I'm not much of a gambler, but I bet on an MMA match once when I was in Vegas. I was informed that the payouts (or lack thereof) were determined by whatever the judges stated at the end of the night, even if the call was controversial and later invalidated. So this sort of thing does affect other forms of gambling, although obviously on a less significant scale.
Interesting. What would happen if it was found later that the match was thrown on purpose by either the judges or the fighters?
This sort of suggests that the best trading strategy would be if you had a guy inside of the censorship bureau who could help you define reality as you want it.
>Interesting. What would happen if it was found later that the match was thrown on purpose by either the judges or the fighters?
This was over a decade ago so I don't remember the exact details, but I'm sure this was covered by the wording of the agreement and I'd have been out of luck with the bookies.
Unfortunately, combat sports are relatively easy to fix because you only have a few people involved in the live action at a time.
>This sort of suggests that the best trading strategy would be if you had a guy inside of the censorship bureau who could help you define reality as you want it.
As far as I can tell, it seems like the betting market sites explicitly encourage insider activities, and I would not be surprised if this happened for real. See:
>Gamblers cry foul after White House briefing ends seconds before key betting cutoff
A slightly different example because if true, the insider would be changing her behavior rather than changing the reporting of the facts. But it still shows that a small number of insiders (or a single insider) can change betting results.
If 24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, big email providers like gmail should automatically mark all of their emails as spam by default until they fix it.
The default experience probably sucks, but I aggressively block anything even mildly annoying on my Facebook newsfeed, and I like what's left:
Mostly Simpsons memes, Seinfeld memes, Pro Wrestling memes, Sopranos memes, and then intersections of those memes (Seinfeld Pro Wrestling, Simpsons Pro Wrestling, etc.). Some nerd shit. Stuff from the handful of friends of mine and local groups I interact with who still post on Facebook. Maybe <1% total garbage like what the article describes but I immediately block any groups or users who post anything even slightly annoying. I almost never watch any video content at all. It's unironically better passive content than anywhere else left on the web, probably because all the people trying to be hip have gone somewhere else lol
However whatever their UI is sluggish as hell and I'm surprised this wasn't discussed. You'll click block user/group and it will respond multiple seconds later (on my symmetric 1Gbps FIOS connection) and UI elements will jump around. FB messenger is slow as shit and occasionally will fail to decrypt/load messages entirely, even though it works fine on my phone (don't have regular FB on my phone so can't make that comparison). There's an anti-performance cargo-cult among web devs. Perhaps their metrics only show what it saves them on server costs. But if I did not already use the site it would be impossible to convince me to start.
It's not rose-tinted glasses IMO. Aside from cross-device continuous chats (which weren't really relevant at the time) and maybe being harder to send pics (can't recall), Adium was a far better messaging experience than anything modern.
* You could theme it however you wanted to an obscene amount. I had it display all messages right after each other in a small font without any linebreaks and I've never been able to have anything like that since then.
* The dock icon showed the names of the last few people who sent you unread messages
* It integrated with the OS X phone book app so you could it would display a single "John Smith" regardless of how many chat apps (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) you had them on
* It was actually smooth and not clunky (unlike Pidgin at the time and maybe half of apps today).
I used Kopete with inline videos and a newspaper-like theme. It was amazing and beautiful. That under 256MB of RAM. Nowadays you would need 2GB to do the same.
And bear in mind KDE3 was considered the bloated DE, as XFCE (even the GTK2 build) could snappily run with 64 MB of RAM and maybe less with a light GTK engine (yes, choosing the GTK2 engine mattered a lot back in the day).
And, yes, choosing Pidgin and a light window manager such as Fluxbox/Openbox could make run machine run well with 64MB at really fast speeds.
They hate infinite scrolling because it's addictive. I hate infinite scrolling because it's annoying lol. The worst is when you scroll to the bottom of a news article and it just loads another and your scrollbar and your URL/browser history get fucked up.
Anecdotally, my physical therapist (far more connected to the cultural zeitgeist than I am) brought up the ad yesterday and talked about how creepy it was.
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