For all practical purposes, whether this was intentional or accidental, the USA has one party that happens to be composed of two factions.
I guess your definition of "all practical purposes" doesn't include issues like health care, abortion, gay rights, environmental regulations, the promotion of religion in the public sector... you know, issues that matter to most Americans.
To most voters, there is in fact a big difference between the Democrats and Republicans. The difference is only hard to see if you're part of a small group (which is overrepresented on Slashdot) that mostly cares about abstract things like "a fascist nanny-state" (i.e. the number of laws in existence) rather than real, observable changes in their day-to-day lives.
JavaScript was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape under the name Mocha, which was later renamed to LiveScript, and finally to JavaScript.[5] The change of name from LiveScript to JavaScript roughly coincided with Netscape adding support for Java technology in its Netscape Navigator web browser. JavaScript was first introduced and deployed in the Netscape browser version 2.0B3 in December 1995. The naming has caused confusion, giving the impression that the language is a spin-off of Java, and it has been characterized by many as a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript the cachet of what was then the hot new web-programming language.
LiveConnect is "a feature of Web browsers that allows Java and JavaScript software to intercommunicate within a Web page", apparently introduced in Netscape 4.
It's actually easier IMO to avoid file handle leaks, resource lock "leaks", and leaks of everything except memory in C++ than in languages like Java and C#.
How do you figure?
If I write a C# class that uses an OS resource like a file handle, I can write a finalizer for that class that will close the file no matter what happens in my app. And then as long as these handles are only used via my class, I never have to worry about leaking a file handle: the GC will call my finalizer before reclaiming the object's memory.
In C++, I can write a destructor for the class to get a similar effect, but I have to ensure that I only ever allocate instances on the stack (where destruction is guaranteed by the compiler). If I accidentally allocate an instance on the heap, it's a potential leak.
But in a game or a media player, can the JVM guarantee to me that the garbage collector will finish before I have to draw a new frame or decode the next chunk of audio? And how well can a JVM, an app, and its resources fit into the 4 MB RAM of a handheld device?
4 MB? Check the date on your calendar.;)
Java apps run fairly well, even for games and multimedia, on the other kind of G1 (which has significantly more than 4 MB of RAM). They run on the Dalvik VM, not an actual JVM, but they're still written in Java and garbage collected.
When high performance is needed, the solution is usually to reuse objects to avoid creating garbage in the first place.
Javascript was born at Netscape at a time when the buzzword Java was cool and hip... it really should be called EMACSscript but that's not cool and hip enough
As I recall, it was originally called "LiveScript" but then quickly changed to "JavaScript" when Java became the new buzzword.
And it's not like Microsoft doesn't have the resources to fix the editor: they have many in-house coders who prefer to use emacs (more than they like to admit, in any case). Why don't they ask them why they prefer emacs, and think about how they can make VS provide what emacs users want?
VS actually has a lot of Emacs editor features, they're just not enabled by default. Look under Tools|Options|Environment|Keyboard.
How do I move forward five words? [...] How do I jump to the matching parenthesis? [...] How do I look up in three seconds what a key does, or which keys a function is bound to? How do I jump to a function/struct/union/enum definition?
1. Ctrl+Right Arrow, five times.;) 2. Ctrl+] 3. Alt+T, O, then use the keyboard to select Environment|Keyboard (if you really use this all the time, it'll still be selected from before). 4. F12
For the others, you might need to write a macro. Surely no problem for a hardcore hacker like yourself, right?;)
If you want to take my words, as someone who has actually worked with various different packages (including your beloved VisualStudio), I find VisualStudio slow, unstable, and bloated, and too obtrusive for real work. Let's see, the Delphi IDE, to me at least, seems more powerful and versatile (and it even does C++ and C#, too!).
I used Delphi for many years and then switched to VS. Delphi in the early years (up to version 7) was lightweight and versatile.
Then they decided they wanted it to be Borland Developer Studio, and it started sucking, big-time. It became a Visual Studio clone done all wrong: the windows were in slightly different places, but the major differences were that it was slower, way buggier (even by the standards of Delphi, which has always been buggy), and had a ridiculous license file scheme (no fun at all when your development box isn't connected to the internet). Now I dread having to do any maintenance on those old projects, because BDS is such a horrific pain to work with.
