Have seen it happen, actually - we were on a vacation in Vegas and a friend of mine won 10 straight hands in a row at blackjack. He wasn't "card counting", he's not that smart - he was just lucky enough to be dealt 19+ every hand (he got three facecard+ace combos, the "upside" of the multi-deck shoe), and the dealer was getting to 17 and staying.

The pit bosses came down to the table with two bouncers, took his chips, dragged him to the office, "asked him questions" for an hour while the rest of us were wondering what to do and if we should call the cops. Then they pushed him out, marched him over, made him cash out his chips, and forced him to accept a "banned from blackjack" stamp on his hand before they'd let him go back to his room. Took a whole week and five good scrubbings with shop soap (the orange pumice stuff) for that mark to go away, his boss looked at him REALLY funny the first day back after vacation before hearing the story.

Really, wow - Casinos do cheat. The info on what they do (like stacking 10 decks to the 'shoe', rigging up the odds on the slot machines and dice games, etc) is available all over the net.

Gotta wonder, how many casino employees did it take logging in to find the mod points to call an honest and insightful post "flamebait"?

You actually found enough people gullible enough to buy Heavy Gear 2 so that you could make a LAN game out of it?

That's a sad waste of money.

I was. Tacvek is right, our local one is called "EZTag", though they keep talking about how they want to "link" the local system with other municipalities like Dallas.

The DMCA wasn't, in itself, a bad idea.

You're joking, right? The DMCA was a horrid idea, just like the eternal "copyright extensions" (which should have been unconstitutional as ex post facto law changes anyways) the content cartels have been buying constantly.

Think about it. Mickey Mouse - or at least Steamboat Willie, the cartoon - should have passed into the public domain DECADES ago. Meanwhile, Disney rapes and pillages the public domain with impunity; if you want to make an animated or live-action Snow White, or Beauty and the Beast, or anything else they've already done be prepared for their army of lawyers to start screaming "it's too similar, shut them down" even if you follow the original plotlines of the story/book in question.

What happened was that there was no attempt made to stop companies misusing it

Bullshit. DRM rapes the public domain AND tries to take away the fair-use rights of consumers at the same time.

Under fair use, I have the right to make a backup copy of something I purchased. There are MANY reasons to do this - fire/flood concerns, degradation of the original media (DVD's scratch, tapes wear out, etc), and of course the ever-present Small Children and My Dog That Likes To Chew On Things problems.

Under fair use, I also have the right to space-shift and time-shift content. Broadcast over the airwaves, but I'm out to dinner? No problem. Set a VCR up with a timer, watch it later. Archive it for posterity. Want to convert it for iPod, or PSP, or something else that's portable? I have the right to do so. The next round of "DRM" will be trying to push the so-called "broadcast flag" into the shortly-only-available-variety Digital TV broadcasts, which will require either (a) a recorder that ignores the flag or (b) the goodwill of the broadcaster. This is a fundamental shift that will wholly strip away people's ability to, say, record the sunday Packers game for later because they're busy volunteering as an adult chaperon for a church retreat.

With DRM, I am prevented from exercising my fair-use rights for perfectly legitimate reasons. Prior to the DMCA, if I could figure out a way around it (such as a Macrovision Stripper for VHS), I was able to get my rights back.

After the DMCA, no dice. I committed a "crime" doing what was necessary to exercise my legal right to safeguard what I had purchased.

The DMCA itself was a bad idea. Anyone who says differently needs to be slapped repeatedly.

If the money is being poured into some politician's slush fund, sure that's a problem, but reasonable use fees are exactly what's called for her.

It's always the slush fund. Houston, TX had a "toll road project" that was supposed to end the toll roads 10 years after the beltway was completed. How did they get around it? They put one little "spur" of 1/4 mile off the edge, claimed it was supposed to "eventually" be a mile long, and deliberately left it unfinished so that they can claim the project is "not completed."

Meanwhile the state funding that was SUPPOSED to be going to widening TX-290 in Houston? Oh yeah, that got embezzled to pay for lobbying efforts on the NAFTA superhighway project that nobody wanted.

