I rather like the book Software Testing in the Real World: Improving the Process by Edward Kit. This book is very short, so you can read it in a reasonably finite time. It's aimed at the managerial end of things -- figuring out how to iteratively improve the testing process in an existing organization.
If you're not at a managerial level and need more localized nuts-and-bolts information, I'll second the recommendation everybody else is making - Testing Computer Software by Kaner/Falk/Nguyen.
If you want to get certified, you can find out about that here. As part of running tests to certify people, the Software Quality Institute maintains a current list of books here for Certified Software Test Engineers and here for Certified Software Quality Analysts.
Did the space program contribute "something"? Certainly.
Is VR something that "came from the space program"? I think not.
Agreed. The space program was just one of the industries interested in exploiting and expanding upon the technology. There were plenty of others.
For instance, medicine was another big application area at the time. People liked the idea of using virtual cadavers for some instructional purposes as an alternative to real ones. Real cadavers are expensive, bulky, unique, difficult to obtain (in the US), and you can't make parts of them selectively transparent at will to look through or past the layers you're not interested in to point out the good parts. Stanford University was one place that was working on that sort of thing.
But I wouldn't say VR "came from research medicine" either. It came from a lot of people all over the place who read _Neuromancer_ and _Ender's Game_ and liked pushing the limits of technology and had wacky ideas about what it might be made to do.
VIRTUAL REALITY - NASA-developed research allows a user, with assistance from advanced technology devices, to figuratively project oneself into a computer-generated environment, matching the user's head motion, and, when coupled with a stereo viewing device and appropriate software, creates a telepresence experience.
Oh, sure, NASA is the home of all VR technology.
Come on! Can't you people even TRY to be credible? Do you wanna tell me that the developers of Battle Zone were secretly working for the space program? Or that John Warnock (yeah, the same one who later founded Adobe) was really preparing for a moon shot when he invented the key overlapping object algorithms?
There's some truth in the original assertion. NASA/Ames was one of the earliest sponsors of "goggles and gloves" interface work and related technologies. They had several uses in mind. One idea they were thinking about was virtual control panels. Take the shuttle or the space station: interior space is at a premium and there's a huge need for buttons and joysticks and LEDs and displays to show status and interact with all the gadgets and control surfaces. The user interface parts of a space station or space ship tend to be expensive, delicate, heavy, inflexible, take up a lot of space, and kind of get in the way when not actively in use. The dream of VR with regard to this problem is that with you could take any blank wall of a space station and turn it into exactly the right UI for the task at hand. The astronaut puts on the goggles and gloves when he needs to, say, manipulate the robot arm; he sees all the relevant controls and can interact with them. But it's just a wall, so when you turn the interface off, it's impossible to accidentally interact with it, the indicator lights don't burn out or short out, and you can't accidentally trip over the joystick or crash into the monitor because it isn't there.
Another big idea was using telepresence to control things like a robot arm or a mars rover in hostile environments.
NASA had real prospective uses for this sort of technology and a big budget, so they were a real player in the early days of VR. Which isn't to say that everything VResque wouldn't have happened anyway without them, but it's something. It's not nothing.
"See, when the government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs."
It's nuts to assume that throwing money at some new boondoggle will help the economy. Yeah, throwing money into space might employ people. Or alternately, you could employ a lot of people in the hole-digging industry if the government simply funded a giant industry to dig holes and fill them up again. Why not do that? See the parent poster's link.
Re:On children and swearing
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A fifteen-year old was considered a young man then, not an adolescent, because they were halfway through the average life span.
I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Average life expectancy was low in the past primarily due to deaths during infancy and childhood. The life expectancy of a male who reached 15 hasn't changed all that much over the years. Some, but not much.
My guess is that extended childhood, like extended retirement, is a luxury good that we are now able to afford. Kids kill time getting random degrees they don't need and will never use, socializing, and basically goofing off for years and years because parents can afford to support them doing that and want to allow it. Every parent dreams of offering his kids "a better life than I had" and each generation is on average a lot richer than the previous one, so each generation gives their kids a little larger gift of time.