So, back to "versatile", is there anything in particular you think BDS can do that VS can't?
And how about C++Builder from Borland?
Heh, if you want Delphi, why not just use Delphi? The VCL is a poor fit for C++, the language extensions they had to add to make it work are ass-ugly, and it takes way longer than Delphi to compile an equivalent program. If you really want to write not-quite-C++ code, you might as well use C++/CLI.
It is almost certain that there is a poker strategy that is unexploitable, and which does not take opponent information into account [...] while such a strategy can't be exploited, it doesn't extract the maximum amount of money from the opponent(s) [...] it may not even beat the rake. So in real life, taking opponent action into account will be needed.
So, uh, what's your point again? Who cares about an unexploitable strategy for losing? Do you consider the game "solved" because you can ignore your opponents' behavior, follow a strict set of rules, and slowly pour your chips down the rake hole? That is missing the point of poker.
Of course as soon as I became a functioning adult it took about five minutes to decide in my self that it was all a bit of bull, but apparently according to the white middle class know it all 20-something "athiests" on Slashdot I'm hopelessly brainwashed and cannot possibly have a conscious thought after all that insidious indoctrination by my ultra abusive parent!
That's cute, but next time, maybe you could try responding to what a person actually writes, instead of going off on a wild rant about what you imagine they might have written in an alternate reality.
I'm not saying it's insurmountable or it happens in every case. But honestly, do you think there would be as many believers as there are if these beliefs weren't forced on children who (often) lack the critical thinking skills to question them? If no one heard about $DEITY until, say, age 18, how many people do you really think would believe it?
"Oh yeah, why didn't I think of that before, it makes so much sense! There's an invisible man in the sky who sacrificed himself to himself to make up for violations of his own rules that hadn't even been committed yet, and that's why we shouldn't sell liquor on Sundays!"
No... if you think about any of these stories objectively, they're silly. Very few mature people would willingly buy into them. But in many cases, they do precisely because they've been raised in a family where it's considered normal.
The shorter the game or run, the high an impact any instance of luck will have.
Certainly. But time in this respect is measured in events, not minutes: you'll see 30+ hands in an hour of playing poker, but it might take days for an investor to make 30 trades.
As in the less varibales you have (poker has far few varibales then the stock market) the grater an impact luck will have one a single move, hand or stock purchase
It's not that simple.
First, I'm not sure you can assume that a game of poker has far fewer variables than the stock market. It has fewer players, but it isn't "luck" when your outcome is affected by other players' choices. The source of luck in poker is the shuffled deck; the source of luck in stock trading is current events.
Second, the generalization you're making doesn't hold up; you can't judge a game simply by the number of variables in play.
Imagine a game where your payoff is determined by rolling a six-sided die and adding 1000 to the result: there's only one variable (and it's luck!), but luck can still only affect the outcome by less than one percent.
Now imagine a game where your payoff is determined by rolling a six-sided die, multiplying by one million, and then adding the current day, hour, minute, and second: now there are five variables, but now the outcome is almost completely dominated by luck.
the casino's will still kick you out for counting cards.
You must be thinking of blackjack.
Isn't poker a problem that's been solved anyway (like chess)?
No. Chess is a game of complete information; poker is a game of incomplete information. Any strategy has to involve some element of speculation about what other players are going to do. That's an art, not a science.
The economy doesn't work like that. When BMW designs a car, they do not know ahead of time how successful it will be.
That's actually an example of car companies relying on monopolies just like the recording industry. What do you think would happen if another company copied BMW's design? Lawsuit party, that's what.
Auto makers can get away with this reliance only because copying a car design is much harder to do (and thus much easier to notice and shut down) than copying a song.
Capitalism is about gambling, to a very large extent. That is why musicians can end up very wealthy, because they take huge risks.
That's also why lottery winners end up very wealthy. But should we encourage people to play the lottery for a chance at a nine-figure income instead of working for a guaranteed five-figure income?
