on it.
For instance, consider seat belts. I would be a lot safer in a crash if I took out my 3-point shoulder-lap belt and replaced it with a 5-point racing harness. But it is illegal to sell a car with a 5-point racing harness and it is illegal to remove the shoulder-lap belt and in many states if you are wearing a 5-point harness instead of the shoulder-lap belt, you are violating the law. How does this affect my -- or the automakers' -- incentive to experiment with safer and more convenient ways of strapping in the driver? Puts a real damper on it, I'd say...
The average private school costs less than half what the average public school spends per student.
Public schools tend not to be racially or economically diverse because they only admit people who live in that school district and the districts themselves are segregated racially and economically.
Here's a link to a 1996 Cato Institute study on What Would a School Voucher Buy?. From the executive summary:
A school voucher of $3,000 per student per year would give more families the option of sending their children to non-government schools. However, many people believe that such a small amount could not possibly cover tuition at a private school; they may be thinking of such costly schools as Dalton, Andover, and Exeter and concluding that all private schools cost in excess of $10,000 a year.
In fact, Education Department figures show that the average private elementary school tuition in America is less than $2,500. The average tuition for all private schools, elementary and secondary, is $3,116, or less than half of the cost per pupil in the average public school, $6,857. A survey of private schools in Indianapolis, Jersey City, San Francisco, and Atlanta shows that there are many options available to families with $3,000 to spend on a child's education. Even more options would no doubt appear if all parents were armed with $3,000 vouchers.
At the time they did the study, there were many private schools in San Francisco that charged less than $1500/year, and even a few that charged around $1000/year. The poor families that send their kids to such schools would benefit from the vouchers. As for the kids going to scary violent places, vouchers help in several ways: (1) some parents can remove their kids to better schools, thus bettering the experience for the kids who leave. (2) The loss of kids makes for smaller classes with less than proportionate loss of resources, so the kids left behind get more teacher attention and the schools can spend more on books or whatever else they need per student. (3) The bad public schools stop expanding and might even diminish to the point of being closed down. (4) the good public schools attract more students and expand or are copied and improved upon.
(1) and (2) deal with the current problem; (3) and (4) change the dynamic so that future kids have a better situation than the current ones.
More specifics: the major California voucher proposal a few years back was designed by a teacher who had worked in a $1000/year school that catered to poor black families in East LA; the vouchers were designed to help more poor families afford schools like hers, and the vouchers were to be for an amount that was about half what the california school system was then spending. (IIRC, it was a $2600 voucher at a time when average California spending was $5200.)
Right. The schools gain for every kid that takes a voucher to opt out, but lose for every kid that already WAS out of the existing system. This is a net gain of resources for the schools if enough kids leave. That's why all the well-designed voucher proposals phase-in credits to the already-gone, to allow some time for other kids to start exiting.
This is NOT an upper versus lower class question since the kids who have the most to gain are those in the poor schools who tend to be lower class. Private schools currently are more economically diverse than are public schools, as well as more racially diverse. The typical private school student does NOT belong to a particularly rich family; a lot of the people that would be helped are poor families currently struggling to pay $2000/year (or less!) to send their kid to the local Catholic school because the local public school is a scary violent place where little learning occurs.
[a voucher system is bad because] it directly takes away money from the entire public school system.
But it also directly takes away students from the entire public school system, with the result that in every voucher proposal I've yet seen the public schools would be likely to end up with more resources per student after vouchers than before them. If the public school system is spending $7k per student and you let kids opt out with a $3k voucher, the public schools are $4k richer per student leaving than before. The more kids leave, the better the situation for the remaining kids.
Josh, if you're out there and just happen to be reading this, count your lucky stars, and thank that teacher of yours. My teachers would have either not cared or taken credit for themselves.
