Call your current provider and ask for them - it might be possible for them to flip a switch somewhere to move your chip and signature to chip and PIN. Certainly if you are planning on travelling in Europe you want C+P since that is what everyone outside of the tourist market will be expecting.

I got a call from the credit card people saying my card was compromized somehow and that they were sending me a new one, but that the old one would continue to work for chip+pin transactions, just the swipe and "tap" transactions would no longer work. I hadly noticed the inconvenience while the replacement was "in the mail".

That card has been compromized a few times over the last few years - it is the one used the most as it has the best rebate program. Finally last year I got tired of needing to contact the dozen places that automatically bill that card, so we moved them all over to my wife's card on the same which gets used much less often and has never been compromized. I guess she doesn't shop in all those shady places that I evidently frequent.

Perhaps I am an asshole. Likely I am suffering from lack of sleep, a poor family life, and lack of fulfilment in my daily existance. Perhaps my raising potential difficulties in the manner I did makes them difficult to understand or even hear. That does not change the validity (or lack thereof) of those issues.

Raising kids is hard. Taking care of infants and toddlers can be extremely difficult. Dealing with a colicky baby at 3am with a toddler who cannot sleep due to a fever and whatever crap has happened in your life that day and the fact you haven't had a decent night's sleep in three weeks can be almost impossible. Having the additional stresses of your own illness or that of your spouse does not make it any easier.

Of course, we are all the products of unbroken lines of parents who "successfully" raised kids to breeding ages, so it clearly is not impossible, and there are uncountable number of people who have made it through much more difficult situations, but there are also huge numbers of people who have been in less difficult situations and have failed miserably. Giving some thought while not in the middle of a desperate situation on how to handle that situation can be very useful. Knowing the phone number of the local crisis hotline, the on-call "tele-nurse", or other available resources can be very useful. Taking seriously friends' offers to "call at any time" is also important. Realizing that the stresses we are talking about can and do have serious mental health effects, which can have very real long term effects even if everyone comes out completely physically fine. "Nobody died, but the divorce wasn't pretty" is not the optimal outcome.

You are right that the spectre of child services swooping in is probably not a useful addition to the discussion. If we assume that the original poster is focussing on family safety to the extent that they think they are mitigating the risk of outcomes that would we catastrophic, then involvement of child services is a non-issue. However the way things have been presented were not along the lines of "I think there is a million-to-one chance that we may have a problem, and I want to provide some extra protection to increase my peace of mind". This felt more like a "There is a 1% chance that we are going to have a problem", and in my opinion those sorts of dangers cannot be reliably addressed by the types of technical measures being considered.

I don't know, 31 incidents from 2000 through 2014 doesn't sound like "plenty of examples, year in and year out"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

And, the voter ID laws being passed do not actually address the types of voter fraud that occasionally takes place.

The above article references 3000 voters being turned away in four states due to the tighter voter id laws enacted there. What fraction of those were fraudlent in the sense that they would not have been legal if proper ID was present?

Are the costs of disenfranchising voters a small price to pay in order to not actually stop any fraud?

So, taking the shoe off the other foot - do you now have some evidence to present of this allegedely common fraud?

Maybe all those people with kids in daycare are delusional, compeltely out of touch with the dangers they are placing their children in. Or mabye you are. Which is more likely?

Yes there are problems and challenges with daycare, and infant daycare spaces may in fact be unobtainable in your area due to high demand, but to think that "a seizure is something you can plan for", there seems to be something wrong with your world view. If your wife's seizures are unpredictable enough that you need some sort of monitoring, and you are able to afford care for your children to take that burden away from her, then not doing so seems strange.

Epilepsy is generally not associated with any other mental issues is it? What is your wife's position on all of this? Does she want to remain primary care giver in this situation? Does she think that this planned monitoring system would be safe enough? How is she coping with this sudden change in her previously well controlled affliction? This type of relaps can lead to major phychological distress - how is she coping with that? Being the primary caregiver of little kids is tough enough for anyone - can she handle the extra burden now that she's no longer confident of having seizures under control? How about you? Is your stress level such that you are maybe in need of some additional support? Are both of you getting enough sleep?

