"Loyalty Discounts" is a great propaganda phrase. I wonder if they had some World War II styled posters in their office. Something along the lines of "Good software helps everyone! Show your TRUE COLORS with Microsoft Loyalty Discounts!"
Remove the monthly fee or drop it to something small. I don't understand what that fee is for - TV listings? Yahoo can list those online for free, so they can't be that pricey.
Record shows to nice, unencumbered xvid or divx files. Let me move them back and forth from my Tivo drive to local Windows/Samba shares, and play divx files directly off my computer. Give me a nice easy way to edit the files as I watch them and permanently remove the commercials from the files, so that I can then archive a high quality commercial free version of the show I recorded.
TiVo can win by letting customers do what they like with their recordings, rather than dealing with the restrictions of cable company provided DVRs.
Of course, the nice thing about Madden is how quickly it depreciates. Just buy it in a year or two. I'm not much of a Madden fan, but it was hard to pass up when I saw Madden 2004 for my PS2 on sale for 83 cents. Yes, that was really the price!
1. This step wouldn't involve bets. It's simply asking the question, if we flopped all five cards and turned our hands over, what are the odds the computer's hand would be the best? Since there's only 1325 possible hands the computer might hold, it should be straightforward.
2. This is definitely the hardest part of my program to develop. But the goal is not to guess what the opponent is doing. It is instead to make plays that are statistically like to come out ahead, given that we really have no clue what the opponent is trying to do. Rather than approaching the problem as a computer trying to act like a human, approach it simply as a computer.
3. This is important when playing as a human, but not so important when we reduce it to a game of numbers.
4. This does include bluffing. The idea is that once the computer knows the statistically best method of play, it will randomly adjust up or down from that point. Its hands will be played anywhere from very tight to very loose, distributed in a bell curve around the statistical best play. Sometimes it will bluff, sometimes it will be conservative. As the human opponents try to figure out a pattern and second-guess it, they will just end up making bad plays and losing out.
Humans might manage to get a good expected value out of 7-2 off suit. But try that against this computer program and you're very likely to get burned.
The real idea behind my approach is to simply take the human element out of the equation. Rather than trying to read other players' hands and exploit their weaknesses, simply reduce poker to a game of chance and percentages. The computer wouldn't play the game of guessing and counter guessing. It would just randomly choose to play a few hands aggressively, a few hands loosely, and most hands towards the middle.
Human opponents would be trying to guess the computer's playing style and counter accordingly. However, they'd always be wrong, because the computer has no playing style! Therefore, when they try to bluff or slow play the computer, they would be making making moves that have a statistically lower expected value than the computer's moves, and so over the course of many hands the computer should come out ahead.
So, will you be selling your car on ebay? If it would be ridiculous to pay $3-4k more for a TDI, wouldn't it also be ridiculous to not accept an offer for $3-4k of free money which you could apply towards a newer car with less miles?
The really good titles may not go under $20 for the 360. But now is a great time to pick up a PS2! There are plenty of great games to be be had for under $10 used.
I'll probably pick up a 360 around 2011 or so, when the cost of system & games is more in line with what they're worth to me. Of course, I'm more of a casual gamer.
1. Create a routine that, given the cards in my hand, the cards exposed, and the number of opponents, would calculate the exact statistical odds that I have the winning hand.
2. Create a second routine that would consider those odds, plus my betting position, relative chip stacks, current bets, blind sizes, etc. and would decide which move (on a scale from folding to aggressive betting) has the greatest expected value. The best way to figure this out would probably be from having done an analysis on a huge database of millions of played hands and their results. I know such databases are available.
3. A third routine would analyze the patterns of my opponents' behaviors in previous hands, and make small adjustments to the "best move" calculation based on the perception of whether those players are loose or tight. (This would not be a big factor, and it might be better to skip it altogether so that opponents couldn't use it to game the system.)
4. Apply a bell curve to randomly distribute my actual play, centered around my calculated "best move." This would prevent opponents from knowing for sure what sort of hand I have. Over many hands, they would hopefully hurt themselves as they try to guess what sort of player I am. In fact I would be a completely neutral player with random skews to either side of the tight/loose scale.
The biggest variable to work out would be the shape of the bell curve. Also, should the randomly chosen style of play change over the course of a hand, or should it stay the same throughout the hand?