I vote for "would not have cared" as most likely. My personal experience? While trying to integrate the Bell Curve (a known impossible problem) as a spare time project, I accidentally invented my own technique of integration. It turned out I was reinventing a technique that used to be commonly taught, but to find that out I had to pore through old textbooks at the Stanford Math Library. (My public-school calc teacher was no help and high school kids didn't have Usenet access in 1983.)
crashnbur, you'll be a much happier math genius if you worry less about being worshipped by the authority figures around you -- it ain't gonna happen. The important thing is to impress yourself and find some friends who think the same things are cool that you do, so you can learn from one another.
Nanotech is prompting interesting questions that are producing interesting answers. Much progress has been made, much work remains to be done. And are you really claiming the computer hasn't changed the world?
In recent years the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology has been awarded for experimental work as well as theoretical. Some people have been designing cool devices at the molecular level, other people have been building them, and they work. There's no reason to think progress of this sort will stop any time soon.
For all the revolutionary talk about
how [the computer] will free us from the burdens of work, now all we do is spend more time working, because computers have enabled us to do
more!
We may spend more time at work but I wouldn't say we spend more time working. For instance, consider time spent reading Slashdot!:-)
Remember how sick everybody got of Wesley? That was due to a writers's strike during the production of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Here's how it happened:
About once a week, the writers and producers would get together and have a big brainstorming session. Ideas are tossed out at these meetings. The group as a whole thinks about continuity and character development: What areas haven't we explored lately? What interesting things might we do next? What overall direction should the show take, what relationships should we develop? What are we doing wrong that we could do better? That sort of thing.
Anyway, one fine week at the writer's meeting the chief Suggestion From On High was: "Hey, what about Wesley? We haven't really done much with that character. He's around, but we don't have much sense of who he is as a person." Everybody agreed, so that was the closing thought that a half-dozen Star Trek writers went away with.
And what's the easiest way for the audience to learn more about and identify more with Wesley? Have him save the ship! Arrange things so that some unlikely danger comes along that only Wesley's special talents are capable of recognizing or defending against. So what comes back is a slew of "Wesley saves the ship" scripts.
Most of these scripts were actually pretty good as individual scripts, but you wouldn't want to use them all sequentially as a matter of balance. Rather, in an ideal world you'd want to slip in a "Wesley saves the ship" script every now and then among the more traditional "Picard surrenders the ship" or "Geordi dislikes being blind" scripts. Use the better Wesley scripts first, send the weaker ones back for a rewrite or keep them around for a rainy day. No two consecutive episodes should be allowed to seem too similar.
But then the writer's strike was declared. When you've got a show to film and no new scripts are coming in, you use the scripts you've already got, regardless of whether this makes for a balanced presentation. Therefore, Wesley got to save the ship every other week, no matter how annoying it was to the fans who watched the show religiously. Thus, the "die-wesley-die" phenomenon.
[my best friend's godmother produced some of the ST:TNG episodes]
What is good for those workers is that people are producing food and goods locally at a price they can afford. The proliferation of sweatshops does nothing to make this happen - the economic
benefits occur elsewhere.
By that argument, anybody who works at Boeing building 747s doesn't economically benefit from their job, because only a few individuals -- elsewhere -- can afford to buy jumbo jets.
There is no reason to think the workers in any particular industry should want to be able to buy the product of their labor. Just as the people who cut, guard or ship diamonds and build 747s benefit from their jobs, the people who build Nike shoes benefit from their jobs too. They work for Nike because that's the best option available to them. If Nike had to pay them much more, Nike would probably go out of business but at a minimum would have to close all those factories putting everybody out of work. Really. Their business model is based on cheap low-productivity labor. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Nikes are a luxury good; you don't NEED them. China is full of shoestores selling cheap knockoff shoes for $5 a pair.
[I spent a few weeks in 1999 working in a chinese factory where young women on the line were making about 20 cents an hour plus food and board assembling electronics for companies like Sharp, and it seemed like a great job for them. It was transitional employment, like working at Burger King is here. They'd do this for a couple of years, then move on to a company that paid more for more experience. The workers seemed to be happy and healthy and safe, much more so than they would be at the surrounding businesses or in their villages back home. Many actually used their job to send money home to their families.]