Voting doesn't matter, nor do presidents.
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anyone who is not rich and voted for Bush is a flaming idiot, in my book.
Hmph. I voted Libertarian, but had someone put a gun to my head and forced me to pick one of the majors I would have voted for Bush in that election. Why? (1) Reading _Earth In The Balance_ had long ago convinced me Al Gore was a pompous nitwit. (2) Bush claimed to be a fiscal conservative, (3) Bush claimed to be noninterventionist, whereas Gore was big on "nation-building". Subsequent events have pretty much demolished points (2) and (3), but that's only obvious in hindsight.
But getting back to the main topic under discussion, here's something you can't say in America:
It doesn't really matter who wins the presidential election.
Seriously. There's no way to know in advance which candidate will make a good president. They both lie about who they are and what they believe and what they intend to do, and they both will get diverted and distracted by the bureaucracy and the opposing party and world events to such a degree that basically all bets are off. (The weirdest thing about the last election was that Bush pretended to be strongly pro-life and Gore pretended to be strongly pro-choice to fit the expectations of their respective parties, and voters bought it and thought that it mattered.)
Even if you could know what the presidential candidate intends to do, the chances are pretty large that he won't be able to do it, and the chances are even larger that nothing the president does will directly affect your life or that of anybody you know.
National politics is basically an expensive form of entertainment, not a way of getting much useful done in the world. And your vote doesn't matter. Even if it mattered statistically - which it doesn't - even it determined the outcome between the top two candidates - which it doesn't - it still wouldn't make much difference, because those two candidates have been chosen to look and sound pretty much the same and have no preformed opinions of their own that they wouldn't sell in a heartbeat.
Incidentally, that's why the last election was so close. Because there was really nothing to recommend either candidate over the other, it was basically a coin flip. It's silly to call the people whose flips came up Heads "flaming idiots" just because yours came up Tails.
CO2 levels have risen dramatically since the industrial revolution.[...] This increase correlates with the increase of the average global temperature of 1 degree centigrade.
How do you account for the fact that mars is also showing signs of global warming? Sure, it's possible that a bunch of martians are having their own industrial revolution at the same time as ours, but it seems more likely the sun has something to do with it. And sure enough, it turns out the sun is gettinghotter. And sunspot activity is changing, and the strength of the sun's magnetic field is changing, and so on. And we don't have good models to account for much of it, and we don't have good data going back more than a few decades on much of it either.
My personal theory is that incrementing the year on our calendars causes global warming. The whole time that people think the planet has gotten hotter, the calendar has been increasing! Coincidence?
Global warming skeptics seem to think the political pressures are in the direction of exagerrating the problem. This may be true in some countries, but is hardly true in the present configuration of the United States.
Although political pressures are important, I think it's the journalistic pressures that predominate. Bad news sells papers. Scientists are as prone as the rest of us to getting the overall impression that things are getting worse, because bad news travels faster than good news and sells better. Scientists then interpret the data in terms of what they already know.
On the other hand it is not difficult to show that the last fifteen years have followed the course of the predictions of 15 years ago. Nor is this surprising.
The only way you could show "the predictions of 15 years ago" are accurate is by ignoring the ones that weren't. By my memory of the past decade, warming predictions of 15 years ago were based on primitive computer models whose results were continually being revised downward until they came close to fitting the data. But maybe we were paying attention to different people. So could you be more specific as to whose predictions of 15 years ago were accurate, and what those predictions were?
Earth isn't the only planet in this solar system that shows a warming trend. Mars is also warming. Did humans sneak over to mars and pollute that planet too?:-)
I don't see how you can dismiss things like the retreat of glaciers around much of the globe (to sizes unprecedented in history or the recent archaeological record) and claim that nothing is going on.
The arcade game Klax is pretty much unplayable for me, as is the Palm game Dinomite. In both cases the programmer assumed various shades of yellow and green are more distinguishable than I find them to be. (I'm red-green colorblind).
The Palm Game Bounce Out" solved the problem by having multiple color/pattern schemes as a preference item; selecting the "sports ball" option makes every item especially unique by pattern.
