DrTodd13

When FD was introduced, I personally thought that this is one of the primary ways it would be done. When you make a bid that is unknown then the box pops up and asks you for the explanation and thereafter the bid is in the FD file. I still think it makes sense to do this for uncontested auctions. Many of us here are programmers and have offered to help but understandably Fred and Uday have not allowed anybody else to see the source code. At this point, I feel the major limitation of FD is dealing with competitive situations. My responses depend on the meaning of the competitive bid. There is no way to specify different possible meanings for the same bid by opps and then to react differently. Moreover, even if you could specify that you couldn't automate the process because you'd have to match what the opp _intended_ to show by his bid with the various options the FD users have specified. None of the options might match or multiple ones might match. Plus, you can't know what the opp intended to show so if he psyched or made a mistake then if the system tried to do something automatic it might reveal the mistake or the psyche by matching it with a rule that the opp didn't intend for it to fall under. The only answer would be to ask the opp what was meant by the bid but you'd need a much better way of describing a hand than what is present now. A textual description is not going to allow anything to be automated. I spent quite a bit of time looking at how to make something like FD that would automatically learn and that would be precise and deal with the different meanings that opps may give to bids. I could not convince myself that this was even possible but I did convince myself that if it were possible it would be so complicated that nobody would ever use it.

Note that I did not make any mention of the result and the only reason for this post was that I was astonished that I was the only person who had made the bid thus far. Also, I think it's losing bridge to P on this hand because partner has a chance to bid. Why would you expect pard to bid anything if at all? If he isn't a minimum he may bid. If he is a minimum then why do you want to be in 5m going down when 4♥ is likely also down?

Let me play devil's advocate. Partner has a chance to bid again. Partner leads a spade and I ruff, get two aces and likely partner has either SA or minor king or minor singleton/void, it is likely that 4♥ is going down and I get a positive score. I better be pretty sure that I'm missing 5m to bid on past 4♥ then. I have 4 losers in my hand and partner may not cover any of those losers. If partner is really a non-minimum he can bid again and then I'll bid 5♣. Notice Atul wound up in 6♣ and wasn't shouting that it was a great score. We don't want to play results here but it is one data point to see whether our action was good or not. I'd like to know what the winning action was. 5♣ seems like the obvious bid and would the problem have been posted if the normal action was the winning action?

(1♦)-X-(1♠)-P-(1N/2♣/2♦)-2♠ Who can make a case for 2♠ being natural? I ran into a hand today where I would have liked it to be the case but didn't want to confuse partner so I passed. [hv=s=sakjt9xhaxdktxcqx]133|100|[/hv]

Compared to the old BBO CC's, FD is just more complicated and faster to access. You could still have your old CC up with the old mechanism and consult it at appropriate times. Is this against the current laws of bridge? Yes. Why be more restrictive with FD than with old CC's though? My view is we need to lobby to get rid of this notion that memorization should be some fundamental part of the bidding process. The need to memorize is always trotted out when it comes to justifying the ban on this system or that convention. To me, the interesting part is deciding what defense to use against some convention and then applying it at the table. The process of memorization is just tedious but not doubt memory aides were not originally allowed to try to keep the speed of the game going. Perhaps in the near future they'll be hand-held devices that can instantly retrieve said defenses and then the need for this rule will be gone. Even without those devices, I'd still trade a more interesting game for a faster one.

No sane person can compare the US and the Netherlands and conclude that the US has a better drug policy. The US has one of the highest rates of imprisonment of any country all due to its crazy drug policy. If you get rid of drug prohibition and all the crimes that people commit trying to get money for drugs then you'd probably decrease prison populations by 3/4 and reduce property crimes by at least the same amount. If you feel that you are a child or a sheep then by all means acquiesce to letting the government tell you what is good and bad for you but if you're a person then reject all forms of the nanny state. The US drug policy is nothing but a bunch of people who think they are smarter than you trying to engineer society to maximize tax revenue so that they'll have more power. Drug addicts aren't generally very productive citizens so they can't allow that.

http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2Scien...s/V9/N45/C2.jsp Short summary. Global warming may _lower_ sea levels. Here's the science. Chicken little seen to be walking upright.