The point is I have a right to choose whether I want payment or not.
Yes, you have the right to want whatever you want. But you don't have the right to restrict other people's actions or speech in order to force them to give you what you want.
The law should not force us to be altruistic.
Certainly not. I hope you haven't gotten the false impression that I'm relying on anyone to be altruistic!
What if all of the players of a game have the same skill at probability?
Then the other factors become more important.
"Skill with reading people" exists in online poker. Contrary to popular belief, "reading" isn't only (or even mostly) about recognizing facial expressions or body language to figure out whether someone has a strong hand. It's also about recognizing patterns of action: a raise means a lot more coming from someone who's folded his last 10 hands than from someone who raises 50% of the time, for instance.
"Skill at hiding your own tells", therefore, also exists in online poker. But it's not about maintaining a poker face, it's about being unpredictable. Or even better, being just predictable enough to give your opponents a false impression that you can use to your advantage. If you're the guy who's folded the last 10 hands, you might conclude that it's time to raise even with a bad hand, because your opponents will believe you have a good hand based on your past behavior.
Now, what if all the players at the table have exactly the same skill level in all these areas? In that case, luck is the only thing separating the players, and it's time to find a different table, because no one can expect to come out ahead.
Given that #2 and #3 are substantially less useful in online poker, it's closer to gambling that it is to a "game of skill," particularly for the vast majority of the population with less than stellar probability skills (see the entire population of people playing the lottery).
Incorrect. You're presuming that all four factors are equally important. But in reality, especially at low-stakes games, skill with probability (#1) is far more important than any of the others.
Poker is a game of situational tactics and strategy. Luck is a factor because you don't know which cards are going to come next, but on the whole it's still a game of skill, because skill is what lets you recognize good bets and stay away from bad bets.
Overall, luck is no more important to poker than it is to investing in stocks or selling insurance. You never know exactly what the outcome will be in any particular case, but you have a damn good idea of how likely each outcome is, and you can plan for that in the long run.
After all, any 3l33t Hax0r can download a hacked copy of OSX from usenet and get it running on their PC.
Maybe. Or maybe they'll find that their PC doesn't have the right set of components - OS X isn't exactly compatible with a wide variety of hardware, you know? What Psystar provides is a system that's known to be compatible with OS X, with prices and configurations that fill the huge, gaping chasm between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro.
That's just silly. If you think long and hard about what you are suggesting, you would realise that it doesn't work.
Trust me, I've thought longer about it than you have.;)
Let's say it takes a year for a musician to come up with material for a single album. To pay them to produce this, you are going to have to pay them a year's wages, plus other costs.
Yes, of course. Just like under the current system: if a musician is going to spend a year recording an album, he has to expect to eventually earn a year's wages plus other costs. The difference is that under the current system, the musician is forced to gamble, because he doesn't know how many copies he'll eventually sell; under my proposed system, he knows ahead of time whether it's a good investment.
Now how do you decide which artist gets the money? Is it any artist who produces some work who gets the money?
What a strange couple of questions. I bet you'd feel silly asking the same thing about any other job: "How do you decide which mechanic gets the money? Is it any mechanic who fixes a car who gets the money?"
The one who gets the money is the one who found a customer who agreed to give him money in exchange for working. Pretty simple.
And how many people are really going to pay for someone to produce works which everyone else will get to enjoy for free?
Do you really think the average person's purchasing decisions are driven by a desire to deprive other people?
If I'm thinking about getting my dirt road paved, but my neighbor doesn't want to chip in, am I going to keep living on a dirt road rather than let him get something for free? Or am I just going to ask myself whether the benefit of living on a paved road is worth the cost? I don't know about you, but I'd choose the latter (just like some people I know who were actually in that situation).
Do you want to go back to the days when a few patrons paid for music works?
I don't think that's a realistic outcome of asking people to pay for production. This isn't the 17th century; we have internet connections and credit cards now. The same technology that makes copyright unenforceable also makes it possible for thousands or millions of people to fund large productions with small amounts of money.