I wasn't aware slot machines ever got into positive return territory, even with high progressives - how do you know the base payout (and jackpot frequency for that mattter) in order to calculate the progressive's effect on net payout?
Base payout rates can be known or roughly guessed at through a combination of public and private (insider) knowledge. Having somebody who maintains slot machines or runs a casino in your circle of acquaintances helps a lot.:-) The Piggy bonus came around often enough that people were able to could calculate its frequency and average value just by careful observation. Note that you don't have to lose any money to do a statistical study of payout frequencies; you can just camp out at a casino and collect statistics while/other/ people lose money on the game.
People like Stanford Wong worked out the odds and/or sanity-checked the odds calculations of others, with help from various high-powered connections. In some cases the calculations were based on recordings of actual play; in other cases it was more of a back-of-the-envelope rough guess.
Advantage bonus-slot players get their edge entirely at the expense of the losing players. Naive players play when the bonus is low or far from paying off; smart players play when the bonus is high or close to payoff. Piggies were so obviously and consistently profitable that some pro players would pay off casino guards, get in fistfights with other pro players ("I was watching that machine first!"), and hassle other patrons for the right to play them. Other games since then (including later Piggy incarnations such as Big Bang) have been tweaked so as to reduce the profit potential considerably.
The ideal plan, from behavioral studies, is small rewards fairly often and large rewards at long, very random intervals.
And luckily enough for the casinos, just letting the machines follow their normal default behavior does exactly this! No further per-client tweaking is required to accomplish it.
To the degree that a little further tweaking/is/ useful, they can do that via the mechanism of comps. The standard thing is to give the biggest expected losers a consolation prize of free meals, shows, airfare and rooms to encourage them to do their losing/here/ rather than at the casino down the street.
Great! So you can use the display to show the past behavior of the machine and use this information to predict the likely outcome (ie; that the machine is DUE for a win).
Er, no. The piggy has a per-machine progressive - when a certain random event occurs it "adds a coin to the piggy bank." When you get the "break the bank" symbol it pays you whatever is in the piggy bank. The bank starts out at a value of 5, 10, or 15 coins, and on average the bank generally breaks at around a value of 19 coins, making this bonus neutral with respect to payout. Sometimes, through random chance, the bank happens to get very large before it breaks. If you happen upon a very large bank, you aren't in any sense "due for a win" - you still have to wait the same average time before the break-the-bank symbol appears as anybody else would - but you are guaranteed that when you get it, your payment is larger than average. The larger-than-average expectation from this one bet makes up for the generally negative expectation of the machine as a whole.
There are other games for which your "the machine is DUE for a win" does apply, though. On machines with the "diamond mine" bonus, for instance, you might find a machine that is likely to pay out sooner than its neighbor, because the nature of the bonus is that the payout comes when a mine fills up, and you can see how close that is to occuring.
Those who want to exploit such opportunities are well advised to read this book, but I'll warn you in advance the pickings are pretty slim. There are enough knowledgable professional and semi-pro advantage players around that the opportunities don't persist long. Everywhere that profitable slot machines exist, there are people lurking in the background waiting to play them the moment they show a tiny profit opportunity. If you wait and only play slots that show a $20/hour ROI, you'll never get to play because somebody else will have jumped on the opportunity the minute it was a $2/hour ROI.
Only an idiot plays slots. They have the highest house odds of any casino game.
Depends on the slot. Do you include Video Poker or Piggy Bankin' machines? If so, there are some players that make a healthy return on investment playing those. Some players have even been barred for playing slots too well. But I'll grant you the general rule still holds for most people most of the time.
If there were a reliable way to exploit any "edge" in a casino it would go out of business in a week.*
*And yes, I've read all the stories about people with fiendishly complicated systems who do actually make shitloads of money, but not only is this very difficult in the first place, it's getting harder. The complexity of the exception proves the rule in this case.
Actually, some of the systems that work to make money are simple. And a casino can easily absorb the losses from a few profitable players here and there. But you are correct that systems that work tend to be short-lived.