Huge loss. We anarchists especially feel it.

A lot of people use the enemy flag to make it easy to remember you don't want to play with the person, not that they aren't necessarily a nice person. So, as long as all yellows aren't Zia or Duboin and as long as we can't separate "nice/mean" from "good player/bad player" then we'll have this problem.

Jimmy (is it y or ie?), Here is my history on this subject - I have come pretty much 180 degrees from where I was a few years ago - at that time I pretty much sided with the "they are ecological kooks" group. I can't say I was ever 100% for Bush but I was anti-Clinton/Gore. I even read Rush Limbaugh's book. I was more conservative minded than liberal. The Bush administration has scared me straight, though. As for GW, I still don't know enough about this subject to have a strong opinion either way so I am open to both sides' arguments. I would have to say at this point I am more swayed to accept it is a real event but am not so sure simply due to normal aberration if the warming isn't simply cyclical and not caused by mankind. I need more data. As you know and I have documented, I have a strong opinion on the voracity of the current administration - there has been (to me, not necessarily to others) enough anecdotal and collaborative evidence presented that this administration first sets an agenda and then either alters, ignores, or lies about any contrarian viewpoint or evidence. Whether or not global warming is a significant problem is certainly of enough importance that it should be investigated without the constraints of politics. So my problem once again comes down to the disdain the Bush administration has shown for opposing views - I tend to side now with the GW crowd simply because Bush has taken the other side and buried any contrary evidence. I believe the position of the funding agencies with the federal government is not to fund climate research into the question of whether humans are causing global warming. The only research they will fund is into how fast humans are going to cause temps to rise and what can be done about it. As far as I know, Bush is not funding GW skeptics and if anything he is part of a system that actively discourages scientific skepticism. Whatever you subsidize you get more of...if you subsidize research into human-caused GW then you'll get more people interpreting evidence to support that viewpoint. As long as money is involved, you can't trust anyone's motives.

I keep hearing they are going to make a movie out of Atlas Shrugged with Angelina and Brad but in any case, read the books. There are quite a few things Rand got right and some, IMO, she got wrong. I was telling my parents a couple days ago about how I feel that a purely rational person has no scientific reason to believe in free will and how the objectivists' answers to this question are tortured. My mom then said maybe that is what drove Rand insane at the end...cognitive dissonance baby.

Wildavsky did (and probably does still) have something about "ask me about objectivism" on his BBO profile. One would think he'd be willing to talk about the matter if someone asked him. I tried a couple times and got no response because (I believe that) he could tell I wasn't coming from a position of ignorance. Seems like a lot of objectivists treat their beliefs like a religion. They are happy to convert others but unwillingly to listen to those who would convert them or challenge their beliefs. It seems to me that any true objectivist following the objectivist creed would come to the conclusion that their belief system is contradictory. Objectivists reject all forms of mysticism. At this point, no one has a good answer for the question of free will versus determinism. It has always seemed to me that an objectivist would have to take the position of determinism. To believe in free will, one has to believe in causeless actions (e.g., your "decision" to do one thing rather than another) and objectivists believe in cold rational causality. The problem, of course, is that in a deterministic worldview, what is going to happen is going to happen and there is no point making the "choice" to try to convert others to objectivism or to believe it oneself. There is no right or wrong in a deterministic world and no point in a system of ethics that attempts to categorize right and wrong. Objectivists clearly can't "choose" to believe this for it makes their belief system irrelevant. So, what do they do instead, they "choose" to believe in free will with absolutely no proof whatsoever! Since when do objectivists believe things without rational proof??? Here's a quote from Karl Popper talking about Leonard Peikoff's beliefs on this matter. At this point, the only view that seems consistent with a materialistic worldview is the deterministic one. Our perception of our own free will may be a total illusion. However, I and most other people reject this belief simply because we don't like the perceived consequences of that belief. What does it actually mean to have free will? What is there in the middle of pure causality and random action that can be called free will? So, many in the future when/if there is a scientific proof of free will then objectivism may be consistent but at this point the rationalistic anti-mystic can't really believe in some mystical origin of free will and therefore must believe determinism making his own belief system irrelevant.