I attended the talk; it was really well done. Lessig's fundamental point is that the internet gives us the freedom it does due to its architecture and we shouldn't take that architecture for granted because it can change and will change. There are various large and powerful interest groups who consider the current degree of anonymity and flexibility the Net provides to be a bug rather than a feature.
Given enough time, money, effort and legal support, bugs can be fixed. And will be.
To the French government, the fact that Yahoo Auctions couldn't identify french users to stop them trading in nazi paraphernalia, was a bug that needed to be fixed.
To US broadcasters, the fact that iCraveTV.com might be able to legally stream television stations for free to countries other than Canada, was a bug that needed to be fixed.
Just as the original design of the net and the law surrounding it met the needs of the people designing it then, the net today is shaped by various groups with conflicting interests and needs. This shaping happens in all sorts of subtle ways. For instance, AT&T's cable modem service won't let you stream video not because the bandwidth isn't there so much as because that would compete with their profitable business in selling video streams aimed at your television. Your subscriber agreements with your DSL provider or cable provider explicitly give your provider veto power over what you do with the bandwidth. That's a fundamentally diffent model than the original net model, and that is the sort of thing we should be worrying about.
To Lessig the fundamental characteristic of The Net that needs to be preserved is its ability to be extended by its users without a central authority being able to say "we won't allow that."
During the Q&A at the end Lessig referred to Richard Stallman as "the philosopher of our time".
Lessig also mentioned that he is currently helping to litigate against what he called "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act". Much applause.
Before seeing this talk I had mixed opinions on Lessig. After seeing it I realize even the positions of his that I disagree with are highly nuanced and well-thought-out. He seeks out, listens to and understands opposing views. He is clueful.
In summary, now that I've met the guy I'll probably have to read his damn book. Like I don't have enough else to read...:-)
Once you've spent some time in the one of the 44 million without insurance you'll be back in heathrow in a heartbeat.
Most of the "44 million" are people who are briefly without insurance while changing jobs or policies, and that's not much of a problem unless they have some horrible health issue right then before the next job kicks in. Which most don't. The mere fact that one is without insurance for a while is not in itself a tragedy.
I was one of those tragic "uninsured" people; I chose to self-insure for about a year once. It was no big deal; it just meant that when I went to the doctor I paid out-of-pocket. My dentist gave me about a 40% discount when he found out I'd be paying it myself. Since I had no major health problems during the time I was uninsured, I saved a lot of money. Had I had a major problem it would have been expensive, but at the time I thought the benefits outweighed the risks.
What I'd really like is an insurance plan with a really high deductible, like $10,000. Insurance shouldn't be used to pay ordinary predictable day-to-day expenses. The whole point of insurance is to spread the risk of unpredictable one-in-a-million costs, not routine ones. Insuring routine stuff is a great way to increase health care costs AND insurance costs.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you talking about? If a hummingbird stops flapping, it will stall. Watch a bird landing sometime; it will deliberately stall -- lose forward momentum -- in order to land safely.
Planes are limited in maneuverability relative to birds.
And birds are limited in speed and carrying capacity relative to planes. Planes are not an inferior-performing model, just a different one.
Usually I get past the filter by deleting useful content which makes my posting MORE lame, less relevant, and harder to put in context. Sometimes I just give up and don't post because the thing the lameness filter blocks is the core of the comment.
My question is, why were these guys always in the city hanging out? Did they ever get any filming done?
I worked as an extra during some of the filming of the sequels. A lot of of the stuff they were filming around here didn't involve Keanu's character, so he was "around" but not actively involved in most of it.
As for the other actors, sometimes you need them, other times a stand-in or stunt double is sufficent. During some of the stunt-heavy sequences the real Carrie-Anne Moss was only on our set once or twice a week at most; ditto for The Fish. But their stunt doubles were around constantly. It depends on what you're filming.
For ongoing info on the sequels, try www.thematrixonline.com .