Copyright created means for the process of the production of artistic works to be democratised. With consumers' money being the votes or course!
No, that's what my proposed system does. Copyright encourages works to be created regardless of whether there's any actual demand for them, on the off-chance that they might end up selling a lot of copies.
And such claims would ultimately have more legitimacy than the claim that we own the fruits of another man or woman's labour, and should be able to take it for free.
Sorry, but the "fruits of a man's labor" argument is bullshit. You don't own words just because you write them, any more than you own numbers just because you calculate them, or own a house just because you paint it.
We all take advantage of other people's labor for free every day, and it's fine. You didn't invent the transistor, TCP/IP, or the English language, and yet here you are using all three of them without paying a dime to any of the people who did invent them.
Pray tell, how would the artists make money from creating art.
By selling their labor directly, just like most other workers.
If you're a musician, don't record any songs unless someone has agreed to pay for your time spent writing/recording. Or, if you prefer, record them but don't release them until someone has paid, which is basically the Street Performer Protocol.
Would there be a fixed amount for each art item created? For each song?
That's up to you and your customers. Whether you charge by the song, by the album, by the hour, etc. is an implementation detail.
The important thing is that you and your customers agree on a fair price, so that once your work is released, you don't have to worry about piracy because you've already been compensated.
Who would pay that amount?
Anyone who benefits enough from your work to make it worth paying for. In the case of music, that's most likely the people who want to listen to it (thousands of them, pooling their money), but might also include others: other artists who want to use your work as a soundtrack, for example.
The profit margin on Moby Dick is as close to zero as you can get.
No doubt, but that small margin is still enough to make it worth publishing and distributing. Therefore, I don't think we have to worry about "works that anyone can publish" becoming unavailable.
Of course, in the absence of copyright, every work is a work that anyone can publish. Even works that Walmart commissioned could be republished by someone else the moment they hit the street; Walmart would have a very short period of exclusivity.
But, more importantly, Walmart won't waste their time selling works that anyone can publish.. because competition will drive the price of the work below an acceptable profit margin. So it's pretty obvious that without copyright Walmart would only sell works for which they were the first publisher.
I don't think that's true. You can already buy copies of public domain books and films. Anyone can compete in the market for published copies of Moby-Dick, for example, but that hasn't driven the price down to an unprofitable level.
Indeed, without copyright, copies would be commodities like many other products which are still profitable. Look around you: there are probably a dozen things within arm's reach that are produced by competing firms who all manage to make money at it. Naming just a few, I see CD-R media, printer paper, and plastic straws, all available from many different companies, but even the cheapest ones are still sold for a profit.
So in your world no one gets paid for their content.
That's not what he said.
If the thing you did best in life (i.e., had the most talent at) was creating content, would you want to get paid for it?
I would, and I do. And as a matter of fact, "creating content" is my job as well as my hobby.
But do you know how most people go about getting paid for the thing they do best in life? They don't do that thing for free, up front, and then beg people to pay them for the thing they've already done.
Nor do they go crying to the government for a license to restrict everyone else's speech and actions, in an attempt to force people to come give them money for doing the same thing that everyone else is now forbidden to do.
No, what most people do is demand money for doing that thing they're good at before they do it. Football players don't go out on the field until they have a contract. Architects don't design houses without a paying customer. Mechanics don't fix cars for free, they fix cars that someone is paying to have fixed.
Artists could stand to learn something from those people, and so could you.
They could probably out-distribute the artists with their own work. Why not? WalMart is the biggest distribution channel in the world.
Yes, why not indeed? Artists should be looking to make money from creating art, not from distribution. Leave distribution up to the distribution experts, whether those are retailers like Walmart or P2P networks like BitTorrent.
Without copyright, artist would loose money because publishers/music/movie corporations would just take it.
How, exactly?
I assume you don't think Vivendi or Sony would send goons to mug artists on their way home from the studio, but the alternative ways that publishers could "just take" money from them are even more absurd. Surely you don't believe artists would give these publishers a bunch of free material to resell, without getting anything in return, do you? That's foolish enough with copyright; without copyright, it's ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
For all practical purposes, whether this was intentional or accidental, the USA has one party that happens to be composed of two factions.