For example, here's a system that worked a few years ago:
(1) Find a bank of "Piggy Bankin'" slot machines.
(2) Walk down the row, pushing a button on each machine, causing it to "wake up" from attract mode and display how many coins are in the bank.
(3) If the number of coins in the bank is greater than 30, camp out at that machine and play one coin at a time until you "break the bank", then immediately cash out. and stop playing.
(4) go find another batch of Piggies, or hover in the background while people play these for a while so as to build the banks back up so you can tear them down again.
If the bank was at $40, your expected income was $20 (subtract 20 from the bank to get the expected value), and it should take less than 20 minutes of play to "earn" it.
Sadly, you won't find banks of original Piggies anymore, and even if you did, you wouldn't find them with large untapped jackpots because too many other advantage players know about them. So I'm not giving anything up by telling you about it now. There are other similar opportunities around, but (a) they tend to be short-lived or otherwise limited in scope, and (b) players who exploit them too aggressively tend to get barred.
When it comes to games where luck dominates, the casino fundamentally doesn't care whether you in particular are a winner over any specific period of time. They have no incentive to modify the odds in the way you suggest.. Why would you assume they do?
Suppose a slot machine has a payout schedule such that, on average, the machine pays out 97% of the amount it takes in. Somebody will win the occasional big payout but most people will lose, and the losses will tend to more than cover the wins.Why should the casino care whether the payouts go to you rather than the next guy? All they care about is that the overall odds are in their favor, and they are. Somebody will win the jackpots, and it might as well be you as much as anybody else. You don't scare them.
When you say "A basic slot strategy is to move from one machine to another, and play machines in certain areas of the casino floor to improve your odds.", you are talking nonsense. Switching machines doesn't change your odds*, so the casinos don't need to do anything special to foil that strategy. You can't combine negative expectation bets to get a positive expectation bet.
(* actually, there's an exception to that rule, and I've made money exploiting it, but I gather you're not talking about wonging into machines with unusually high per-machine progressives. That's gotten pretty hard to do lately due to stiff competition and "anti-flea" features built into the newest machines by the manufacturers. But it was fun while it lasted, eh?)
A little more web research finds that one can increase rotational responsiveness a bit by changing the key coding, but apparently the Segway ignores forward speed settings above the maximum allowable value. So you can set the speed value to "FF" if you want - and some have tried it, but you still get the same 12.5 as the next guy.
The bottom 80% of households earn 50.6% of all income. The top 20% of households therefore get the other 49.4%.
But note that which households constitute the "top 20%" and the "bottom 80%" are defined by their income, not their wealth. So for all we know, there could be poor people in the top 20% and rich people in the bottom 80%. (in fact, the latter is definitely true; any retired multi-millionaire who has a bad year in the stock market could have net earnings of zero or less, putting him in the bottom quintile by earnings; he'd still be "rich" by most other standards)
It's also worth noting that the "top 20%" contains more than 20% of the people in the country. Because it's a percentage of households, not of people. Dual-income households skew the results a bit.
A side note about public libraries and such: I've never been able to reconcile my views on individual sovereignty and property rights in relation to public libraries and schools. Thomas Jefferson and I had the same problem.
An individual should not be forced to pay taxes to fund a program for the benefit of others. Yet an uneducated populace is an easy target for propaganda and dictatorship.
I think the first mistake is to assume that decent access to books wouldn't exist if the government didn't provide that service. Private subscription libraries and charity-funded libraries work pretty well too. The first "public" libraries weren't tax-funded, and the system that produced them (including the Carnegie libraries all across the country) could have kept right on doing so. In addition, the growth of new and used bookstores and improved book-making technology has greatly improved access to affordable books for just about everyone.
The second mistake is to assume that public schools help people resist propaganda. That's just silly. Without public schools, people would probably be better than they are now at recognizing propaganda because they wouldn't have been subjected to so much irrational dogmatic nonsense disguised as education. Having a single legal monopoly provider of education services in a huge geographic region makes it much easier for those who want to bias the curriculum in various ways to do so by dumbing down the textbooks and in other ways influencing the statewide curriculum.