That would be true to the spirit of the book. In the book on which these movies are all loosely based, our hero takes a long trip to a planet far away. He discovers that the humans on that planet did themselves in and were replaced by apes. Our hero breaks free and flies home only to discover that the same phenomenon independently happened here during his travel time. Incidentally, there wasn't any "time rift" in the book; every trip took centuries of real time but relatively little "ship time" due to relativity.
The sci-fi premise of the book is that it is natural for human civilization to destroy itself (think of the cold war mentality; many folks in the 50s through the 70s regarded a nuclear world war as pretty much inevitable) and gentle tool-using apes might be able to take over the reins.
Nowadays we know apes are about as warlike as people are, so the premise that ape civilization could be more fundamentally stable than human civilization, doesn't make much sense.
The Burton movie preserved the animal-rights aspect (arguing that it's wrong to exploit near-human species) but extended the argument to genetic manipulation and didn't focus so much on civil rights allegory.
Some of the movie reviewers were looking for a civil rights statement and disappointed not to find one. I'd rather take the example of that little girl being used as a pet literally. Baby chimps _are_ used as pets, while adult chimps are too dangerous to have around. The essence of the animal-rights argument is that it's morally justified to treat animals as you would treat a human being, and that to treat them otherwise is equivalent to engaging in slavery.
With that in mind, a lot of scenes make more sense. The youngsters throwing rocks, the human organ-grinder assistant, and the caged kid all fit that mold; we are invited to see these things from the animal's point of view.
They've all got the gannet. It's a standard Julie Andrews tune; it's in all the books.
So if it turns out to be a problem, we'll just have to build some machines that take HUGE AMOUNTS of CO2 out of the air. All sorts of interesting experiments are underway as to how one might do this. Such as by seeding the oceans with iron filings.
We don't yet have a _good_ solution to the problem, so we should spend some more time thinking about it until we do. Making grand, ludicrously expensive symbolic gestures that have no significant impact on actually fixing the problem (Kyoto), is not a good idea.
I'm sorry, but your information is not correct. The "full pay" version of Deuces Wild and of Jokers Wild have net player gain with optimum play.
Video poker machines offer among the WORST payout expectation in casinos, except for certain progressives.
This might be true generally, especially for players who don't play perfect basic strategy. But players who are very careful about game selection and learn the proper strategy can indeed find games with a slim edge for the player in Southern Nevada. Perhaps there aren't any positive expectation games where you live, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
(Another way people make money at video poker is to find a casino where the slot club offers money-back bonuses that make up for the house edge.)
The online casinos were just offering the same sorts of games that are found in the casinos. The game I attacked was a full-pay Deuces Wild.
And you don't need a computer to play "perfect" video poker. It is an extremely trivial game.
It's certainly true that you don't need a computer. You do need a chart or table of rules to follow which is different for each game and somewhat sensitive to the payout schedule, but it's possible to memorize this table, and many people have. (I haven't, and I doubt you have either.)
Anyone who is really interested in becoming a video poker expert will probably want to do one or more of the following:
Read the rec.gambling video poker FAQ
Buy Dan Paymar's book Video Poker Optimum Play
Subscribe to the newsletter Video Poker Times
My real goal at the time was just to see if the player-bot could be done and to practice C++ programming. Yes, it would be interesting to check whether the free program's odds are accurate. But running under emulation was _really slow_ at the time and the client software tended to crash a lot so it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
Regarding "developing an effective counter": if the house is cheating at all, there is probably no way to develop an effective counter. It would be stupid to assume the only way they cheat is to tweak the odds in mechanically predictable ways. People have suggested modifying the bot player to make mistakes, but what if their cheating algorithm is win-based rather than strategy-based? It would be simple to have two payout schedules and switch to the bad one only after the player has - through luck or skill - won $500.
Or perhaps the payout schedule was just wrong from the beginning.Drop the chance of a Royal Flush to nothing, and no amount of skilled play will consistently win.
>have eventually gone positive.
Wow, it sounds like not only did you write a program to simulate video poker playing, but also to simulate a gambling addiction!
No, the fact that I cut my losses at something that for me was perfectly affordable indicates I was following a rational speculative investment strategy. I decided upfront how much I was willing to lose, and when I lost that I quit.