I wonder how well this would work. There are probably flaws that the best experts could exploit, but I bet I'd beat most human players.
There's a huge gap between "cheap and easy" and "$40 billion." It's hard to imagine how the cost could be so high, when there is nothing about this project that seems to be monumentally difficult. GPS is already an established technology, the satellites are already in the air, and some planes are already equipped for GPS navigation. There is nothing new that needs to be invented, it's just a matter of implementation.
The system has to be extremely reliable and fault proof, so that means the development costs will be high. But $40 billion? Perhaps that includes technology to allow officials to fly commercial planes remotely in the event that they head off course towards a major city.
The thing about rants is that they're noisy and accomplish nothing. If/. were a car, then rants would be like a loose, rattling door panel or something. That's why we need less rants and more analogies. Analogies are more like the engine of the/. "car" because they drive the discussion forward. The best analogies are about cars, because cars are easy for everyone to understand. Car analogies are like a sweet fine-tuned V-8 engine, and they make/. perform like a supercar.
Actually, I think we agree that the law often has serious problems, and that it can unfairly implicate people who weren't causing anyone harm and who should have been left alone. I could list several of my own examples of stupid prosecution taking place, where basic common sense should have led to the case being dropped. I find these cases extremely frustrating. (I'm in the US myself, but I think this discussion applies just as well over here.)
And yet, the reason we need the law to be specific is that we can't trust officers and judges to apply fairness and common sense to every situation. Even if they did, there will always be a wide range of opinions over what is fair and reasonable. There needs to be explicit standards, or there will be ten times as many examples of unfair prosecution to choose from.
Take your example of the law against using cell phones while driving. I happen to agree with this law - studies have shown that cell phone use while driving causes the same level of impairment as drunk driving. Without this law, who would decide if people should be fined for this activity? Some officers would decide it was unsafe and hand out tickets left and right, but others would not do anything. Some judges would decide to impose severe penalties, some would give minor fines, and some would simply throw the cases out.
You cite the example of the man charged for simply pressing the hands free button on his phone. I think the officer could have applied common sense and never written the ticket. Officers generally have the ability to apply discretion in what tickets they write and in how they enforce the laws. However, there will always be those who decide to be dicks and write tickets just because they can. Considering that the law was changed to prevent this from happening again, it seems to me like the system was working pretty well overall. It will never be a perfect system.
Here in the US we have a law against driving at a speed that is "unsafe for conditions." It allows for discretion to be applied. It's a rare case of common sense being written into the law. Perhaps that should be done more often. (This still doesn't explain why our highway speed limits are 20 MPH too low!)
God, I hope this is a troll post. The only way this would feasible is if all the police were fair, kind, humble people with the community's best interests at heart. The reality is that some officers are corrupt, and most officers are dicks. The job attracts those who enjoy the power it gives them - and if you increase their power as you are suggesting, even more dicks will become police officers. With this power they will be able to bully people and fine anyone who looks at them the wrong way.
I'm amazed by how casually you dismiss the issue of unjust arrest and imprisonment, as though it's a minor detail. I didn't know you have to be a hippie to care about that. Did you realize as you visited there you were protected by your Australian citizenship? Perhaps if there they threw you in a cell for a year because they didn't like your accent, you'd become a hippie yourself.
Are you serious? If you're the person who wrote or edited this article, and you think it is "fixed" in its current form, you need to go find another career. At least please go study the topics of proper sentence structure, the meaning of its vs. it's, and how to communicate clearly. Perhaps you could sign up for a writing class.
Question: Which of the following are properly formed sentences?
"Unlike traditional stations on air, this time jumping right to online shows." "Of course provided the shows are any good." "We see most stations asking for videos, YouTube material with download availability in place such as "I Report" but is it too little too late?"
HTML5 will only be useful on new browsers that support it. Given that, why worry about backward compatibility at all? Why not just throw out HTML altogether and design something from the ground to meet modern requirements and to be easier to use?
I don't think anyone is using HTML because they just love it.
I also suggest using Password Maker to generate unique passwords for you. I don't even know the passwords to the websites I visit any more, I simply have them generated from one core password.
You could use this extension by itself or combine it with the Secure Login extension.