Are there perhaps five friends or family members who could take one day each week to spend the day with your family? Members of the local mom's group? People in your birthing classes? Church members? If the expected frequency of seizures is so high that it feels wrong to burden friends or family with the issue (perhaps monthly, weekly or daily?) then it is clearly too high to rely on tech solutions and panic buttons - your wife needs more help than that. If the expected frequency os seizures is low enough (I don't know how low this would be - maybe once a year seizures?) then maybe it would not be so difficult to provide good social coverage durring work hours, and rely more on the kids when they got older, but unless you work within a hundred meters of your home, I cannot imagine how you can think that any sort of remote monitoring would provide the type of help that you are going to need.

If mom has a seizure and you get alerted to it, what are you going to do about it? How long is your response time to get home? Are you really comfortable that the toddler and the infant will be able to handle things until you arrive? And that you can get home in time to assist your wife with her seizure issues? Are you expecting to call the ambulance to get there before you? What do you expect them to do with the kids? I imagine that the systems in place to care for families in the community might view such a situation as an unfortunate rare accident, but if this type of seizure happens again, do you think social services will be happy with leaving the children under the care of you and your wife? While there are news stories of children being left in awful situations with terrible parents, there are also cases where children are separated from parents who maybe don't seem so bad - would this type of situation fit into that characterization?

Except for the fact that the lion's share of money raised by the lottery is from people purchasing multiple tickets. And for the fact that money raised by lotteries does not typically add to the tax base, it just allows governments to decrease the amount of money they send to the schools from out of general revenue.

http://stoppredatorygambling.o...
"80% of Lottery Profits Come From 10% of the Players"

http://www.cpjustice.org/stori...

"...What we found, however, was that lotteries did not enhance the funding of public education. Lottery states actually used a smaller percentage of their wealth for education than did non-lottery states...."

Offer to purchase his tickets for him, and instead put the money into the bank. Every year take him out to dinner with the weekly "profits". OK, lying to your pop probably isn't the best idea.

Is it good that we have public bodies encouraging people to spend money on lottery tickets? I don't really think so.

Problem gamblers cost society significant amounts of money in the form of lost productivity, broken homes, theft, and all sorts of other ills. Like booze and tobacco, we might not prohibit it outright, but it seems insane to actively encourage it.

Prize-linked savings accounts (sometimes called "no-lose lotteries") are something I could get behind, but lotteries as we now run them do seem like taxes that tend to fall largely on those least able to pay them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Almost all of the solid research I have seen on what factors actually account for future earnings, success in school, etc. tend to support the idea that the details of what you do for the kids are not really that important, but the broad brushstrokes of how your family and you kids' peer's families view schooling, working to achieve goals, and the importance of critical thinking seem to be more important that what school or educational method is experienced.

The fact that you and your spouse are trying to find "the best" for the tyke probably means that you kid is likely to do well no matter what you choose. Try to find friends for your kids who's families place similar importance on the idea of education, and that will probably help too. Kids who apply to elite schools and do not get accepted seem to have as successful lives as those who attend.

You might also consider that rather than home schooling, you might make an even bigger difference in the wider community's development if you sent your kid to the local school, and then devoted some of the time and resources that you would have spent on home schooling to supporting that local school with volunteering and money. If all of the "keen" parents abandon the public schools for alternative educational programs, us slackers who don't care enough about our kids are going to do so little that generations of public school kids are just going to end up as bums and thugs, putting all the weight of responsibile citizenship on your kids as they grow up. Seriously though, the local school would love to have additional involved parents, and the other families there would also love to have additoinally involved parents.

The US has managed to get other places to "bend over" for things like reporting on US citizenship financial holdings by threatening to fine companies who do not report such info. Since almost every financial institution of any size has some US dealings, they are vunerable to this threat. Up until the Canadian government said "OK we will collect the data for you, big brother Sam, don't hurt us" the Canadian financial sector was all in a tizzy trying to figure out how it could prove to Uncle Sam it was not harbouring undeclared citizens, figuring out how to provide the info that Sam wanted on the declared citizens that would violate privacy laws, and figuring out how to divest themselves of clients who were US citizens to get rid of the complicated reporting requirements. I know of at least one international venture capitol fund that refuses investments from USA citizens for exactly this reason.

