I played thousands of hours of Quake 3: Arena. I really like WoW, in particular the peculiar competitive-end-game-raiding aspect. Different strokes to different folks. My "dislike" is RTS games, which I've never enjoyed.
I played at launch, but started getting bored around 20 and by 40, unable to afford a mount, quit playing.
A friend convinced me to return just before WotLK. Using Refer-a-Friend, we leveled up. I found it a lot more pleasant with the faster XP and with his borrowed gold buying my mount.:)
Once I was into outland, questing was tolerable, and in WotLK/Northrend, it was downright fun.
Once I discovered raiding in Naxxramas at 80, I was hooked. Now that's why I play. As I got into the game I've changed guilds a couple times and now raid with a very high end guild. (We had a top 25 US Heroic Lich King kill, for those who know what that means.)
The high end raiding content is genuinely hard. It's a mix of optimizing gameplay mechanics, good awareness of all the things going on, twitch reactions, strategy and personal strategic planning (what "we" do in a given situation and what "I" do if X happens), etc. For my guild, also a lot of fun camaraderie, although some top guilds are notorious for being not-so-friendly places. It's a bit time consuming, as it will eat 5 nights a week potentially during "progression", where we're learning and downing fights, but when you factor in how little time it takes up in the "off season", it only eats ~9-10 hours/week on average.
Anyhow, end game raiding = a blast. That's why I play.
I tend to feel the same way. I don't feel like developers who don't understand their production environment, or system architects who don't understand the code, can be fully successful. As a lead developer for a fairly high traffic site, I thought a lot about how the code and hardware interacted, and what the various limits were and how things degraded.
There are people who really enjoy the fact that people make amazing games with fabulous production values. I've played plenty of AAA quality games the past few years that I thought were an absolute bargain - Portal, Dragon Age to name a couple. I would have thought $200 was a bargain for Baldur's Gate II back when I played that. I don't think I've seen many (any?) $60 5-hour games. I've seen a couple fairly short console games - I played Infamous and Prototype, and those were both 15-25 hour games that were $60. Given the amazing quality of the games, it didn't seem like a ripoff to me. (Although I just rented Prototype for like $6, but Infamous I bought and I'm not unhappy about that.)
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Dragon Age couldn't have been made with a price point of $10. I may be right or wrong, but I'm pretty sure Bioware thinks so. Part of the reason for that is simply that there are a shit-ton of people who wouldn't pay $10; they'd say it should have ads, or that Bioware should have released a demo, or that they weren't paying for it out of protest that DLC was released at launch, or.... anything.
Frankly, it's embarrassing. There are just too many people who could afford the games they play, and just don't want to make choices. They don't want to sacrifice anything in their life to afford their game - they refuse to give up their cable TV, their Starbucks, their Camaro payment, or work an hour of overtime here or there; so instead of choosing, they steal, because they can. F that. Buy it, or don't buy it. Then the "real" value of games will be known.
If you have only one broadband provider, then even if they are brutally honest about how they mess with your traffic, then most people are still going to use that.
When I was 15, Race Drivin' (the sequel to Hard Drivin') was out; it was a sit-down racing simulator with amazingly realistic wheel feedback/physics. Unlike basically every other game I've played, the car you were driving behaved much like a real car. (ie, you could fish tail, and if you steered with the slide you could recover)
The first time I ever accidentally fishtailed my car in real life, I instinctively steered with the slide and recovered. I've heard that people without training tend to turn against the slide and exacerbate the problem. I have always thought that without my really extensive Race Drivin' playing, I wouldn't have reacted that way. (And when I say extensive, I mean it - I got to the point where I could gain time on laps and once played for an entire hour and stood up with the "remaining time" at the cap.)
I have a friend who was my college roommate. We were both big into Street Fighter. A friend of his was a champion Street Fighter played (a 3rd place finish in the national SF2:CE tournament capcom held), and also was a fanatical and highly-ranked Mario Kart player. He also played poker online and so on. But he was no shut in; he was lean and fit, played basketball, and was a generally very cool guy.
Anyhow, my friend and I were chatting a couple years ago and I asked what this guy was up to - and I was told he had to swear off gaming entirely, because if he played, he'd get sick. It apparently affected him if he was around anything electronic for too long, too close. Of course, you never know - but he was completely normal, funny, balanced when I knew him. So while this feels incredibly preposterous, I do know a guy, who knows a guy, who swore off electronics. (He didn't sue anyone, and afaik, he wasn't affected by something as far away as a neighbor's wifi; he had to be in close proximity to a TV or computer or such.)