But skilled players who want to make money playing video poker really do need a huge bankroll and need to be willing to withstand a long losing run before they go positive. That's not wishful thinking, it's just the way the math works.
To quote from the rec.gambling video poker FAQ:
In an honest game my "expected income" was positive but I had a low chance of a high payout and a high chance of a low loss, unless I was willing to invest many thousands of dollars. Were it just a matter of the money, I could have formed a partnership to spread the risk. But given my suspicion of cheating and the lack of reasons to think the game is honest, the smart thing was to just let it go.
Regarding companies folding: It's really bad out there now, but it's been particularly bad in the PDA field, which has been my specialty until recently. The last four major companies I worked for (the Newton Group of Apple, the DataRover group of General Magic, PocketScience, and Red Jade) are all dead or on life support today. Generally I left a company because I could see the crash coming despite my best efforts to prevent it. Although in one case -- the Newton group at apple -- I left because I was actually optimistic about the product and wanted to have a bigger stake in its success than I could get as a low-level Apple employee. (So I became employee #4 of LandWare, a company which narrowly managed to survive the Newton crash by diversifying into Palm and Windows CE).
My logical next move would be Palm or Handspring, but they've both got hiring freezes on and Palm just had a couple rounds of layoffs. Had I gone the Windows route it wouldn't have been any better; none of the major players in the early days are still thriving today. The only player that has been somewhat stable throughout is Microsoft itself. I've thought about that too, but on the other hand, "once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny." :-)
i'm no expert at resume writing but yours could use some work...[suggestions]
Thanks for the comments. I've changed some of it. I usually save the "what I want to bring to YOUR company" for the cover letter and just let the objective say what general area I'm interested in. But what I bring is the ability to spot and solve problems the company doesn't know it has. Problems with the product, problems with the process for producing it. I am really enthusiastic about producing a high quality user experience and have the tech background that lets me understand and figure out how to help the engineers fix the problems that might prevent that.
Something will turn up. And if not, there's always acting! (In the last couple months I worked as an extra on the two Matrix movies currently being filmed. I left that off the resume since I couldn't figure out how to make driving on a fake freeway relevant enough to a real job to be worth the distraction factor.)
I only had a Mac handy but the casino client software was windows-only, so I ran the client under SoftWindows emulation figuring this would make it harder for the client to determine something untoward is going on.
Recognizing the cards involved nothing more complicated than hit-testing for colored points along lines with certain offsets. The card pictures never changed, so it was just a matter of partitioning the set appropriately. For instance, a "9" of anything has a pip in the top-left corner; an ace does not. The only thing that was at all tricky there was differentiating a couple of the face cards. For instance, I seem to recall that their Jack of Spades and Jack of Clubs looked very similar to my algorithm. Differentiating spades and clubs generally was hard but it was especially hard with the face cards.
As for the play, that also required no original work. There are people who play video poker professionally; you can order basic strategy charts for all the major games that detail what payout schedules have what expected value and tell you how to play the hands. Some common casino machines are positive expectation and the casinos don't care because the average player makes enough strategy errors to be a net loser. My program had to recognize the card values, categorize the hand, then run down a chart (either a table lookup or a series of if-thens) to determine what strategy to employ. Then it had to simulate a mouse click on the appropriate "hold" buttons, then on the "draw" button.
To tune and debug the program, I had it play the hands but NOT hit draw until I verified the right cards were selected. I played through many hundreds of hands, discovering and fixing several bugs along the way. There were a couple of card-recognition bugs and a couple of play-related bugs, but eventually I got to the point where every time I questioned a play and looked it up in the rules, the computer was right. My program could play faster and more accurate video poker than I could.
InterCasino had two modes. You could play just for fun with fake money, or you could play for real money. To shake out the bugs, I played in the "just for fun mode", letting it run through the night while I slept. I had it preprogrammed to pause at random intervals for random amounts of time to simulate bathroom breaks or whatever, but mostly it just played.
