hotShot

I have no doubt that anyone would consider it to be an honor and a privilege to represent his country in the World Championships. I agree with Fred about that. I even agree that it will be much more intense than I can even imagine. We are human beings, citizens and a lot of other things that are more important than being a bridge player. So I think this is not about bridge, it's about respect and tolerance. These women decided to devote one of the proudest moments in their lives, the ceremony where they are honored for winning a world championship, to state that they didn't vote for GWB. I believe that it was their moment of honor and that I should tolerate/accept/respect what they made of it. They made more of a personal statement than a political one and even GWB can't be offended that someone choose to vote someone else.

I have not seen a rule yet they have broken. If they have a contract with the USBF and broke that, it's between those two and none of my business. It's my impression that no nation stands for "breaking laws", and I would guess that breaking a law in a country where you are guest, will be seen as an insult. I would hope that the WBF would reconsider to put the event there. I would not play there. Of cause it's not OK! I will have to inform myself better about the cultural differences or I can decide not to be guest of someone with a "sadistic" attitude.

That's somewhat subjective :) Some would say that the Dutch team should then be smoking obnoxious substances (as Ron usually puts it) on the podium. I'd rather say that people who have agreed to represent some organization should do so in whatever way they have (be it implicitly) agreed to represent the organization. I did not know that that's in the Dutch constitution. I thought the Netherlands stand for a long tradition of tolerance .....

People who represent their counties should, represent what their county stands for. If the come from a land that stands for freedom, freedom of speech and a demand for equality, they should represent that, without insulting their hosts.

Of cause this is not to censor free speech, but to stop public nudity as displayed at the super bowl clothing malfunction. The question is should such efforts of censorship be welcomed?

Let me ask a simple question? Who is honored at the award ceremony? I think it's the winning player. In what way could a sign saying "We didn't vote for Bush" offend the hosts? I think this does not affect the Chinese or the wbf at all, if American citizens speak about their own president. Did they disturb the ceremony for the silver or bronze medalist? I guess not? So why should anyone feel offended?

We often read about censorship in china and that free speech is not possible there. So I think this is a great place to show how much free speech a democratic nation can allow it's own people. If the WBF where to disallow actions like that, it could be seen as sign of approval to censorship. I hope that won't happen. Governments and politicians have used the success of athletes to prove their own superiority. Why should athletes not have the right to choose the politicians? What if an athlete would not want to be used by an dictator or worse?

Over the last 10 years columnists like Niki Lauda stated that Ron Dennis has no No. 1 driver in his team. While Ferrari ordered their No. 2 driver to let their No. 1 overtake to optimize the championship odds. Michael Schumacher championship wins would have been harder if this had been different. Every driver has his own engineering/service team and a big part of their income depends on the drivers success. So when Alonso complained that he's not the no. 1 driver and his team does not make a good job, I wondered why he decided to join a team with a history of not having a no. 1 driver and why his team would be willing to reduce their own income to make him less successful. A world champion who can't win against the newcomer and who is putting the blame on his team loses a lot of respect. He was punished for the qualifying incident, another thing not to be proud of. In the Ferrari-McLaren spy affair he acted as a witness against his team, I don't know enough about the background to judge about that.

Lets take a look at the space shuttle program: Everybody involved in panning, building and maintaining a space shuttle, knows that any error or material weakness will cause the death of the shuttle crew. They have the highest quality controls and everything is checked more than once. All this was not good enough to prevent 2 disasters in 116 shuttle missions. Remember this plain crash? One of the safest airplanes existing crashed, because the pilot allowed his children to visit him in cockpit during flight. During the disaster in the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl the safety system did not fail. The engineering crew switched off all security systems to test a new idea for a safety system. They thought they could handle it. This could have happened anywhere in the world, it's human nature and no technical issue. All this shows that humans are incapable of running a technical system over a longer period of time, without loosing their concentration and without making errors. Nuclear energy is cheap on paper, because the costs for securing radioactive waste for the next 10000 to 100000 years are set to 0. But this is a period of time that is long enough for geological changes to happen. And you won't be able to hold anyone to account if anything happens in 15000 years. I think that the maintenance and safety of a chemistry plant is comparable to that of a nuclear power plant. Maintenance and safety reduce profit and I guess you remember the Bhopal disaster. I would not trust profit organizations very much in this area.

If 4♣ and 4♦ showed first (or 2nd) round control it is usually not wise to use 4NT to ask for keycards. It is better to carry on bidding controls. So instead of 4NT south should bid 4♥ because of the missing ♠ control. With ♠ control north has to make the next move.

You hold 9♦ and partner should have 2 for his 1NT bid, so you have a 11 card fit. With combined 19-21 HCP and an 11 card fit, there is no system that allows you to safely bid game, if it is possible. So you can guess 5♦ or irritate partner with 3♦ (he might try 3NT over that because he will expect more HCP). I prefer 5♦.

In bridge as in other areas of competition, you will get as good as you need to win or as good as your personal abilities allow you to get. Juniors don't have the experience they would need to win an open event, but some do get there very fast. Mind sports do have some physical fitness aspects. Top chess players loose 2-3 kg of weight during a top level game. So why should there be no seniors event? I guess 90+% play bridge for social pleasure and the number of players capable to top level competition is probably lover than 2%. My impression is that men are more interested in competition than women. The open event is usually much bigger than the ladies event. The quality of the top player is usually better if the pool to pick from is bigger. To win an open event you need 4 (very) good player, so the best women often join a mens team to play there.