This is not a FD problem. It happens even with the old-style CCs. Somebody loads the BBO sayc CC and don't know about the "..." things and so their bids diverge from their CC. At least with FD, you can see the explanation of a bid before you make it and thus you are less likely to bid 2♣ with the wrong hand type. I think that CCs and FDs are primarily useful for established partnerships and/or rigorous tournaments. In the "killing time" tournaments people play now it is unreasonable to expect people to fill out a CC or FD and know what is on it for a 12 board tourney.

How many times are you going to hand control back and forth between these two groups of tyrants before you realize they are corrupted beyond redemption and only seek to maximize their power. Isn't the popular definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? My suggestion is that you don't vote (unless you have a "none of the above" option) for anyone and that you tell everyone who will listen why you aren't voting and why they shouldn't vote either. Do everything you can to drive down the % of people who vote and sooner or later people will realize that the system is illegitimate. Then they will get rid of the fascists. Death to tyrants!

I hate the UNDO because I feel like I am accusing someone of lying when I reject one undo but accept another. When I did accept undos, I thought about 20% were clear cut misclicks, about 50% were clearly an attempt to remedy a slip of the brain rather than a slip of the hand, with the other 30% being the gray middle area. The only policy that doesn't make me feel bad or allow cheaters to get away with murder is to disallow undos. I even think they should be disallowed in the f2f game. You should be paying attention and ridiculous results caused by carelessness is your incentive to pay attention.

Unless the certification is for "online tournaments" then the certificate is next to worthless. Most director calls in f2f tournaments relate to lead out of turn, failure to follow suit, insufficient bids, etc. What you need to focus on for online tourneys is hesitation, UI, MI issues.

I hear that Kerry meant to say that if you don't get an education then you may wind up sending people to go to Iraq...only he forget the "sending people" part which made it sound like he was saying only morons join the army. That isn't what he said this time but it is basically what he has said in the past and it is largely true but no one wants to admit it because they view these people as heroes and nobody wants to think their heroes are mentally challenged. Anyway, I propose that if a congressman votes for war that he has to go serve in an infantry unit on the front lines. We'll even let him name his own successor. If the war is that important then I think we have enough politicians that we aren't going to miss a few who die in the war.

Hey Fred, When you do these updates, would it be possible not to overwrite bbover.ini? Some of us have customized that file for firewall traversal, etc., and it is just a little bit of a pain to have to re-edit it after an update. thanks, Todd

If you have a machine outside the firewall that you control then you can use the HTTP proxy to BBO. I have done it although I prefer the SOCKS proxy due to speed. My socks proxy also limits connections to ssh connections so if this is the case for you as well then you'll always need a machine outside the firewall.

Heroes!

One would think the events would still be fresh enough in his mind not to make such a mistake. I found the whole "he saw it on close-circuit" pretty silly and the sort of thing that conspiratorialist make up or believe without proof. He could not possibly have seen the second plane hitting the towers because that did not happen until after he entered the classroom.

Video In this video you see George W. on Dec. 4, 2001 responding to a question about what he was doing and how he felt when he first heard about the 9/11 attacks. He states that he was in the hallway of an elementary school _WATCHING A VIDEO OF THE FIRST PLANE_ hitting the tower. As it turns out (and as you might expect), video footage of the first plane is difficult to come by because people weren't expecting it. Nevertheless, some footage did exist but it was not aired immediately, in fact not until Sep. 12. So, Bush's statement is an impossibility. Idiot, liar, or monster?

Happy bday.

Please post the other two classes. That is where I suspect there will be some discussion. Class 1 looks ok.

I wonder about cause and effect here. What I mean is, I wonder if these directors managed to ask interesting questions, and to even show up at the training session because they were motivated to do a good job directing, and this motivation is the driving force that makes them better directors. I don't doubt that these sessions helped these directors, I just feel that it's having taken place is what made these directors among the best BBO TDs, rather it was their inate desire to do well when they direct. And this desire was evidenced in the training sessions by their participation in active learning. Right. You also have to somehow publicize your new certification scheme so that people prefer certified directors over non-certified ones. If you don't then there is no reason to be certified. With all the complaints you here, you'd think there would be some interest in this.