In the morning, I'd won about a thousand dollars of fake money. As long as I played in "free" mode, I seemed to be earning about what was expected, occasionally hitting the big payoffs that make up for the long term negative grind.
So I switched to the real-money mode. I figured it was easily worth investing $500 or so of my blackjack earnings to see if I could institute a real money machine. The dream was to have a bank of PCs in my closet raking in the cybercash while I sleep, eat, read, or go to work... So I deposited the money and set the thing to work. Again I ran it in semi-interactive mode for a while before putting it into automatic.
And it lost. So long as I played with real money, it just wasn't hitting the big payoffs as often as I think it should have. I switched back to free mode and won again, switched back to paid mode and lost again. After losing several hundred dollars I decided to pull the plug.
I did not play enough hands to be sure I didn't have a run of bad luck. Video poker is a game with a very small edge and almost all of the edge you have comes from hitting that once-in-a-blue-moon royal flush or equivalent. Maybe if I'd been willing to lose $10k I'd have eventually gone positive. But there's no way to prove that the game is honest, so I couldn't count on the laws of probability being in my favor. My only protection was to have a reasonable stop-loss figure, and I hit it.
So I won't be retiring to the carribbean just yet. :-)
(In fact, I'm currently unemployed due to a recent dot.bomb event. Need a lead QA engineer, software engineer or otherwise just generally smart guy? My resume is here; check it out. Especially if you're doing something with handhelds.)
Er, no. The average player loses at all the games in the casino, or the casino wouldn't offer the game. But some games have a large enough skill factor that very good players can consistently make money at them.
There are two table games where a good player can actually make a living playing the game. The two games are blackjack and poker. With poker you just have to be enough better than the other players - one of the skill components is skill at selecting who to play against - to make up for the house cut. With blackjack you have to master basic strategy and one of any number of counting systems. If you have bankroll and self-discipline, it's easier to become a decent blackjack player than it is to become a decent chess player. Most people don't put in enough time to become skilled, so the casinos make enough money from the bad players to more than make up for what they lose to the few skilled players.
Those who want to find good books, discuss playing conditions and so on should check out Stanford Wong's BJ21 discussion board.
That may be true of Foxwoods, but it's not true generally. Nevada is full of casinos that still have 1 and 2-deck games. For instance, the Horseshoe and Circus Circus in Las Vegas have single-deck.
Konami's Bemani series is the modern equivalent of Mortal Kombat. The games to look for are Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Freaks, Drum Freaks, and Para Para Paradise. Some of these are available in home versions but you can't get decent controllers in the US. Especially for the dancing games, where even the import home controllers aren't good enough to accomodate some of the showoff techniques.
DDR is one of the few arcade games that has a local fan base and regular tournaments. If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, they have DDR tournaments at the Metreon with prizes and judging expertise donated by Konami.
The scene was a lot better in Hong Kong, though. And Tokyo's not bad either.
I'd leave it up to the car buyers and sellers to decide whether airbags are worth the extra cost in dollars and risk. The benefits aren't the same for all people, nor are the risks. For instance, if you always wear your seatbelt there is essentially no benefit to having an airbag too; an airbag can be thought of as a substitute seatbelt that doesn't require buckling in but only helps you in a single-impact front-on crash. Lives saved by airbags are generally lives of people who didn't wear seatbelts. Which isn't to say it's a small group being protected, but it's a selective group; you know if you're in it when you buy the car.
For instance, consider seat belts. I would be a lot safer in a crash if I took out my 3-point shoulder-lap belt and replaced it with a 5-point racing harness. But it is illegal to sell a car with a 5-point racing harness and it is illegal to remove the shoulder-lap belt and in many states if you are wearing a 5-point harness instead of the shoulder-lap belt, you are violating the law. How does this affect my -- or the automakers' -- incentive to experiment with safer and more convenient ways of strapping in the driver? Puts a real damper on it, I'd say...
