Right, thus my quotes. This is the reason I enjoy to gamble!
Maybe *I* will be the guy who is there when two six sided dice roll an '8' 10 times in a row. Maybe I will see a lot more blackjacks than I statistically should during a 3 day trip to Vegas.
You should come to some tournaments! We're a small community but always in need of new blood.
You won't make a living off of it, but it's a satisfying hobby with good people, and you don't have to put in world champion hours to win money and have fun.
Not really. Scrabble Players buy in to tournaments like poker players. There is no 'house' rake, but oftentimes money is taken out for things like renting a hotel ballroom to or catering the event.
Add on top of that the amount of variance in Scrabble, and you're really not likely to make a consistent living unless you are *very* frugal.
I mean there is Nigel Richards, who undoubtedly the best player the game has ever seen, and he's 'only' won $200,000 since 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If we got some sponsorship money in the game, then sure, but not until then -- we're just trading money around in the community.
My understanding is that this is not correct (your comments on the difficulty of programming an RNG notwithstanding.)
If you can assume a magical perfectly random algorithm for a moment, you simply have to design a slot machine as follows (simple example):
Machine takes $1 bets only. Machine "rolls" a virtual ten sided die. On the number 10, a jackpot of $9 is paid. On any other number, the bet is lost.
This machine would make $1 profit for every $10 wagered, over time, "guaranteed" (by mathematics, not rigged programming) and would never need to be 'overdue' to hit or any other such nonsense. A customer could get lucky and hit 10 jackpots in a row, but the odds would be fairly astronomical.
Incidentally, such a machine would be a pretty bad bet compared to most Vegas slot machines, but I think still a high enough payout to be legal in Nevada. I think it would be roughly comparable to the odds on the bad machines in the McCarran airport...
If you start winning sufficiently large amounts, this doesn't work. The casino might not know where all of its $500 dollar chips are, but it damn well will have a record of all of the $5,000 chips and there is scrutiny when cashing them in.
If you're deliberately cashing in stacks of 1000 at a time in order to avoid scrutiny over $10,000 in chips, that is called 'structuring' and the Federal government doesn't look on it too kindly. But they would have to notice, and I'm sure they miss plenty. I guess it's a risk/reward calculation we all have to make (should we be lucky enough to find ourselves in possession of many thousands of dollars in casino chips...)
I really have nothing more than speculation to go on here so I could be wrong, but judging the state of some of the places I've seen selling lottery tickets, I don't think the lottery has particularly onerous requirements in order to become a vendor.
name and shame man
I've never found a still valid lottery ticket on the ground.
Tiny little compact places full of small people in tiny apartments got fiber optic sooner than the gigantic US with lots of space between places that would be hooked up, and competing options for TV and data.
But somehow they were still behind in Manhattan
Actually that took you 150 chars, considering your character count was part of your point. Better luck next time. [127 chars]
Ok, just change the criteria to "Once something has achieved sentience, it is no longer moral to abort/take that away".
Problem Solved?
It seems like a bad idea because it would result in a tyranny of the majority.
Just trying to pick some things that aren't super controversial as an example here, (since bringing up religion or Israel/Palestine is going to derail this thought experiment): properly elected representative world government would probably vote to ban pornography, or marijuana, and I don't want this.
Both of these things are very much legal where I live.
You could address it by writing a well thought out and intellectual world constitution and system of checks and balances though of course. I'd probably be down for one-world government if this could happen, if for no other reason than to finally escape dysfunctional (by western representative elected government standards) United States political system.
How you pick out and establish this constitution? Tell me how you would address *that* specific problem.
Fine. As well they should.
They advertiser can work this out with the website the same way I would have worked it out with the Miami Herald in 1955. Frankly, I'm not sure if that was trusting the newspaper's ad sales department to be not fraudulent when reporting circulation numbers, or if there was an industry group like Nielsen that verified such things or made estimates based on 3rd party polling.
Whatever the method, plenty of ad sales were made, and everyone was happy, and I know it didn't involve 100% tracking of individual readers. Alexa can either adjust the model that they have to account for the growing number of people who block their web bugs, come up with a new process or model entirely, or die in a fire. I don't particularly care. Life went on before all of this big brother tracking shit, and it will go on after it is defeated, or at least marginalized.
No question that it does present a risk, and it's fair to discuss how to mitigate that.
I propose that they can go about it the same way they do in the newspaper industry, it would be fraud for the New York Times or my local free newspaper claim a larger circulation than they really have when negotiate ad sales. I see why no reason why websites wouldn't have to present Alexa type statistics to back up their claim.
Taking out ads on some sketchy Eastern European hosted link farm should be viewed just as skeptically as calling up a Bulgarian local paper and trusting their staff to give you accurate circulation statistics and demographics about their village. i.e don't be xenophobic about it, but realize that there might be some incentive to take advantage of your ad money, and negotiate according to your risk tolerance level.
Download at your own risk indeed. I was curious so I opened a VM with a fresh IE install (no Adblocking) and chose the download.com link for VLC.
Download.com is reputable enough anyway, right? Long history with cnet serving up shareware and all that?
http://i.imgur.com/l8n2ScB.png
WHICH OF THE DAMN DOWNLOAD BUTTONS OPENS ACTUALLY GETS ME VLC?!?!
Obviously I know, but my dad doesn't, and that's why I have no sympathy for online advertisers.
To do nothing is to be nothing.