Point being: it's always the slush fund that the toll road money goes to.

The other thing we have in Houston now? They did away with the posted signage telling you how much the toll is. If you drive round the beltway and you have an "EZPass", you have absolutely no idea how much money you were charged until you get your monthly statement. There are no signs saying what the toll is to get on, No early-warning with "free exits" right before each big pay-plaza, and the only way you're going to find out the toll price is by going through the pay booth and asking the attendant.

And of course there are certain areas (Westpark Tollway) that you're ONLY allowed onto if you have an EZPass. I wound up buying an EZPass just as a defensive measure because of the number of times cops have been caught forcing people over into the exit-only lane onto that toll road since it was built.

Go through those gates without a transponder? Massive fine - and there's no appeal process, no way to get before a judge to say "Here's the situation, I couldn't safely get out of the lane, I got to the first available exit but they've put a toll reader before that exit." It's all a revenue scam, nothing more.

Yawn again, seeing the mod abuse continue unabated...

How many left wingnuts got mod points and confused "flamebait" with "uncomfortable truth" this morning?

You're assuming I have a "side."

I'm on the side of fair elections - one in which nobody repeats Boss Tweed's famous "it's not the votes, it's the count, so KEEP COUNTING" scenario.

That's what the Franken camp pulled. You're obviously not on the side of fair elections.

And that the states each use different voting machine setups, each with their own error rates.

And the sheer logistics of trying to do a "national" recount - look at the amount of vote fraud pulled by the Franken camp in Minnesota - 25 counties that now show more votes than voters, selective recounting of Dem-heavy districts, fraud trying to "certify" the election even while significant challenges existed and some counties hadn't even finished their processes yet... now imagine trying to nationally recount the "national popular vote" while dealing with the fact that every state (and in some states, even different counties) have different counting standards, different voting machinery with higher or lower error rates...

And before some moron screams that I'm "lying" about the Franken thing: Wall Street Journal article on it.

I smell a rat. Its name is Franken.

Backers of this idiotic scheme have been pushing it for years.

The problem is, the "national popular vote" is anything but uniform. Liars like to claim Al Gore "won" the popular vote, but that is a false claim; he had less than 1% difference, and the average error rate of voting machines across the US is somewhere between 2-3%. If you go by the actual vote and work with the number of counties where there were voting irregularities and counting irregularities, there's a major question of how many votes anyone had.

In other words: voting equipment is not perfect. This is why we have recounts.

Now, can you imagine the scale of someone having to do a national recount based on the fact that Gore's supposed "win of the popular vote" in 2000 was under the threshold to trip an automatic recount in every single state that has such a law?

We apportion the votes by state for two reasons:
#1 - The US is supposed to be a union of self-sovereign states. The Federal government is supposed to have only a limited set of powers, with each state independently deciding the rest of the issues for itself. Yes, this has been eroded badly away in recent decades, but it's still true.

#2 - The logistics of holding a "national recount" are simply not possible. Recounting a state alone is bad enough (look at the Dem vote fraud efforts for Franken and the "targeted recounting" of counties, which magically has more votes than voters in several Dem-heavy districts trying to steal the Senate election).

This was an incredibly insightful comment and deserves better. Just more of the left-wing nutshits on Slashdot that get mod points too often and abuse them, I guess...

Do the calculation.

Pull the kid out: a few thousand extra dollars in school costs each year.

Raise a stink: Probably wind up pulling the kid anyways, BUT in the meantime, subject the kid to untold harassment for being "the smart kid" (harassment was another ongoing problem btw), PLUS all the aggravation and nonsense involved, PLUS any court fees involved, PLUS any court fees defending themselves...

Yeah. If they don't make a stink, the public school won't get fixed. On the other hand, they're protecting their kid the best way they know how, and this is just "one more thing" - they've been fighting this school enough already. She's much happier at the new school, and she's in classes moving at her pace rather than the pace of the slowest idiot.

Wow.

I can barely hear you over the sound of all the kool-aid you're drinking.