Public schools tend not to be racially or economically diverse because they only admit people who live in that school district and the districts themselves are segregated racially and economically. Here's a link to a 1996 Cato Institute study on What Would a School Voucher Buy?. From the executive summary:
At the time they did the study, there were many private schools in San Francisco that charged less than $1500/year, and even a few that charged around $1000/year. The poor families that send their kids to such schools would benefit from the vouchers. As for the kids going to scary violent places, vouchers help in several ways: (1) some parents can remove their kids to better schools, thus bettering the experience for the kids who leave. (2) The loss of kids makes for smaller classes with less than proportionate loss of resources, so the kids left behind get more teacher attention and the schools can spend more on books or whatever else they need per student. (3) The bad public schools stop expanding and might even diminish to the point of being closed down. (4) the good public schools attract more students and expand or are copied and improved upon.(1) and (2) deal with the current problem; (3) and (4) change the dynamic so that future kids have a better situation than the current ones.
More specifics: the major California voucher proposal a few years back was designed by a teacher who had worked in a $1000/year school that catered to poor black families in East LA; the vouchers were designed to help more poor families afford schools like hers, and the vouchers were to be for an amount that was about half what the california school system was then spending. (IIRC, it was a $2600 voucher at a time when average California spending was $5200.)
This is NOT an upper versus lower class question since the kids who have the most to gain are those in the poor schools who tend to be lower class. Private schools currently are more economically diverse than are public schools, as well as more racially diverse. The typical private school student does NOT belong to a particularly rich family; a lot of the people that would be helped are poor families currently struggling to pay $2000/year (or less!) to send their kid to the local Catholic school because the local public school is a scary violent place where little learning occurs.
But it also directly takes away students from the entire public school system, with the result that in every voucher proposal I've yet seen the public schools would be likely to end up with more resources per student after vouchers than before them. If the public school system is spending $7k per student and you let kids opt out with a $3k voucher, the public schools are $4k richer per student leaving than before. The more kids leave, the better the situation for the remaining kids.
I vote for "would not have cared" as most likely. My personal experience? While trying to integrate the Bell Curve (a known impossible problem) as a spare time project, I accidentally invented my own technique of integration. It turned out I was reinventing a technique that used to be commonly taught, but to find that out I had to pore through old textbooks at the Stanford Math Library. (My public-school calc teacher was no help and high school kids didn't have Usenet access in 1983.)
crashnbur, you'll be a much happier math genius if you worry less about being worshipped by the authority figures around you -- it ain't gonna happen. The important thing is to impress yourself and find some friends who think the same things are cool that you do, so you can learn from one another.
Anyway, here's one set of Top 10 Recent achievements in Nanoelectronics
And a set of Top 10 Hard Problems.
In recent years the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology has been awarded for experimental work as well as theoretical. Some people have been designing cool devices at the molecular level, other people have been building them, and they work. There's no reason to think progress of this sort will stop any time soon.
We may spend more time at work but I wouldn't say we spend more time working. For instance, consider time spent reading Slashdot!About once a week, the writers and producers would get together and have a big brainstorming session. Ideas are tossed out at these meetings. The group as a whole thinks about continuity and character development: What areas haven't we explored lately? What interesting things might we do next? What overall direction should the show take, what relationships should we develop? What are we doing wrong that we could do better? That sort of thing.
Anyway, one fine week at the writer's meeting the chief Suggestion From On High was: "Hey, what about Wesley? We haven't really done much with that character. He's around, but we don't have much sense of who he is as a person." Everybody agreed, so that was the closing thought that a half-dozen Star Trek writers went away with.
And what's the easiest way for the audience to learn more about and identify more with Wesley? Have him save the ship! Arrange things so that some unlikely danger comes along that only Wesley's special talents are capable of recognizing or defending against. So what comes back is a slew of "Wesley saves the ship" scripts.
Most of these scripts were actually pretty good as individual scripts, but you wouldn't want to use them all sequentially as a matter of balance. Rather, in an ideal world you'd want to slip in a "Wesley saves the ship" script every now and then among the more traditional "Picard surrenders the ship" or "Geordi dislikes being blind" scripts. Use the better Wesley scripts first, send the weaker ones back for a rewrite or keep them around for a rainy day. No two consecutive episodes should be allowed to seem too similar.