In a more competitive system, teaching methods and information sources would be more varied with different schools trying different approaches. There'd be no single point of failure, no solitary commitee one could influence in order to change the information that 90% of the students in a state are exposed to. So the propagandist's task would be harder than it is today.
As I wrote in a different post on this thread, a mountain of celery is typically not considered toxic just because there are ingredients in plants that INSECTS do not like.[...]The non gene engineered version of the plant is not toxic to humans.
It's funny you mention celery. Celery naturally has caffeic acid, which is carcinogenic in rodents. You can find many other examples of foods that naturally contain known carcinogens here. Look for the lines hilited in blue. If you've never heard of such a thing, try googling the phrase "natural carcinogen" some time.
I do agree with you that we probably don't have much of a basis for productive discussion here.
[DDT] may not cause cardiac arrest on contact, but the fact your sperm count is down 50% over guys from a hundred years ago isn't too pleasant a thought; I assure you that it isn't harmless.
The fact that you bring up sperm count suggests to me that it may be you who has been had. The best current evidence is that sperm counts haven't changed much at all in the last 50 years. Here are a couple relevant links:
As to the DDT issue, I don't find Prof. Wurster's letter terribly convincing since he doesn't refer to any new data to counter what seems to have been a vast flood of contrary data that came in well after the EPA ban to which he refers. Why don't we focus on eggshell thinning. Could you speak to the references (and summaries) here? Are you claiming these references don't exist, aren't relevant, are being mis-described, are nonrepresentative? Or, if all these references do exist and do show what they are purported to show, do you have some specific reason for doubting them?
Water is toxic in that too much of it will cause you to drown. I assumed you would figure that out without it having to be spelled out.
I find it absolutely ludicrous that you say the environment is full of natural toxins. Such as what?
Aflavatoxin, for one. More generally: Plants evolve natural pesticides to protect themselves against pests. Many of those are carcinogenic. Most fruits and vegetables we eat are full of naturally-evolved toxins, but just as with the man-made ones, these toxins are at a low enough dosage level that the net benefits of eating plants outweigh the costs of all the summed specific risks, natural or man-made.
You are obviously a person who has a vested interest in the chemical industry.
If you really believe that, you are obviously a nut.:-)
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If you're not at a managerial level and need more localized nuts-and-bolts information, I'll second the recommendation everybody else is making - Testing Computer Software by Kaner/Falk/Nguyen.
If you want to get certified, you can find out about that here. As part of running tests to certify people, the Software Quality Institute maintains a current list of books here for Certified Software Test Engineers and here for Certified Software Quality Analysts.
(I'm signed up to take the CSTE next month.)
For instance, medicine was another big application area at the time. People liked the idea of using virtual cadavers for some instructional purposes as an alternative to real ones. Real cadavers are expensive, bulky, unique, difficult to obtain (in the US), and you can't make parts of them selectively transparent at will to look through or past the layers you're not interested in to point out the good parts. Stanford University was one place that was working on that sort of thing.
But I wouldn't say VR "came from research medicine" either. It came from a lot of people all over the place who read _Neuromancer_ and _Ender's Game_ and liked pushing the limits of technology and had wacky ideas about what it might be made to do.
Another big idea was using telepresence to control things like a robot arm or a mars rover in hostile environments.
NASA had real prospective uses for this sort of technology and a big budget, so they were a real player in the early days of VR. Which isn't to say that everything VResque wouldn't have happened anyway without them, but it's something. It's not nothing.
Here's a relevant link.
"See, when the government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs."
It's nuts to assume that throwing money at some new boondoggle will help the economy. Yeah, throwing money into space might employ people. Or alternately, you could employ a lot of people in the hole-digging industry if the government simply funded a giant industry to dig holes and fill them up again. Why not do that? See the parent poster's link.
I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Average life expectancy was low in the past primarily due to deaths during infancy and childhood. The life expectancy of a male who reached 15 hasn't changed all that much over the years. Some, but not much.