I like to ask those who take the bible literally: Prior to the creation of the earth, the light and the day, how much time had gone bye and why should an eternal being as god measure it?

So you think that living in a natural environment, learning everything about thousands of plants and animals does no make you curious? Not even if your life depends on knowing what you can eat and what is a threat? You think that learning how to form stones into tools or make use of natural materials (e.g. to make clothing) has no positive effect on intelligence? Good that I know your question was rhetorical ......

If you mean, that 2 weeks of lying lazy at the beach lets your IQ points drop a few points, while a little mind jogging helps to keep it's level, than you are right. But in general repeated IQ tests, generally lead to similar results +- a few points.

What do we know about intelligence some time ago? Not much due to the lack of documents. But what we know should make quite clear that the people back than where smart. Eratosthenes 225BC calculated earth circumference quite accurate. People were burned for knowing that about 1800 years later, I wonder who was more intelligent. We still learn math found by Euclid, Thales or Pythagoras. Nebra_skydisk 1600BC it seems to prove that even back than people where in contact between central Europe and Egypt. Stonehenge 3000BC those people knew astronomy far better than most of us now. And they knew a lot about applied physics otherwise they would have been unable to build something like that. There is evidence that we know a lot more facts today, but only little evidence that we are more intelligent.

Evolution teaches the survival of the fittest, this is cruel and it says that inferior races die out, while superior races live on. So this theory is not politically correct. It can be easily abused by racists to prove their superiority and to justify the killing of inferiour beings. It is easier to fight the evolution theory than to deal with it's abuse. While scientist have no problem to see themselves as "homo sapiens sapiens" (the wise human being) some may fear that their relationship to apes is to close to be accepted. To them evolution theory is a personal threat.

So pirate5 has to make he first suggestion and pirate1 will be the last. This means: Pirate1's live is in no danger and if he does not accept offers of less than 100, he will get all in the end. Pirate2's live is in no danger, but he will have to offer pirate1 100, to stay alive. So he will accept any offer better than nothing. Pirate3 is sort of a lucky guy, he knows pirate1 will reject his offer, but if pirate2 agrees, his live is save and he lives to spent his money. So in his position 99-1-0 would work. So he does not need to agree to anything less than 99 coins. Pirate4 is in a bad position, he knows that pirate3 and pirate1 will disagree with almost any suggestion he can make (maybe 0-99-1-0 would work). So his live is at risk if he does not agree to anything that pirate5 suggests. So pirate5 will stay alive if he offers pirate4 and pirate2 a coin and keeping their lives. So the solution is 98-1-0-1-0.

You don't need fantasy, just copy nature. Further reading: Eero Mäntyranta

Don't tell me you did not notice that the rich guys get the best women.

I can understand and even support that some misbids are treated like an infractions. Ghestem is just the best example for this. If one partner forgets this convention and makes e.g. a natural 3♣ overcall, he holds one suit and psyches opps out of 2 others. Usually bidding will never recover from that. The offenders regular partner will know that partner is often forgetting the agreement and has a huge advantage over opps here. Unfortunately the non offending side, will often not be able to reach a good spot and often they will hear from the TD that they lost the right to get a corrected score because their bidding was irrational, wild or gambling or even that they "stopped to play bridge". This results in lots of AC meetings. But a general rule to treat misbids as infraction is very unwise, especially for beginner.

When i last checked the traffic produced by a BBO connection it was about 1MB / h. Maybe it's more now, because the number of users has increased, but it should still be no problem even with a small bandwidth connection after the login (it requires a lot of data to be transfered) is finally finished. The forum server seems slow sometimes ....

If you disable the wire ethernet device using the bios setup, you will only have only one network card left. Ubuntu setup should be able to get the routing right, so you can make sure the routing is the only problem.

This proves that eth1 is your WLAN card and that it got it's IP-Address from a DHCP-Server. This is bad, because you should not access the same subnet on both interfaces. 0.0.0.0 172.21.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 This line means: Any IP that is not in the subnets above, should be accessed using the gateway 172.21.1.1 using interface eth0. This often happens if you use automated services with 2 network cards. The generated routing commands are wrong. Since i don't use Ubuntu and i can't access a linux machine right now, i don't know where you need to change the routing. Manually you can delete any routing entry using: route del .... and add new ones using: route add .... The commands you have to use must be something like: route del -net 169.254.0.0/24 route del default gw 172.21.1.1 route add default gw IP_OF_YOUR_WLAN_GATEWAY There must be some sort of linux routing howto somewhere ......

You have 2 ethernet connections: eth0 172.21.30.40 eth1 169.254.7.95 I bet one of these is your wireless lan. I think it is eth1. It is connected and should work, but maybe your system tries to contact the net on the other interface. I also think that your default route points to eth0, so if you don't have a cable in there, you won't get a data transfer. So please check that using the 'route' command at the command prompt. Perhaps 'route -n' will give enough information about it.