I guess your definition of "all practical purposes" doesn't include issues like health care, abortion, gay rights, environmental regulations, the promotion of religion in the public sector... you know, issues that matter to most Americans.
To most voters, there is in fact a big difference between the Democrats and Republicans. The difference is only hard to see if you're part of a small group (which is overrepresented on Slashdot) that mostly cares about abstract things like "a fascist nanny-state" (i.e. the number of laws in existence) rather than real, observable changes in their day-to-day lives.
From Wikipedia:
LiveConnect is "a feature of Web browsers that allows Java and JavaScript software to intercommunicate within a Web page", apparently introduced in Netscape 4.
It's actually easier IMO to avoid file handle leaks, resource lock "leaks", and leaks of everything except memory in C++ than in languages like Java and C#.
How do you figure?
If I write a C# class that uses an OS resource like a file handle, I can write a finalizer for that class that will close the file no matter what happens in my app. And then as long as these handles are only used via my class, I never have to worry about leaking a file handle: the GC will call my finalizer before reclaiming the object's memory.
In C++, I can write a destructor for the class to get a similar effect, but I have to ensure that I only ever allocate instances on the stack (where destruction is guaranteed by the compiler). If I accidentally allocate an instance on the heap, it's a potential leak.
But in a game or a media player, can the JVM guarantee to me that the garbage collector will finish before I have to draw a new frame or decode the next chunk of audio? And how well can a JVM, an app, and its resources fit into the 4 MB RAM of a handheld device?
4 MB? Check the date on your calendar. ;)
Java apps run fairly well, even for games and multimedia, on the other kind of G1 (which has significantly more than 4 MB of RAM). They run on the Dalvik VM, not an actual JVM, but they're still written in Java and garbage collected.
When high performance is needed, the solution is usually to reuse objects to avoid creating garbage in the first place.
Javascript was born at Netscape at a time when the buzzword Java was cool and hip... it really should be called EMACSscript but that's not cool and hip enough
As I recall, it was originally called "LiveScript" but then quickly changed to "JavaScript" when Java became the new buzzword.
In my opinion, more story wouldn't bring players back to the game as much as more interesting multi-player modes [...]
The Lost and Damned added new multiplayer modes. Perhaps this update will too.
And it's not like Microsoft doesn't have the resources to fix the editor: they have many in-house coders who prefer to use emacs (more than they like to admit, in any case). Why don't they ask them why they prefer emacs, and think about how they can make VS provide what emacs users want?
VS actually has a lot of Emacs editor features, they're just not enabled by default. Look under Tools|Options|Environment|Keyboard.
How do I move forward five words? [...] How do I jump to the matching parenthesis? [...] How do I look up in three seconds what a key does, or which keys a function is bound to? How do I jump to a function/struct/union/enum definition?
1. Ctrl+Right Arrow, five times. ;)
2. Ctrl+]
3. Alt+T, O, then use the keyboard to select Environment|Keyboard (if you really use this all the time, it'll still be selected from before).
4. F12
For the others, you might need to write a macro. Surely no problem for a hardcore hacker like yourself, right? ;)
If you want to take my words, as someone who has actually worked with various different packages (including your beloved VisualStudio), I find VisualStudio slow, unstable, and bloated, and too obtrusive for real work. Let's see, the Delphi IDE, to me at least, seems more powerful and versatile (and it even does C++ and C#, too!).
I used Delphi for many years and then switched to VS. Delphi in the early years (up to version 7) was lightweight and versatile.
Then they decided they wanted it to be Borland Developer Studio, and it started sucking, big-time. It became a Visual Studio clone done all wrong: the windows were in slightly different places, but the major differences were that it was slower, way buggier (even by the standards of Delphi, which has always been buggy), and had a ridiculous license file scheme (no fun at all when your development box isn't connected to the internet). Now I dread having to do any maintenance on those old projects, because BDS is such a horrific pain to work with.
So, back to "versatile", is there anything in particular you think BDS can do that VS can't?
And how about C++Builder from Borland?