My guess is that extended childhood, like extended retirement, is a luxury good that we are now able to afford. Kids kill time getting random degrees they don't need and will never use, socializing, and basically goofing off for years and years because parents can afford to support them doing that and want to allow it. Every parent dreams of offering his kids "a better life than I had" and each generation is on average a lot richer than the previous one, so each generation gives their kids a little larger gift of time.
Hmph. I voted Libertarian, but had someone put a gun to my head and forced me to pick one of the majors I would have voted for Bush in that election. Why? (1) Reading _Earth In The Balance_ had long ago convinced me Al Gore was a pompous nitwit. (2) Bush claimed to be a fiscal conservative, (3) Bush claimed to be noninterventionist, whereas Gore was big on "nation-building". Subsequent events have pretty much demolished points (2) and (3), but that's only obvious in hindsight.
But getting back to the main topic under discussion, here's something you can't say in America:
It doesn't really matter who wins the presidential election.
Seriously. There's no way to know in advance which candidate will make a good president. They both lie about who they are and what they believe and what they intend to do, and they both will get diverted and distracted by the bureaucracy and the opposing party and world events to such a degree that basically all bets are off. (The weirdest thing about the last election was that Bush pretended to be strongly pro-life and Gore pretended to be strongly pro-choice to fit the expectations of their respective parties, and voters bought it and thought that it mattered.)
Even if you could know what the presidential candidate intends to do, the chances are pretty large that he won't be able to do it, and the chances are even larger that nothing the president does will directly affect your life or that of anybody you know.
National politics is basically an expensive form of entertainment, not a way of getting much useful done in the world. And your vote doesn't matter. Even if it mattered statistically - which it doesn't - even it determined the outcome between the top two candidates - which it doesn't - it still wouldn't make much difference, because those two candidates have been chosen to look and sound pretty much the same and have no preformed opinions of their own that they wouldn't sell in a heartbeat.
Incidentally, that's why the last election was so close. Because there was really nothing to recommend either candidate over the other, it was basically a coin flip. It's silly to call the people whose flips came up Heads "flaming idiots" just because yours came up Tails.
How do you account for the fact that mars is also showing signs of global warming? Sure, it's possible that a bunch of martians are having their own industrial revolution at the same time as ours, but it seems more likely the sun has something to do with it. And sure enough, it turns out the sun is getting hotter. And sunspot activity is changing, and the strength of the sun's magnetic field is changing, and so on. And we don't have good models to account for much of it, and we don't have good data going back more than a few decades on much of it either.
My personal theory is that incrementing the year on our calendars causes global warming. The whole time that people think the planet has gotten hotter, the calendar has been increasing! Coincidence?
Although political pressures are important, I think it's the journalistic pressures that predominate. Bad news sells papers. Scientists are as prone as the rest of us to getting the overall impression that things are getting worse, because bad news travels faster than good news and sells better. Scientists then interpret the data in terms of what they already know.
On the other hand it is not difficult to show that the last fifteen years have followed the course of the predictions of 15 years ago. Nor is this surprising.
The only way you could show "the predictions of 15 years ago" are accurate is by ignoring the ones that weren't. By my memory of the past decade, warming predictions of 15 years ago were based on primitive computer models whose results were continually being revised downward until they came close to fitting the data. But maybe we were paying attention to different people. So could you be more specific as to whose predictions of 15 years ago were accurate, and what those predictions were?
Also, what do you think about indications that other planets are warmingtoo?
Earth isn't the only planet in this solar system that shows a warming trend. Mars is also warming. Did humans sneak over to mars and pollute that planet too? :-)
Trinity's last scene was overdone to precisely that degree.
Maybe the main thing that's "going on" is that the sun has gotten warmer lately. After all, Mars is losing ice coverage too...
The Palm Game Bounce Out" solved the problem by having multiple color/pattern schemes as a preference item; selecting the "sports ball" option makes every item especially unique by pattern.