While the USA may be morrally bankrupt, the financial weight that they can bring to bear on any institution is pretty large.

Well, I think that is only true for countries that have a tax treaty with the USA. And it only covers wages and "earned income", and you are still required to file onerous records regardless of your income.

The USA is virtually the only country in the world that requires non-resident citizens to file tax returns and pay USA taxes on all of their world income regardless of where it is earned. Canadians living in the USA do not pay taxes to Canada, or even have to file Canadian tax returns. The reverse is not the case. Even giving up your US citizenship doesn't remove this burden entirely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I would disagree, you would be a fool to enter into a business relationship with someone you do not have at least a bit of trust in. The contract gives you some potential way of recovering some of your costs if things go bad, and raising the cost to both parties in behaving badly, but the contract doesn't really protect you from someone really trying to rip you off. You need to trust: that they are who they say that they are; that you will be able to find them afterwards if things go badly; that they will eventually be able to pay if the court case goes against them; that the courts will read the contract the way you think they should; and a host of other items. The fact is that most people in most situations are quite trustworthy, and most of us trust the rest of us to behave reasonable in most situations.

Businesses that do not show enough trust in their suppliers and customers end up incurring extra expenses because of that lack of trust, perhaps making them less competitive. Of course businesses that show too much trust may end up with extra losses leading to their demise, so there is some sort of balance between the two extremes.

Good point.

I don't think you use the phrase "optimum strategy" the same way I would. While it is true that psychology could infleuence how your oponent might play, if you have the game solved, the oponent's play does not matter. For 4x4 TTT, a winning strategy is outlined here http://all-r-math.blogspot.ca/... which also references Zermelo's theorem showing that "For any finite two-player games of perfect information in which the players move alternatingly and in which chance does not affect the decision making process, one of the players will always have a non-losing strategy. If the game cannot end in a draw, then this non-losing strategy is a winning strategy." Physchology does not enter into it for these types of games.

It seems as though the term "optimum strategy" is being used in the context of "Perfect Play"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But I digress. If in fact the robot is using a "perfect play" strategy, as defined above, then knowing it's strategy won't help. The optimal strategy against "perfect play" is by definition also "perfect play" - any other strategy against perfect play is sub-optimal. It is true (as referenced above) that "perfect play" will never exploit the weaknesses of non-perfect play, but that does not mean that "perfect play" provides any weaknesses that can be exploited by some other strategy.

So, it looks like the site has recovered - have you played yet? Have you been able to consistently win? http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/

I guess we should really read the articles to find out what they classify as "optimal strategy".

I could believe that there exist strategies that would be effective against certain players/strategies than their "optimal strategy" (by "more effective" I suppose I mean "would beat them faster"), but that does not mean that their "optimal strategy" against any oponent does not exist.

On what basis do you make the claim "The programmers assume an optimal strategy for poker, but there is no such optimum strategy as such."?

Tick-tack-toe, chess, and go all clearly are not "games of skill" if you have the knowledge of all possible board configurations and their interconnections. For chess and go it is not clear when (if ever) our storage and calculating abilities will completely be able to map out the space, but the space is defined. Since there is no chance element involved it is easier to see how knowledge of the space translates into the optimal moves.

For games like poker, craps, and rock-paper-sissors(-lizard-Spock?), it does become a bit more difficult to define "optimal" since each hand or round is non-deterministic, so there is no possiblity of guaranteeing a win in any particular round. In RPS, there is a strategy that is guaranteed to win at least 50% of the time, against any possible other strategy. Even knowing that your opponent is using this strategy does not give you enough information to consistently beat it. Why do you think that such a strategy does not exist for poker?

Is there a name for one-card poker? Each player gets one card, you bet/call/raise/fold and you are done. Has that been "solved"? A quick web search turns up a three-card-deck variant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which has been analyzed back in 1950. Is there some qualitative difference to suggest that more complex forms of poker cannot be analyzed in a similar way?