Everyone would be bothered by poisonous gas and foghorns. By contrast, there are a half dozen wifi networks visible from my house and no one is bothered.
Assuming his malady is real - which is obviously far from certain - he has an affliction which makes him sensitive to something that is all but pervasive in any suburban or urban environment now. Even if we assume 100% that he really is made ill, I'd expect him to put his bed and a chair inside a Faraday cage in his house first to accommodate his own disability, and then, assuming that's insufficient, he should go live in the wilderness.
I'm probably in the minority, but once Mass Effect for PC was announced, I was excited about it. I griped several times about the DRM, and finally gave up. It was only a long time later that I noticed it was on steam, cheap, and with only steam drm; so I finally picked it up. With Dragon Age, they just had a cd check. I pre-ordered a collector's edition. There is no question that I paid $40 less, many months later, for Mass Effect than I would have without the DRM.
And I never pirate anything.
Let me point this out: people say that people would pirate a lot less if DRM went away. I'm not going to dispute that; I'm not sure. But I am also sure that DRM would go away if everyone stopped pirating, also.
Most people suggesting piracy is a legitimate recourse to DRM don't suggest buying copies. Because "it would just encourage them to keep making more DRM, thinking it is working".
They want to have their cake and eat it too. I support the idea of not buying games with unacceptable DRM. But if you disagree with the DRM enough to not buy it, then you should not play. (In my book, people who buy it and also pirate it to get a non-gimped copy are fine, but then you run the risk of picking up viruses/etc from the cracks, and you certainly aren't sending any sort of message to the publisher.)
There are places that understand and deal with the sentiment. Our sysadmins are oncall, but they're paid purely by the month. They were integral parts of procuring, configuring, and deploying the hardware, and 100% of the maintenance is their job. If nothing at all goes wrong and no maintenance is needed, we still send them the same amount of money. (And it's quite a lot for that case.) And in return, they are motivated to build things reliably, because it won't wake them up in the middle of the night.
Not only would Carmack have ported to linux, he would have talked about it here on Slashdot. He's probably too busy still building his Iron Man suit to port to Linux nowadays.
"Google employees can read your stuff" is not accurate.
Google just doesn't trust internal people; the security folk there are very savvy, and they know that incidents from inside are a serious risk. Which isn't to say they are HIPAA compliant; until they are, your doctors don't belong there. But it isn't fair to Google to imply that internal people there have unauthorized access to your mail. Are there people who might be able to read your email without authorization? Perhaps. But I think Google has controls to mitigate the risk of it happening, and make it so that it cannot happen without an audit trail.
Regardless of the rules, a jury has the power to judge both the facts and the law. So you can judge the "rules" you were given as surely as you can judge the violation of the law.
.
"It is not only [the trial juror's] right, but his duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court." -- John Adams, 1771
.
"The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy." -- John Jay, First Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1789
.
"The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided." Twelfth U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, Harlan F. Stone, 1941
.
There's a huge potential for misuse, but if presented with a case where a defendant is clearly guilty of an unjust law, you have a civic duty to consider a not guilty vote regardless of the law; jury trials exist precisely as a defense against unjust laws and unjust application of laws.
.
"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Thomas Paine, 1789
Did you think I was pasting in ARIN queries from a unix cli and don't know how http 1.1 vhosts work? oookay.
That said, that's a good point; of course a dns hijack search will try to be context sensitive. So I put comcast.sucks.com into my/etc/hosts file with that address and visited it...
We are sorry, comcast cannot be found. We suggest that you check the spelling of the web address or try a different search term.
Of course comcast as a term DOES have search results, but they're clearly not handling a domain + no query term situation correctly.
I want to know more about how the OP came by his account; apparently Time-Warner offered some "combined with earthlink" accounts in some places, and then Comcast took over Time Warner's cable accounts....
It makes me wonder if there is dns hijacking on a per-port basis, and the OP's port used to be occupied by an Earthlink customer. It's easy to see a scenario were "Earthlink powered by Time Warner" customers were hijacked, and this is an artifact.