Base payout rates can be known or roughly guessed at through a combination of public and private (insider) knowledge. Having somebody who maintains slot machines or runs a casino in your circle of acquaintances helps a lot. :-) The Piggy bonus came around often enough that people were able to could calculate its frequency and average value just by careful observation. Note that you don't have to lose any money to do a statistical study of payout frequencies; you can just camp out at a casino and collect statistics while /other/ people lose money on the game.
People like Stanford Wong worked out the odds and/or sanity-checked the odds calculations of others, with help from various high-powered connections. In some cases the calculations were based on recordings of actual play; in other cases it was more of a back-of-the-envelope rough guess.
Advantage bonus-slot players get their edge entirely at the expense of the losing players. Naive players play when the bonus is low or far from paying off; smart players play when the bonus is high or close to payoff. Piggies were so obviously and consistently profitable that some pro players would pay off casino guards, get in fistfights with other pro players ("I was watching that machine first!"), and hassle other patrons for the right to play them. Other games since then (including later Piggy incarnations such as Big Bang) have been tweaked so as to reduce the profit potential considerably.
And luckily enough for the casinos, just letting the machines follow their normal default behavior does exactly this! No further per-client tweaking is required to accomplish it.
To the degree that a little further tweaking /is/ useful, they can do that via the mechanism of comps. The standard thing is to give the biggest expected losers a consolation prize of free meals, shows, airfare and rooms to encourage them to do their losing /here/ rather than at the casino down the street.
Er, no. The piggy has a per-machine progressive - when a certain random event occurs it "adds a coin to the piggy bank." When you get the "break the bank" symbol it pays you whatever is in the piggy bank. The bank starts out at a value of 5, 10, or 15 coins, and on average the bank generally breaks at around a value of 19 coins, making this bonus neutral with respect to payout. Sometimes, through random chance, the bank happens to get very large before it breaks. If you happen upon a very large bank, you aren't in any sense "due for a win" - you still have to wait the same average time before the break-the-bank symbol appears as anybody else would - but you are guaranteed that when you get it, your payment is larger than average. The larger-than-average expectation from this one bet makes up for the generally negative expectation of the machine as a whole.
There are other games for which your "the machine is DUE for a win" does apply, though. On machines with the "diamond mine" bonus, for instance, you might find a machine that is likely to pay out sooner than its neighbor, because the nature of the bonus is that the payout comes when a mine fills up, and you can see how close that is to occuring.
Those who want to exploit such opportunities are well advised to read this book, but I'll warn you in advance the pickings are pretty slim. There are enough knowledgable professional and semi-pro advantage players around that the opportunities don't persist long. Everywhere that profitable slot machines exist, there are people lurking in the background waiting to play them the moment they show a tiny profit opportunity. If you wait and only play slots that show a $20/hour ROI, you'll never get to play because somebody else will have jumped on the opportunity the minute it was a $2/hour ROI.
Depends on the slot. Do you include Video Poker or Piggy Bankin' machines? If so, there are some players that make a healthy return on investment playing those. Some players have even been barred for playing slots too well. But I'll grant you the general rule still holds for most people most of the time.
For example, here's a system that worked a few years ago:
(1) Find a bank of "Piggy Bankin'" slot machines.
(2) Walk down the row, pushing a button on each machine, causing it to "wake up" from attract mode and display how many coins are in the bank.
(3) If the number of coins in the bank is greater than 30, camp out at that machine and play one coin at a time until you "break the bank", then immediately cash out. and stop playing.
(4) go find another batch of Piggies, or hover in the background while people play these for a while so as to build the banks back up so you can tear them down again.
If the bank was at $40, your expected income was $20 (subtract 20 from the bank to get the expected value), and it should take less than 20 minutes of play to "earn" it.
Sadly, you won't find banks of original Piggies anymore, and even if you did, you wouldn't find them with large untapped jackpots because too many other advantage players know about them. So I'm not giving anything up by telling you about it now. There are other similar opportunities around, but (a) they tend to be short-lived or otherwise limited in scope, and (b) players who exploit them too aggressively tend to get barred.