Actually, I think his idea is not so bad. Winamp does license the mp3 codec, and I doubt there's anything too scary in their EULA. But just think of how many examples of scary EULA clauses have been posted here on/. They are found buried in the midst of legalese that most end users never read. I'm sure that anyone setting up a Windows system would find things to object to in their software agreements, if they read and comprehended those agreements.
So in the end, it's not that one system has objectionable clauses and the other one does not. The difference is that one system makes those clauses very clear while the other one hides them carefully.
The problem here is that the death threats need to be translated from blog-speak to their real world equivalents.
Blog-speak: thats dumb
Translation: I respectfully disagree on that point.
Blog-speak: ur a fuckin loser noob go eat shit
Translation: I strongly disagree, and hold you in low esteem.
Blog-speak: im gonna come find ur house and chainsaw you into pieces and feed u 2 my dawg
Translation: I find your opinions reprehensible and I see no value in continuing this discussion.
I don't know if it is even possible to express a legitimate death threat in blog-speak. Perhaps with punctuation it could be done.
In all seriousness, I would like to know the business case for not open sourcing these drivers. It seems to me they have everything to gain and nothing to lose. I can't imagine there's any significant technological secrets contained in the drivers themselves. The value they are selling is in the physical printers, and the drivers are just there to make the printers useful.
Why not open the drivers to a free process that will almost certainly improve them, and at the same time improve the company's image in the Linux community?
I know some companies have pulled shady contests that sould similar (e.g. send us your ideas for a video game, if we make it we'll send you a t-shirt), but this ain't that.
Even that doesn't seem that shady to me, so long as the company is completely upfront about the terms. There are probably many great ideas out there that are lost because the thinker doesn't have the time, desire, or know-how to bring his idea to life. I think such a person would prefer to see their idea become reality rather than have it be simply forgotten.
Slashdot Mirror
"Loyalty Discounts" is a great propaganda phrase. I wonder if they had some World War II styled posters in their office. Something along the lines of "Good software helps everyone! Show your TRUE COLORS with Microsoft Loyalty Discounts!"
Here's how TiVo could be more appealing to me:
Remove the monthly fee or drop it to something small. I don't understand what that fee is for - TV listings? Yahoo can list those online for free, so they can't be that pricey.
Record shows to nice, unencumbered xvid or divx files. Let me move them back and forth from my Tivo drive to local Windows/Samba shares, and play divx files directly off my computer. Give me a nice easy way to edit the files as I watch them and permanently remove the commercials from the files, so that I can then archive a high quality commercial free version of the show I recorded.
TiVo can win by letting customers do what they like with their recordings, rather than dealing with the restrictions of cable company provided DVRs.
Of course, the nice thing about Madden is how quickly it depreciates. Just buy it in a year or two. I'm not much of a Madden fan, but it was hard to pass up when I saw Madden 2004 for my PS2 on sale for 83 cents. Yes, that was really the price!
With a billion installs, I wonder how many PCs are displaying a BSOD at any given moment in time. Perhaps a million or so?
Reinstall Windows for the 11th time on the same machine, and you'll quickly discover why it's so mind-numbing.
1. This step wouldn't involve bets. It's simply asking the question, if we flopped all five cards and turned our hands over, what are the odds the computer's hand would be the best? Since there's only 1325 possible hands the computer might hold, it should be straightforward.
2. This is definitely the hardest part of my program to develop. But the goal is not to guess what the opponent is doing. It is instead to make plays that are statistically like to come out ahead, given that we really have no clue what the opponent is trying to do. Rather than approaching the problem as a computer trying to act like a human, approach it simply as a computer.
3. This is important when playing as a human, but not so important when we reduce it to a game of numbers.
4. This does include bluffing. The idea is that once the computer knows the statistically best method of play, it will randomly adjust up or down from that point. Its hands will be played anywhere from very tight to very loose, distributed in a bell curve around the statistical best play. Sometimes it will bluff, sometimes it will be conservative. As the human opponents try to figure out a pattern and second-guess it, they will just end up making bad plays and losing out.
Humans might manage to get a good expected value out of 7-2 off suit. But try that against this computer program and you're very likely to get burned.