Heh, if you want Delphi, why not just use Delphi? The VCL is a poor fit for C++, the language extensions they had to add to make it work are ass-ugly, and it takes way longer than Delphi to compile an equivalent program. If you really want to write not-quite-C++ code, you might as well use C++/CLI.
It is almost certain that there is a poker strategy that is unexploitable, and which does not take opponent information into account [...] while such a strategy can't be exploited, it doesn't extract the maximum amount of money from the opponent(s) [...] it may not even beat the rake. So in real life, taking opponent action into account will be needed.
So, uh, what's your point again? Who cares about an unexploitable strategy for losing? Do you consider the game "solved" because you can ignore your opponents' behavior, follow a strict set of rules, and slowly pour your chips down the rake hole? That is missing the point of poker.
Of course as soon as I became a functioning adult it took about five minutes to decide in my self that it was all a bit of bull, but apparently according to the white middle class know it all 20-something "athiests" on Slashdot I'm hopelessly brainwashed and cannot possibly have a conscious thought after all that insidious indoctrination by my ultra abusive parent!
That's cute, but next time, maybe you could try responding to what a person actually writes, instead of going off on a wild rant about what you imagine they might have written in an alternate reality.
I'm not saying it's insurmountable or it happens in every case. But honestly, do you think there would be as many believers as there are if these beliefs weren't forced on children who (often) lack the critical thinking skills to question them? If no one heard about $DEITY until, say, age 18, how many people do you really think would believe it?
"Oh yeah, why didn't I think of that before, it makes so much sense! There's an invisible man in the sky who sacrificed himself to himself to make up for violations of his own rules that hadn't even been committed yet, and that's why we shouldn't sell liquor on Sundays!"
No... if you think about any of these stories objectively, they're silly. Very few mature people would willingly buy into them. But in many cases, they do precisely because they've been raised in a family where it's considered normal.
What are copyrighted is modern translations of documents... which I sort of hate, but then again theology professors have to eat too.
Perhaps the church could've paid the translators with some of that money they're always collecting.
As much as you like to believe religion is being forced on you, it's not.
It is, however, forced on believers' children at an age when they're ill-equipped to give it the scrutiny it deserves.
The shorter the game or run, the high an impact any instance of luck will have.
Certainly. But time in this respect is measured in events, not minutes: you'll see 30+ hands in an hour of playing poker, but it might take days for an investor to make 30 trades.
As in the less varibales you have (poker has far few varibales then the stock market) the grater an impact luck will have one a single move, hand or stock purchase
It's not that simple.
First, I'm not sure you can assume that a game of poker has far fewer variables than the stock market. It has fewer players, but it isn't "luck" when your outcome is affected by other players' choices. The source of luck in poker is the shuffled deck; the source of luck in stock trading is current events.
Second, the generalization you're making doesn't hold up; you can't judge a game simply by the number of variables in play.
Imagine a game where your payoff is determined by rolling a six-sided die and adding 1000 to the result: there's only one variable (and it's luck!), but luck can still only affect the outcome by less than one percent.
Now imagine a game where your payoff is determined by rolling a six-sided die, multiplying by one million, and then adding the current day, hour, minute, and second: now there are five variables, but now the outcome is almost completely dominated by luck.
the casino's will still kick you out for counting cards.
You must be thinking of blackjack.
Isn't poker a problem that's been solved anyway (like chess)?
No. Chess is a game of complete information; poker is a game of incomplete information. Any strategy has to involve some element of speculation about what other players are going to do. That's an art, not a science.
The economy doesn't work like that. When BMW designs a car, they do not know ahead of time how successful it will be.
That's actually an example of car companies relying on monopolies just like the recording industry. What do you think would happen if another company copied BMW's design? Lawsuit party, that's what.
Auto makers can get away with this reliance only because copying a car design is much harder to do (and thus much easier to notice and shut down) than copying a song.
Capitalism is about gambling, to a very large extent. That is why musicians can end up very wealthy, because they take huge risks.
That's also why lottery winners end up very wealthy. But should we encourage people to play the lottery for a chance at a nine-figure income instead of working for a guaranteed five-figure income?