Suppose a slot machine has a payout schedule such that, on average, the machine pays out 97% of the amount it takes in. Somebody will win the occasional big payout but most people will lose, and the losses will tend to more than cover the wins.Why should the casino care whether the payouts go to you rather than the next guy? All they care about is that the overall odds are in their favor, and they are. Somebody will win the jackpots, and it might as well be you as much as anybody else. You don't scare them.
When you say "A basic slot strategy is to move from one machine to another, and play machines in certain areas of the casino floor to improve your odds.", you are talking nonsense. Switching machines doesn't change your odds*, so the casinos don't need to do anything special to foil that strategy. You can't combine negative expectation bets to get a positive expectation bet.
(* actually, there's an exception to that rule, and I've made money exploiting it, but I gather you're not talking about wonging into machines with unusually high per-machine progressives. That's gotten pretty hard to do lately due to stiff competition and "anti-flea" features built into the newest machines by the manufacturers. But it was fun while it lasted, eh?)
A little more web research finds that one can increase rotational responsiveness a bit by changing the key coding, but apparently the Segway ignores forward speed settings above the maximum allowable value. So you can set the speed value to "FF" if you want - and some have tried it, but you still get the same 12.5 as the next guy.
One hacker claims it's been done. He calls the fast, poor tuning radius setting "SUV mode".
But note that which households constitute the "top 20%" and the "bottom 80%" are defined by their income, not their wealth. So for all we know, there could be poor people in the top 20% and rich people in the bottom 80%. (in fact, the latter is definitely true; any retired multi-millionaire who has a bad year in the stock market could have net earnings of zero or less, putting him in the bottom quintile by earnings; he'd still be "rich" by most other standards)
It's also worth noting that the "top 20%" contains more than 20% of the people in the country. Because it's a percentage of households, not of people. Dual-income households skew the results a bit.
The second mistake is to assume that public schools help people resist propaganda. That's just silly. Without public schools, people would probably be better than they are now at recognizing propaganda because they wouldn't have been subjected to so much irrational dogmatic nonsense disguised as education. Having a single legal monopoly provider of education services in a huge geographic region makes it much easier for those who want to bias the curriculum in various ways to do so by dumbing down the textbooks and in other ways influencing the statewide curriculum.
In a more competitive system, teaching methods and information sources would be more varied with different schools trying different approaches. There'd be no single point of failure, no solitary commitee one could influence in order to change the information that 90% of the students in a state are exposed to. So the propagandist's task would be harder than it is today.
It's funny you mention celery. Celery naturally has caffeic acid, which is carcinogenic in rodents. You can find many other examples of foods that naturally contain known carcinogens here. Look for the lines hilited in blue. If you've never heard of such a thing, try googling the phrase "natural carcinogen" some time.
I do agree with you that we probably don't have much of a basis for productive discussion here.
The fact that you bring up sperm count suggests to me that it may be you who has been had. The best current evidence is that sperm counts haven't changed much at all in the last 50 years. Here are a couple relevant links:
Reuters article on male fertility study
medline reference, same study
As to the DDT issue, I don't find Prof. Wurster's letter terribly convincing since he doesn't refer to any new data to counter what seems to have been a vast flood of contrary data that came in well after the EPA ban to which he refers. Why don't we focus on eggshell thinning. Could you speak to the references (and summaries) here? Are you claiming these references don't exist, aren't relevant, are being mis-described, are nonrepresentative? Or, if all these references do exist and do show what they are purported to show, do you have some specific reason for doubting them?
Water is toxic in that too much of it will cause you to drown. I assumed you would figure that out without it having to be spelled out.
I find it absolutely ludicrous that you say the environment is full of natural toxins. Such as what?
Aflavatoxin, for one. More generally: Plants evolve natural pesticides to protect themselves against pests. Many of those are carcinogenic. Most fruits and vegetables we eat are full of naturally-evolved toxins, but just as with the man-made ones, these toxins are at a low enough dosage level that the net benefits of eating plants outweigh the costs of all the summed specific risks, natural or man-made.
You are obviously a person who has a vested interest in the chemical industry.
If you really believe that, you are obviously a nut. :-)