The real idea behind my approach is to simply take the human element out of the equation. Rather than trying to read other players' hands and exploit their weaknesses, simply reduce poker to a game of chance and percentages. The computer wouldn't play the game of guessing and counter guessing. It would just randomly choose to play a few hands aggressively, a few hands loosely, and most hands towards the middle.
Human opponents would be trying to guess the computer's playing style and counter accordingly. However, they'd always be wrong, because the computer has no playing style! Therefore, when they try to bluff or slow play the computer, they would be making making moves that have a statistically lower expected value than the computer's moves, and so over the course of many hands the computer should come out ahead.
So, will you be selling your car on ebay? If it would be ridiculous to pay $3-4k more for a TDI, wouldn't it also be ridiculous to not accept an offer for $3-4k of free money which you could apply towards a newer car with less miles?
Just curious. :)
The really good titles may not go under $20 for the 360. But now is a great time to pick up a PS2! There are plenty of great games to be be had for under $10 used.
I'll probably pick up a 360 around 2011 or so, when the cost of system & games is more in line with what they're worth to me. Of course, I'm more of a casual gamer.
Here's how I would make a poker program:
1. Create a routine that, given the cards in my hand, the cards exposed, and the number of opponents, would calculate the exact statistical odds that I have the winning hand.
2. Create a second routine that would consider those odds, plus my betting position, relative chip stacks, current bets, blind sizes, etc. and would decide which move (on a scale from folding to aggressive betting) has the greatest expected value. The best way to figure this out would probably be from having done an analysis on a huge database of millions of played hands and their results. I know such databases are available.
3. A third routine would analyze the patterns of my opponents' behaviors in previous hands, and make small adjustments to the "best move" calculation based on the perception of whether those players are loose or tight. (This would not be a big factor, and it might be better to skip it altogether so that opponents couldn't use it to game the system.)
4. Apply a bell curve to randomly distribute my actual play, centered around my calculated "best move." This would prevent opponents from knowing for sure what sort of hand I have. Over many hands, they would hopefully hurt themselves as they try to guess what sort of player I am. In fact I would be a completely neutral player with random skews to either side of the tight/loose scale.
The biggest variable to work out would be the shape of the bell curve. Also, should the randomly chosen style of play change over the course of a hand, or should it stay the same throughout the hand?
I wonder how well this would work. There are probably flaws that the best experts could exploit, but I bet I'd beat most human players.
If the patent lawyers (who make their money from patent disputes) don't want her in this position, then I hope she will be appointed.
There's a huge gap between "cheap and easy" and "$40 billion." It's hard to imagine how the cost could be so high, when there is nothing about this project that seems to be monumentally difficult. GPS is already an established technology, the satellites are already in the air, and some planes are already equipped for GPS navigation. There is nothing new that needs to be invented, it's just a matter of implementation.
The system has to be extremely reliable and fault proof, so that means the development costs will be high. But $40 billion? Perhaps that includes technology to allow officials to fly commercial planes remotely in the event that they head off course towards a major city.
The thing about rants is that they're noisy and accomplish nothing. If /. were a car, then rants would be like a loose, rattling door panel or something. That's why we need less rants and more analogies. Analogies are more like the engine of the /. "car" because they drive the discussion forward. The best analogies are about cars, because cars are easy for everyone to understand. Car analogies are like a sweet fine-tuned V-8 engine, and they make /. perform like a supercar.
Actually, I think we agree that the law often has serious problems, and that it can unfairly implicate people who weren't causing anyone harm and who should have been left alone. I could list several of my own examples of stupid prosecution taking place, where basic common sense should have led to the case being dropped. I find these cases extremely frustrating. (I'm in the US myself, but I think this discussion applies just as well over here.)
And yet, the reason we need the law to be specific is that we can't trust officers and judges to apply fairness and common sense to every situation. Even if they did, there will always be a wide range of opinions over what is fair and reasonable. There needs to be explicit standards, or there will be ten times as many examples of unfair prosecution to choose from.
Take your example of the law against using cell phones while driving. I happen to agree with this law - studies have shown that cell phone use while driving causes the same level of impairment as drunk driving. Without this law, who would decide if people should be fined for this activity? Some officers would decide it was unsafe and hand out tickets left and right, but others would not do anything. Some judges would decide to impose severe penalties, some would give minor fines, and some would simply throw the cases out.