The point is I have a right to choose whether I want payment or not.
Yes, you have the right to want whatever you want. But you don't have the right to restrict other people's actions or speech in order to force them to give you what you want.
The law should not force us to be altruistic.
Certainly not. I hope you haven't gotten the false impression that I'm relying on anyone to be altruistic!
What if all of the players of a game have the same skill at probability?
Then the other factors become more important.
"Skill with reading people" exists in online poker. Contrary to popular belief, "reading" isn't only (or even mostly) about recognizing facial expressions or body language to figure out whether someone has a strong hand. It's also about recognizing patterns of action: a raise means a lot more coming from someone who's folded his last 10 hands than from someone who raises 50% of the time, for instance.
"Skill at hiding your own tells", therefore, also exists in online poker. But it's not about maintaining a poker face, it's about being unpredictable. Or even better, being just predictable enough to give your opponents a false impression that you can use to your advantage. If you're the guy who's folded the last 10 hands, you might conclude that it's time to raise even with a bad hand, because your opponents will believe you have a good hand based on your past behavior.
Now, what if all the players at the table have exactly the same skill level in all these areas? In that case, luck is the only thing separating the players, and it's time to find a different table, because no one can expect to come out ahead.
Given that #2 and #3 are substantially less useful in online poker, it's closer to gambling that it is to a "game of skill," particularly for the vast majority of the population with less than stellar probability skills (see the entire population of people playing the lottery).
Incorrect. You're presuming that all four factors are equally important. But in reality, especially at low-stakes games, skill with probability (#1) is far more important than any of the others.
Poker is a game of situational tactics and strategy. Luck is a factor because you don't know which cards are going to come next, but on the whole it's still a game of skill, because skill is what lets you recognize good bets and stay away from bad bets.
Overall, luck is no more important to poker than it is to investing in stocks or selling insurance. You never know exactly what the outcome will be in any particular case, but you have a damn good idea of how likely each outcome is, and you can plan for that in the long run.
After all, any 3l33t Hax0r can download a hacked copy of OSX from usenet and get it running on their PC.
Maybe. Or maybe they'll find that their PC doesn't have the right set of components - OS X isn't exactly compatible with a wide variety of hardware, you know? What Psystar provides is a system that's known to be compatible with OS X, with prices and configurations that fill the huge, gaping chasm between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro.
That's just silly. If you think long and hard about what you are suggesting, you would realise that it doesn't work.
Trust me, I've thought longer about it than you have. ;)
Let's say it takes a year for a musician to come up with material for a single album. To pay them to produce this, you are going to have to pay them a year's wages, plus other costs.
Yes, of course. Just like under the current system: if a musician is going to spend a year recording an album, he has to expect to eventually earn a year's wages plus other costs. The difference is that under the current system, the musician is forced to gamble, because he doesn't know how many copies he'll eventually sell; under my proposed system, he knows ahead of time whether it's a good investment.
Now how do you decide which artist gets the money? Is it any artist who produces some work who gets the money?
What a strange couple of questions. I bet you'd feel silly asking the same thing about any other job: "How do you decide which mechanic gets the money? Is it any mechanic who fixes a car who gets the money?"
The one who gets the money is the one who found a customer who agreed to give him money in exchange for working. Pretty simple.
And how many people are really going to pay for someone to produce works which everyone else will get to enjoy for free?
Do you really think the average person's purchasing decisions are driven by a desire to deprive other people?
If I'm thinking about getting my dirt road paved, but my neighbor doesn't want to chip in, am I going to keep living on a dirt road rather than let him get something for free? Or am I just going to ask myself whether the benefit of living on a paved road is worth the cost? I don't know about you, but I'd choose the latter (just like some people I know who were actually in that situation).
Do you want to go back to the days when a few patrons paid for music works?
I don't think that's a realistic outcome of asking people to pay for production. This isn't the 17th century; we have internet connections and credit cards now. The same technology that makes copyright unenforceable also makes it possible for thousands or millions of people to fund large productions with small amounts of money.
