No, it's really no more of a scam or criminal act than, say, encrypting your email. There's nothing wrong with obscuring what you're doing.
Except that according to Bringing Down the House, they had been told not to come back to some of the casinos, and were using disguises to avoid being thrown out again. They were tresspassing, which is a criminal act.
But I agree that team blackjack play can't be considered a scam, especially the part about having spotters waiting for a hot deck. If the casino offers a game where the player has the advantage, a savvy player will take advantage of that. The casino can always change the rules of the game, or choose not to offer it.
You're a bit misinformed about device virtualization, at least the way VMware does it.
Devices aren't merely multiplexed. They're virtualized (or emulated, if you prefer that term.)
What's the difference? For disks, the virtual machine doesn't see the actual disk controller or disk. It sees an emulated IDE or SCSI controller, and the virtual machine's disk storage is backed by a file in the host operating system. Reads and writes to the disk file go through normal Windows or Linux file APIs on the host. (Raw disk passthrough is possible, but it's still more complicated than multiplexing.)
For network devices, the virtual machine sees an emulated NIC. (AMD PCNet32, Intel E1000, or VMware vmxnet device, depending on the VM.) Packets are sent on the physical network via the Windows or Linux networking layers. To receive incoming packets, the host's network card is put in promiscuous mode, and packets destined for the virtual machine's MAC are filtered to it.
Other types of devices are fully emulated. Video? The VM has a VMware SVGA card. Updates to video are emulated, and the contents of the virtual frame buffer can be displayed via VNC, the VMware remote console, or drawn via X or Windows GDI calls via the local UI. Other types of devices in the virtual machine, like interrupt controllers, the chipset, and so on, are fully implemented in software. No "multiplexing" is done with these devices.
I also disagree that the processor emulation is a "hack" that "kills performance." While x86 is not trap-and-emulate style virtualizable, binary translation is hardly a "hack". And it hardly kills performance. Projects like Dynamo have been improving performance of compiled code by dynamically translating it. And Intel announced plans to kill off x86 emulation in IA-64 hardware, because their software solution was good enough.
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But I agree that team blackjack play can't be considered a scam, especially the part about having spotters waiting for a hot deck. If the casino offers a game where the player has the advantage, a savvy player will take advantage of that. The casino can always change the rules of the game, or choose not to offer it.
You're a bit misinformed about device virtualization, at least the way VMware does it.
Devices aren't merely multiplexed. They're virtualized (or emulated, if you prefer that term.)
What's the difference? For disks, the virtual machine doesn't see the actual disk controller or disk. It sees an emulated IDE or SCSI controller, and the virtual machine's disk storage is backed by a file in the host operating system. Reads and writes to the disk file go through normal Windows or Linux file APIs on the host. (Raw disk passthrough is possible, but it's still more complicated than multiplexing.)
For network devices, the virtual machine sees an emulated NIC. (AMD PCNet32, Intel E1000, or VMware vmxnet device, depending on the VM.) Packets are sent on the physical network via the Windows or Linux networking layers. To receive incoming packets, the host's network card is put in promiscuous mode, and packets destined for the virtual machine's MAC are filtered to it.
Other types of devices are fully emulated. Video? The VM has a VMware SVGA card. Updates to video are emulated, and the contents of the virtual frame buffer can be displayed via VNC, the VMware remote console, or drawn via X or Windows GDI calls via the local UI. Other types of devices in the virtual machine, like interrupt controllers, the chipset, and so on, are fully implemented in software. No "multiplexing" is done with these devices.
I also disagree that the processor emulation is a "hack" that "kills performance." While x86 is not trap-and-emulate style virtualizable, binary translation is hardly a "hack". And it hardly kills performance. Projects like Dynamo have been improving performance of compiled code by dynamically translating it. And Intel announced plans to kill off x86 emulation in IA-64 hardware, because their software solution was good enough.