You cite the example of the man charged for simply pressing the hands free button on his phone. I think the officer could have applied common sense and never written the ticket. Officers generally have the ability to apply discretion in what tickets they write and in how they enforce the laws. However, there will always be those who decide to be dicks and write tickets just because they can. Considering that the law was changed to prevent this from happening again, it seems to me like the system was working pretty well overall. It will never be a perfect system.
Here in the US we have a law against driving at a speed that is "unsafe for conditions." It allows for discretion to be applied. It's a rare case of common sense being written into the law. Perhaps that should be done more often. (This still doesn't explain why our highway speed limits are 20 MPH too low!)
God, I hope this is a troll post. The only way this would feasible is if all the police were fair, kind, humble people with the community's best interests at heart. The reality is that some officers are corrupt, and most officers are dicks. The job attracts those who enjoy the power it gives them - and if you increase their power as you are suggesting, even more dicks will become police officers. With this power they will be able to bully people and fine anyone who looks at them the wrong way.
I'm amazed by how casually you dismiss the issue of unjust arrest and imprisonment, as though it's a minor detail. I didn't know you have to be a hippie to care about that. Did you realize as you visited there you were protected by your Australian citizenship? Perhaps if there they threw you in a cell for a year because they didn't like your accent, you'd become a hippie yourself.
Are you serious? If you're the person who wrote or edited this article, and you think it is "fixed" in its current form, you need to go find another career. At least please go study the topics of proper sentence structure, the meaning of its vs. it's, and how to communicate clearly. Perhaps you could sign up for a writing class.
Question: Which of the following are properly formed sentences?
"Unlike traditional stations on air, this time jumping right to online shows."
"Of course provided the shows are any good."
"We see most stations asking for videos, YouTube material with download availability in place such as "I Report" but is it too little too late?"
Answer: None of the above.
HTML5 will only be useful on new browsers that support it. Given that, why worry about backward compatibility at all? Why not just throw out HTML altogether and design something from the ground to meet modern requirements and to be easier to use?
I don't think anyone is using HTML because they just love it.
I also suggest using Password Maker to generate unique passwords for you. I don't even know the passwords to the websites I visit any more, I simply have them generated from one core password.
You could use this extension by itself or combine it with the Secure Login extension.
http://passwordmaker.org/
Actually, I think his idea is not so bad. Winamp does license the mp3 codec, and I doubt there's anything too scary in their EULA. But just think of how many examples of scary EULA clauses have been posted here on /. They are found buried in the midst of legalese that most end users never read. I'm sure that anyone setting up a Windows system would find things to object to in their software agreements, if they read and comprehended those agreements.
So in the end, it's not that one system has objectionable clauses and the other one does not. The difference is that one system makes those clauses very clear while the other one hides them carefully.
Oh, it's still random, but you don't want to use the data as it's subject to GITM attacks.
(GITM = God in the middle)
The problem here is that the death threats need to be translated from blog-speak to their real world equivalents.
Blog-speak: thats dumb
Translation: I respectfully disagree on that point.
Blog-speak: ur a fuckin loser noob go eat shit
Translation: I strongly disagree, and hold you in low esteem.
Blog-speak: im gonna come find ur house and chainsaw you into pieces and feed u 2 my dawg
Translation: I find your opinions reprehensible and I see no value in continuing this discussion.
I don't know if it is even possible to express a legitimate death threat in blog-speak. Perhaps with punctuation it could be done.
By the way, if anyone is interested in picking up this vulnerability (she's a beaut!), please head over to my new business venture, AppleWormBay.com.
In all seriousness, I would like to know the business case for not open sourcing these drivers. It seems to me they have everything to gain and nothing to lose. I can't imagine there's any significant technological secrets contained in the drivers themselves. The value they are selling is in the physical printers, and the drivers are just there to make the printers useful.
Why not open the drivers to a free process that will almost certainly improve them, and at the same time improve the company's image in the Linux community?
Even that doesn't seem that shady to me, so long as the company is completely upfront about the terms. There are probably many great ideas out there that are lost because the thinker doesn't have the time, desire, or know-how to bring his idea to life. I think such a person would prefer to see their idea become reality rather than have it be simply forgotten.
Hmmm, I've never heard of this "Par T Sex Press.com" - are they a quality reseller?