Copyright created means for the process of the production of artistic works to be democratised. With consumers' money being the votes or course!
No, that's what my proposed system does. Copyright encourages works to be created regardless of whether there's any actual demand for them, on the off-chance that they might end up selling a lot of copies.
And such claims would ultimately have more legitimacy than the claim that we own the fruits of another man or woman's labour, and should be able to take it for free.
Sorry, but the "fruits of a man's labor" argument is bullshit. You don't own words just because you write them, any more than you own numbers just because you calculate them, or own a house just because you paint it.
We all take advantage of other people's labor for free every day, and it's fine. You didn't invent the transistor, TCP/IP, or the English language, and yet here you are using all three of them without paying a dime to any of the people who did invent them.
Pray tell, how would the artists make money from creating art.
By selling their labor directly, just like most other workers.
If you're a musician, don't record any songs unless someone has agreed to pay for your time spent writing/recording. Or, if you prefer, record them but don't release them until someone has paid, which is basically the Street Performer Protocol.
Would there be a fixed amount for each art item created? For each song?
That's up to you and your customers. Whether you charge by the song, by the album, by the hour, etc. is an implementation detail.
The important thing is that you and your customers agree on a fair price, so that once your work is released, you don't have to worry about piracy because you've already been compensated.
Who would pay that amount?
Anyone who benefits enough from your work to make it worth paying for. In the case of music, that's most likely the people who want to listen to it (thousands of them, pooling their money), but might also include others: other artists who want to use your work as a soundtrack, for example.
The profit margin on Moby Dick is as close to zero as you can get.
No doubt, but that small margin is still enough to make it worth publishing and distributing. Therefore, I don't think we have to worry about "works that anyone can publish" becoming unavailable.
Of course, in the absence of copyright, every work is a work that anyone can publish. Even works that Walmart commissioned could be republished by someone else the moment they hit the street; Walmart would have a very short period of exclusivity.
But, more importantly, Walmart won't waste their time selling works that anyone can publish.. because competition will drive the price of the work below an acceptable profit margin. So it's pretty obvious that without copyright Walmart would only sell works for which they were the first publisher.
I don't think that's true. You can already buy copies of public domain books and films. Anyone can compete in the market for published copies of Moby-Dick, for example, but that hasn't driven the price down to an unprofitable level.
Indeed, without copyright, copies would be commodities like many other products which are still profitable. Look around you: there are probably a dozen things within arm's reach that are produced by competing firms who all manage to make money at it. Naming just a few, I see CD-R media, printer paper, and plastic straws, all available from many different companies, but even the cheapest ones are still sold for a profit.
So in your world no one gets paid for their content.
That's not what he said.
If the thing you did best in life (i.e., had the most talent at) was creating content, would you want to get paid for it?
I would, and I do. And as a matter of fact, "creating content" is my job as well as my hobby.
But do you know how most people go about getting paid for the thing they do best in life? They don't do that thing for free, up front, and then beg people to pay them for the thing they've already done.
Nor do they go crying to the government for a license to restrict everyone else's speech and actions, in an attempt to force people to come give them money for doing the same thing that everyone else is now forbidden to do.
No, what most people do is demand money for doing that thing they're good at before they do it. Football players don't go out on the field until they have a contract. Architects don't design houses without a paying customer. Mechanics don't fix cars for free, they fix cars that someone is paying to have fixed.
Artists could stand to learn something from those people, and so could you.
They could probably out-distribute the artists with their own work. Why not? WalMart is the biggest distribution channel in the world.
Yes, why not indeed? Artists should be looking to make money from creating art, not from distribution. Leave distribution up to the distribution experts, whether those are retailers like Walmart or P2P networks like BitTorrent.
Without copyright, artist would loose money because publishers/music/movie corporations would just take it.
How, exactly?
I assume you don't think Vivendi or Sony would send goons to mug artists on their way home from the studio, but the alternative ways that publishers could "just take" money from them are even more absurd. Surely you don't believe artists would give these publishers a bunch of free material to resell, without getting anything in return, do you? That's foolish enough with copyright; without copyright, it's ridiculous.