I encourage you to read the wikipedia entry on wetware, which does refer to the term’s original meaning as the physical, but also clarifies that the term is now used to refer to the thought processes as well, as per Rucker’s use in the eponymous book; “…all sparks and tastes and tangles, all its stimulus/response patterns – the whole bio-cybernetic software of mind.”
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Like alcohol, because that goes well with making good financial decisions.
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Yup. Because there’s nothing that they like better than somebody who goes home with a “I was ahead $20k” story but none of the money left because other people imagine that they’d be smart enough to quit when they were ahead. Great word of mouth advertising for the price of a few drinks and possibly a room.
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Well the casinos felt that it was…Eventually I believe that a few court cases ruled that card counting wasn’t cheating, so they fell back on asking you to leave and having you arrested for trespassing if you tried to re-enter.
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Excellent article, though Kane sounds like a bit of a twat. And instead of using the exploit to earn a steady living, they sit in a single casino for hours, cashing out several hundred thousand dollars at a time. It should’ve been treated as the goose that lays golden eggs. Instead they tried to force foie gras out of it and the giant noticed the commotion and swatted them rather unceremoniously.
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Card counting is not illegal. The use of electronic or mechanical devices to help you count cards is illegal. But casinos can boot you out if you do it and will, in short order, have you banned from every casino in Nevada.
Because what really matters is that the casinos can cheat everyone, but not be cheated in return.
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As with most addiction, I don’t think a rational understanding helps a lot. These things are driven by emotion.
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Like with silicon, where the software states have corresponding hardware states (amount of charge carriers in DRAM capacitors, on FET or flash gates…), brain tissue has the software states encoded in internal states of individual neurons, the interconnects and their “weights”, hormone levels, and more.
With wetware, the “hardware” and “software” parts have even fuzzier boundary than with silicon. A closer example in silicon realm is an FPGA, which is fundamentally an array of simple gates and logic elements with a dense interconnect matrix. The function, in a somewhat distant resemblance to neurons, is determined by enabling/disabling the interconnects. The hardware can be considered to be software-defined.
Even with computers, hacking can have the form of feeding specially crafted inputs to get the desired output, without the requirement of any alteration of an existing system. In this case, exploiting the gambling-related behavior clearly counts as a wetware hack.
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Oh boy, you aren’t kidding. Considering how many casinos have these machines had they just been a bit more cautious and nondescript they could have gone on forever with nobody being the wiser. What Idiots.
But I suppose expecting degenerate gamblers who’ve blown through millions of dollars over the years to be prudent is the epitome of foolishness.
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You concede the original usage, but then refer to a more recent usage as acceptable just because it’s newer? How arbitrary and illogical.
I refer to the original usage, and decry the more modern one as stupidly slipshod, conflating meanings and slaughtering clarity. Why you would support linguistic corruption of a very precise term into an immensely imprecise one is beyond my comprehension.
Except that it was never that much precise term to start with. With brain, somewhat like with FPGAs, you cannot properly separate software from hardware, they are too closely interlinked. Also, with older computers (think magnetic drums and discrete parts) it was not unusual to patch hardware with those thin wires to tweak the functionality to match the software; I think some machines even had user-defined instructions. See also red wire.
There’s an entire song about these patch wires. (Took me way too long to find. Not in my private archive where I thought it must have been. Maybe bad migration from some ancient computer?)
Relevant part:
Now the red wire comes from the programmer’s box,
When the software alone cannot cope.
And we tear it all out just as soon as he’s gone,
Even though he will whine, cry and mope.
For although he is good with a keyboard or mouse,
He can’t solder to save his life,
And his patches will make the system melt down,
Causing trouble, and anguish, and strife.
So even in the good bad old times there wasn’t that strict difference between hardware and software, even with better-defined-than-brains computers.
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The article says that their winnings were confiscated on the pretext of being obtained illegally. But the charges were all dropped and they never got the money back? How could the money remain confiscated if it was established that they obtained it through legal means?
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(I was just asking the exact same question and read yours the moment I posted mine.)
I’m curious about that as well. It doesn’t seem like there was deal like “if you forfeit your winnings, we won’t prosecute”, was there?
If you want to cheat people out of their money, go and open your own casino.
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I think you need some kind of special permission to do that… like from the Mafia or the Mormons or someone…
Oh, we are engaged in some sort of Linguistic Re-enactment?
I thought we were using the current usage of words.
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All you gotta do is be Native American.
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There are multiple current usages. Not all of them are of equal value.
It’s like people applying the term “terrorist” to anything that causes terror. By modern usages, a large frightening dog can be called a “terrorist”. Which demonstates that just because a particular usage is current doesn’t mean it isn’t completely idiotic.