We are sorry, porn cannot be found. We suggest that you check the spelling of the web address or try a different search term.
I'm not sure why Comcast would redirect you to Earthlink in the first place... but even if they did, I seriously doubt they'd redirect you to a search for pr0n in particular. Time to dig a little more.
A major proponent of this bill is the "Poker Players Alliance" (http://pokerplayersalliance.org/). They've been lobbying for several years now; they formed around the time Bill First put the UIGEA into a port security bill using a procedural move.
I think the majority of people who are passionate about seeing this bill pass are poker enthusiasts who just want to be able to play poker online as a hobby. I don't give a damn if they legalize online slot machines or keno, and I think it's generally ridiculous to utilize such things. At least in Vegas, you get free drinks while wasting your money. But poker is a game of skill in the long run.
The UIGEA was ethically bankrupt:
* It carved out exceptions, such as betting on horses * 43 States have State Lotteries, aka, the "Tax On People Who Are Bad At Math". These are games which, like typical casino games, are inherently "unbeatable". They are pure chance, and stacked very heavily against the player.
At this point, millions of people are still playing poker online, but they don't enjoy any sort of regulatory protection, and the United States does not enjoy any tax revenue from it; although the UIGEA burdens our banks with a significant cost of compliance by trying to force them to screen out transactions intended to move money to the online poker houses.
As far as Harry Reid goes, I think online poker has been a net benefit to Vegas; huge numbers of players visit for the World Series of Poker each year, as well as a bunch of lesser events. And those numbers have dwindled since the UIGEA passed in 2006.
What is the delta between what you would choose to not pay for when you can pirate anything, and what you would choose to pay for if you could pirate nothing?
I'm sure there are many people who obtain illegal copies who truly would not pay for a real one, but I'm also certain there are many people who pirate hundreds of works and pay for zero, who in the absence of piracy channels, would pay for some subset of those works, despite their protestations to the contrary at the moment.
Maybe if that's your objection, you should rave against pharmaceutical companies; since they operate the same way, and not getting a drug can have a significantly bigger impact on life than not getting a game.
First of all, I've read my fair share of Sklansky too.
Second, you're grossly misapply a gambling viewpoint to the situation of homeowner's insurance for a huge number of reasons.
First, insurance companies don't permit you to take out multiple insurance policies on the same house, save when the secondary insurance stipulates that it takes effect outside the limits of the first. (So if Policy A doesn't cover flood damage, you can get policy B to fill that gap. But Policy B will stipulate that if you DO have flood insurance on another policy, then your cover under policy B is invalid, or other such limit).
Second, a lot of efficient insurance policies are actually +EV by their very nature. The insurance business has a term called "cost of float". Insurance collects a ton of money up front for events which may or may not occur down the road. They do their best to predict the cost of the sum of those future events, and they're good at it.
It turns out that in many cases, *if* you value your dollars at $0, your cost to self-insure will actually be higher, because the insurance company is actually collecting less money from you than they expect to pay out.
How? There's a time value to money. If an insurance company has a "cost of float" of 102%, it means for every $1M in premiums collected, they expect to pay out $1,020,000. Nominally a loss, but the payouts are far enough into the future that they can invest the money now, earn a return, make the payment, and have a profit.
If you're judging on a more immediate term - ie, "Well, I can take out insurance and wreck the house, which would only sell for $200k, but the policy will pay $250k", then your "+EV situation" is predicated upon the commission of a serious crime. Tons of people go to jail for insurance fraud, thinking they can game the system. So you'll have to factor in the EV of a long prison term.
The worst part of it all is that a lot of insurance contracts actualy allow the buyer to control the outcome, relying on the good nature of the majority in order to keep margins small enough to fool those same good natured people into thinking that they benefit in some way from the wager.
This relies on an assumption of insurance fraud. Insurance doesn't pay out when you cause the "outcome". "Winning" a bet over insurance in that way is analagous to "winning" a poker hand by pulling out a gun and telling the other guy that you're going to shoot him if he doesn't fold.
Slashdot Mirror
I played thousands of hours of Quake 3: Arena. I really like WoW, in particular the peculiar competitive-end-game-raiding aspect. Different strokes to different folks. My "dislike" is RTS games, which I've never enjoyed.
I played at launch, but started getting bored around 20 and by 40, unable to afford a mount, quit playing.