But then the writer's strike was declared. When you've got a show to film and no new scripts are coming in, you use the scripts you've already got, regardless of whether this makes for a balanced presentation. Therefore, Wesley got to save the ship every other week, no matter how annoying it was to the fans who watched the show religiously. Thus, the "die-wesley-die" phenomenon.
[my best friend's godmother produced some of the ST:TNG episodes]
By that argument, anybody who works at Boeing building 747s doesn't economically benefit from their job, because only a few individuals -- elsewhere -- can afford to buy jumbo jets.
There is no reason to think the workers in any particular industry should want to be able to buy the product of their labor. Just as the people who cut, guard or ship diamonds and build 747s benefit from their jobs, the people who build Nike shoes benefit from their jobs too. They work for Nike because that's the best option available to them. If Nike had to pay them much more, Nike would probably go out of business but at a minimum would have to close all those factories putting everybody out of work. Really. Their business model is based on cheap low-productivity labor. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Nikes are a luxury good; you don't NEED them. China is full of shoestores selling cheap knockoff shoes for $5 a pair.
[I spent a few weeks in 1999 working in a chinese factory where young women on the line were making about 20 cents an hour plus food and board assembling electronics for companies like Sharp, and it seemed like a great job for them. It was transitional employment, like working at Burger King is here. They'd do this for a couple of years, then move on to a company that paid more for more experience. The workers seemed to be happy and healthy and safe, much more so than they would be at the surrounding businesses or in their villages back home. Many actually used their job to send money home to their families.]
Given enough time, money, effort and legal support, bugs can be fixed. And will be.
To the French government, the fact that Yahoo Auctions couldn't identify french users to stop them trading in nazi paraphernalia, was a bug that needed to be fixed.
To US broadcasters, the fact that iCraveTV.com might be able to legally stream television stations for free to countries other than Canada, was a bug that needed to be fixed.
Just as the original design of the net and the law surrounding it met the needs of the people designing it then, the net today is shaped by various groups with conflicting interests and needs. This shaping happens in all sorts of subtle ways. For instance, AT&T's cable modem service won't let you stream video not because the bandwidth isn't there so much as because that would compete with their profitable business in selling video streams aimed at your television. Your subscriber agreements with your DSL provider or cable provider explicitly give your provider veto power over what you do with the bandwidth. That's a fundamentally diffent model than the original net model, and that is the sort of thing we should be worrying about.
To Lessig the fundamental characteristic of The Net that needs to be preserved is its ability to be extended by its users without a central authority being able to say "we won't allow that."
During the Q&A at the end Lessig referred to Richard Stallman as "the philosopher of our time".
Lessig also mentioned that he is currently helping to litigate against what he called "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act". Much applause.
Before seeing this talk I had mixed opinions on Lessig. After seeing it I realize even the positions of his that I disagree with are highly nuanced and well-thought-out. He seeks out, listens to and understands opposing views. He is clueful.
In summary, now that I've met the guy I'll probably have to read his damn book. Like I don't have enough else to read... :-)
Most of the "44 million" are people who are briefly without insurance while changing jobs or policies, and that's not much of a problem unless they have some horrible health issue right then before the next job kicks in. Which most don't. The mere fact that one is without insurance for a while is not in itself a tragedy.
I was one of those tragic "uninsured" people; I chose to self-insure for about a year once. It was no big deal; it just meant that when I went to the doctor I paid out-of-pocket. My dentist gave me about a 40% discount when he found out I'd be paying it myself. Since I had no major health problems during the time I was uninsured, I saved a lot of money. Had I had a major problem it would have been expensive, but at the time I thought the benefits outweighed the risks.
What I'd really like is an insurance plan with a really high deductible, like $10,000. Insurance shouldn't be used to pay ordinary predictable day-to-day expenses. The whole point of insurance is to spread the risk of unpredictable one-in-a-million costs, not routine ones. Insuring routine stuff is a great way to increase health care costs AND insurance costs.