A friend convinced me to return just before WotLK. Using Refer-a-Friend, we leveled up. I found it a lot more pleasant with the faster XP and with his borrowed gold buying my mount. :)
Once I was into outland, questing was tolerable, and in WotLK/Northrend, it was downright fun.
Once I discovered raiding in Naxxramas at 80, I was hooked. Now that's why I play. As I got into the game I've changed guilds a couple times and now raid with a very high end guild. (We had a top 25 US Heroic Lich King kill, for those who know what that means.)
The high end raiding content is genuinely hard. It's a mix of optimizing gameplay mechanics, good awareness of all the things going on, twitch reactions, strategy and personal strategic planning (what "we" do in a given situation and what "I" do if X happens), etc. For my guild, also a lot of fun camaraderie, although some top guilds are notorious for being not-so-friendly places. It's a bit time consuming, as it will eat 5 nights a week potentially during "progression", where we're learning and downing fights, but when you factor in how little time it takes up in the "off season", it only eats ~9-10 hours/week on average.
Anyhow, end game raiding = a blast. That's why I play.
http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/d33x7/reddit_is_hiring/c0x7aq5
I tend to feel the same way. I don't feel like developers who don't understand their production environment, or system architects who don't understand the code, can be fully successful. As a lead developer for a fairly high traffic site, I thought a lot about how the code and hardware interacted, and what the various limits were and how things degraded.
There are people who really enjoy the fact that people make amazing games with fabulous production values. I've played plenty of AAA quality games the past few years that I thought were an absolute bargain - Portal, Dragon Age to name a couple. I would have thought $200 was a bargain for Baldur's Gate II back when I played that. I don't think I've seen many (any?) $60 5-hour games. I've seen a couple fairly short console games - I played Infamous and Prototype, and those were both 15-25 hour games that were $60. Given the amazing quality of the games, it didn't seem like a ripoff to me. (Although I just rented Prototype for like $6, but Infamous I bought and I'm not unhappy about that.)
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Dragon Age couldn't have been made with a price point of $10. I may be right or wrong, but I'm pretty sure Bioware thinks so. Part of the reason for that is simply that there are a shit-ton of people who wouldn't pay $10; they'd say it should have ads, or that Bioware should have released a demo, or that they weren't paying for it out of protest that DLC was released at launch, or.... anything.
Frankly, it's embarrassing. There are just too many people who could afford the games they play, and just don't want to make choices. They don't want to sacrifice anything in their life to afford their game - they refuse to give up their cable TV, their Starbucks, their Camaro payment, or work an hour of overtime here or there; so instead of choosing, they steal, because they can. F that. Buy it, or don't buy it. Then the "real" value of games will be known.
If you have only one broadband provider, then even if they are brutally honest about how they mess with your traffic, then most people are still going to use that.
When I was 15, Race Drivin' (the sequel to Hard Drivin') was out; it was a sit-down racing simulator with amazingly realistic wheel feedback/physics. Unlike basically every other game I've played, the car you were driving behaved much like a real car. (ie, you could fish tail, and if you steered with the slide you could recover)
The first time I ever accidentally fishtailed my car in real life, I instinctively steered with the slide and recovered. I've heard that people without training tend to turn against the slide and exacerbate the problem. I have always thought that without my really extensive Race Drivin' playing, I wouldn't have reacted that way. (And when I say extensive, I mean it - I got to the point where I could gain time on laps and once played for an entire hour and stood up with the "remaining time" at the cap.)
svefg cbfg
FYP
I haven't updated my firmware in a long time. It makes me wonder - are games labeled with a firmware requirement?
Given that Sony is attaching undesirable terms to their firmware updates, should they be?
I have a friend who was my college roommate. We were both big into Street Fighter. A friend of his was a champion Street Fighter played (a 3rd place finish in the national SF2:CE tournament capcom held), and also was a fanatical and highly-ranked Mario Kart player. He also played poker online and so on. But he was no shut in; he was lean and fit, played basketball, and was a generally very cool guy.
Anyhow, my friend and I were chatting a couple years ago and I asked what this guy was up to - and I was told he had to swear off gaming entirely, because if he played, he'd get sick. It apparently affected him if he was around anything electronic for too long, too close. Of course, you never know - but he was completely normal, funny, balanced when I knew him. So while this feels incredibly preposterous, I do know a guy, who knows a guy, who swore off electronics. (He didn't sue anyone, and afaik, he wasn't affected by something as far away as a neighbor's wifi; he had to be in close proximity to a TV or computer or such.)
Everyone would be bothered by poisonous gas and foghorns. By contrast, there are a half dozen wifi networks visible from my house and no one is bothered.
Assuming his malady is real - which is obviously far from certain - he has an affliction which makes him sensitive to something that is all but pervasive in any suburban or urban environment now. Even if we assume 100% that he really is made ill, I'd expect him to put his bed and a chair inside a Faraday cage in his house first to accommodate his own disability, and then, assuming that's insufficient, he should go live in the wilderness.
I'm probably in the minority, but once Mass Effect for PC was announced, I was excited about it. I griped several times about the DRM, and finally gave up. It was only a long time later that I noticed it was on steam, cheap, and with only steam drm; so I finally picked it up. With Dragon Age, they just had a cd check. I pre-ordered a collector's edition. There is no question that I paid $40 less, many months later, for Mass Effect than I would have without the DRM.
And I never pirate anything.
Let me point this out: people say that people would pirate a lot less if DRM went away. I'm not going to dispute that; I'm not sure. But I am also sure that DRM would go away if everyone stopped pirating, also.
Most people suggesting piracy is a legitimate recourse to DRM don't suggest buying copies. Because "it would just encourage them to keep making more DRM, thinking it is working".
They want to have their cake and eat it too. I support the idea of not buying games with unacceptable DRM. But if you disagree with the DRM enough to not buy it, then you should not play. (In my book, people who buy it and also pirate it to get a non-gimped copy are fine, but then you run the risk of picking up viruses/etc from the cracks, and you certainly aren't sending any sort of message to the publisher.)
I think based on /.'s post, it would be "foreign keys not updating" rather than "indexes not updating".
There are places that understand and deal with the sentiment. Our sysadmins are oncall, but they're paid purely by the month. They were integral parts of procuring, configuring, and deploying the hardware, and 100% of the maintenance is their job. If nothing at all goes wrong and no maintenance is needed, we still send them the same amount of money. (And it's quite a lot for that case.) And in return, they are motivated to build things reliably, because it won't wake them up in the middle of the night.
I'm really eager to take the educational advice of a person who uses apostrophes to pluralize nouns.
Not only would Carmack have ported to linux, he would have talked about it here on Slashdot. He's probably too busy still building his Iron Man suit to port to Linux nowadays.
"Google employees can read your stuff" is not accurate.
Google just doesn't trust internal people; the security folk there are very savvy, and they know that incidents from inside are a serious risk. Which isn't to say they are HIPAA compliant; until they are, your doctors don't belong there. But it isn't fair to Google to imply that internal people there have unauthorized access to your mail. Are there people who might be able to read your email without authorization? Perhaps. But I think Google has controls to mitigate the risk of it happening, and make it so that it cannot happen without an audit trail.
Regardless of the rules, a jury has the power to judge both the facts and the law. So you can judge the "rules" you were given as surely as you can judge the violation of the law.
.
"It is not only [the trial juror's] right, but his duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court." -- John Adams, 1771
.
"The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy." -- John Jay, First Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1789
.
"The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided." Twelfth U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, Harlan F. Stone, 1941
.
There's a huge potential for misuse, but if presented with a case where a defendant is clearly guilty of an unjust law, you have a civic duty to consider a not guilty vote regardless of the law; jury trials exist precisely as a defense against unjust laws and unjust application of laws.
.
"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Thomas Paine, 1789
Did you think I was pasting in ARIN queries from a unix cli and don't know how http 1.1 vhosts work? oookay.
That said, that's a good point; of course a dns hijack search will try to be context sensitive. So I put comcast.sucks.com into my /etc/hosts file with that address and visited it...
Of course comcast as a term DOES have search results, but they're clearly not handling a domain + no query term situation correctly.
I want to know more about how the OP came by his account; apparently Time-Warner offered some "combined with earthlink" accounts in some places, and then Comcast took over Time Warner's cable accounts....
It makes me wonder if there is dns hijacking on a per-port basis, and the OP's port used to be occupied by an Earthlink customer. It's easy to see a scenario were "Earthlink powered by Time Warner" customers were hijacked, and this is an artifact.
So I'm thinking... ok, if Comcast hijacked your dns, why would they send it to an earthlink IP?
So I navigate to 207.69.131.9...
And I get javascript redirecting me to:
http://earthlink-help.com/main?AddInType=Bdns&Version=1.4.11&FailureMode=1&ParticipantID=xj6e3468k634hy3945zg3zkhfn7zfgf6&ClientLocation=us&Referer=&FailedURI=http%3A%2F%2F207.69.131.9%2F&SearchQuery=
Where I get some kind of branded search and this:
I'm not sure why Comcast would redirect you to Earthlink in the first place... but even if they did, I seriously doubt they'd redirect you to a search for pr0n in particular. Time to dig a little more.
You seem to be missing the all-important "?????" step... what craziness is this?
A major proponent of this bill is the "Poker Players Alliance" (http://pokerplayersalliance.org/). They've been lobbying for several years now; they formed around the time Bill First put the UIGEA into a port security bill using a procedural move.
I think the majority of people who are passionate about seeing this bill pass are poker enthusiasts who just want to be able to play poker online as a hobby. I don't give a damn if they legalize online slot machines or keno, and I think it's generally ridiculous to utilize such things. At least in Vegas, you get free drinks while wasting your money. But poker is a game of skill in the long run.
The UIGEA was ethically bankrupt:
* It carved out exceptions, such as betting on horses
* 43 States have State Lotteries, aka, the "Tax On People Who Are Bad At Math". These are games which, like typical casino games, are inherently "unbeatable". They are pure chance, and stacked very heavily against the player.
At this point, millions of people are still playing poker online, but they don't enjoy any sort of regulatory protection, and the United States does not enjoy any tax revenue from it; although the UIGEA burdens our banks with a significant cost of compliance by trying to force them to screen out transactions intended to move money to the online poker houses.
As far as Harry Reid goes, I think online poker has been a net benefit to Vegas; huge numbers of players visit for the World Series of Poker each year, as well as a bunch of lesser events. And those numbers have dwindled since the UIGEA passed in 2006.
What is the delta between what you would choose to not pay for when you can pirate anything, and what you would choose to pay for if you could pirate nothing?
I'm sure there are many people who obtain illegal copies who truly would not pay for a real one, but I'm also certain there are many people who pirate hundreds of works and pay for zero, who in the absence of piracy channels, would pay for some subset of those works, despite their protestations to the contrary at the moment.
Maybe if that's your objection, you should rave against pharmaceutical companies; since they operate the same way, and not getting a drug can have a significantly bigger impact on life than not getting a game.
First of all, I've read my fair share of Sklansky too.
Second, you're grossly misapply a gambling viewpoint to the situation of homeowner's insurance for a huge number of reasons.
First, insurance companies don't permit you to take out multiple insurance policies on the same house, save when the secondary insurance stipulates that it takes effect outside the limits of the first. (So if Policy A doesn't cover flood damage, you can get policy B to fill that gap. But Policy B will stipulate that if you DO have flood insurance on another policy, then your cover under policy B is invalid, or other such limit).
Second, a lot of efficient insurance policies are actually +EV by their very nature. The insurance business has a term called "cost of float". Insurance collects a ton of money up front for events which may or may not occur down the road. They do their best to predict the cost of the sum of those future events, and they're good at it.
It turns out that in many cases, *if* you value your dollars at $0, your cost to self-insure will actually be higher, because the insurance company is actually collecting less money from you than they expect to pay out.
How? There's a time value to money. If an insurance company has a "cost of float" of 102%, it means for every $1M in premiums collected, they expect to pay out $1,020,000. Nominally a loss, but the payouts are far enough into the future that they can invest the money now, earn a return, make the payment, and have a profit.
If you're judging on a more immediate term - ie, "Well, I can take out insurance and wreck the house, which would only sell for $200k, but the policy will pay $250k", then your "+EV situation" is predicated upon the commission of a serious crime. Tons of people go to jail for insurance fraud, thinking they can game the system. So you'll have to factor in the EV of a long prison term.
This relies on an assumption of insurance fraud. Insurance doesn't pay out when you cause the "outcome". "Winning" a bet over insurance in that way is analagous to "winning" a poker hand by pulling out a gun and telling the other guy that you're going to shoot him if he doesn't fold.