FM75

Sources can be found here. I am not aware of any pre-built Mac executable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Currency_Unit The future of the euro - probably similar result. Economics and politics do not mix very well, especially when the organizations involved are different. Expect the next problem - the tipping point - to be France. Before 2019? I would say before 2019. But that would probably be a topic for a different thread.

"Common Knowledge' or 'Common Sense" are motherhood and apple pie terms. If we can accept that knowledge (sense) is even close to the classical bell curve distribution (I say close because the bell curve is centered about zero, which is silly with respect to things like knowledge which can't be negative), then we should be able to accept that "accredited individuals" may be wrong as much as 20 % of the time. A passing score on many types of accreditation exams - Pilots, motor vehicle, license to sell securities, etc. is 80%. That said, let's consider what "better job of managing things" means. The statement continues with "It's so much easier to work on things in isolation." This part is most certainly true. In fact, it is the most vexing part of trying to solve problems. We have been trained to "keep everything else constant", which works nicely in linear systems. It is exactly the "isolation" problem that can contribute to failure to solve problems that are not linear (dependent on only one independent variable). "Keeping everything else constant" has become ingrained in our (science) educational system. But most of the world is not linear. Most significant real world problems in fact have some sort of "feedback" that violates linearity and independence. Let's return now, to the "better job of managing". What does this mean? It rolls off the tongue nicely. But it assumes that the meaning of the phrase is both obvious and incontrovertible. Here we see an example of the root cause of the difficulty of solving problems. Problems are hard to solve, primarily because it is so hard to define the problem precisely - as in this example. What makes solving problems like this so difficult is trying to find the solution, before the problem is well-formed. ""better job of managing things than the interdependent systems evolved over millions of years"... I am not sure what the role of this phrase is. On the one hand it simply could be taken to be an unshaken (we take this on faith, so no argument can win) belief in God. If that is the nature of the quote, then there is really no useful purpose in discussing the topic further, if you are or are not of that "faith". On the other hand if it is the "evolved over millions of years" part, then it is perfectly reasonable to question the time frame. If "millions of years" is the time frame, then the last few generations are either unimportant - and AGW is not something to worry about, or the millions of years of evolution may no longer be relevant. but only the last few generations are. In my opinion, each is a simplification, that may not be particularly useful.

Assuming that the person claiming that 3NT is more like to make than 4H... Unstated, but let's assume the 3NT is 15-17 balanced to semi-balanced. Do they bid 1N even with 5 card major, also not mentioned. It seems to me that S has 2 choices. 2♦ transfer to 2♥, pass and 4♦ transfer to 4♥ pass (Texas, and preemptive if they play Texas). The likelihood of making 3N is irrelevant unless NS has some unmentioned convention related to a possible continuation over 2♥. North did not super-accept, which might reasonably have been an option. South has an 8 loser hand (LTC) even assuming a 3 card heart fit. That suggest 9 max tricks in hearts, but not in NT. Entries to South hand? :)

GIB has this same hand posted on RobotVHumans.com forum, questioning human's pass of forcing 1NT. Unfortunately, the Robot forum requires entering 65535 character password, no more than 32767 of which can be alphanumeric characters. Good luck finding his post.

White v White, I do not hate 2♥ by South. South has already denied a 5 card major, East has not bid hearts. South can reasonably expect a Moysian (4-3) heart fit, but does risk a Burn's Law violation (ending up in a contract where the opponents have more trump than your side - you have 6 or 7 on this bidding). South has a minimum, but can afford to compete at the 2 level. South is also over East, who rates to have the most strength of the 2 opponents. The bidding to this point suggests even to even+ strength. Protect against opponents picking up the 50 point part score bonus. If they really have a good fit in diamonds, you want them to have to make 9 tricks.

Using OC Precision... 1♥ - 1♠ -- 5♥, 11-15; natural - usually denying 3 card trump support 2NT - 4♣ -- Upper range, balanced; Control ask 4♠ -- 2 aces or ace and 2 kings Now we need to worry about PA on control bidding at 5 level. Assuming that control bids show A or K -- - 4N -- start bidding controls 5♦ - 6♠ Partner has the ♦K and either ♠AK (and did not show support?!) or more likely ♠K and ♥Axxxx If the PA is only to show Aces, then probably 5♥ - 5♠ Partner could have the ♠A, or 2 kings that could be anywhere but hearts and we could be off the 2 top trumps.

I was kibbing at a bidding practice. South's hand: ♠ KJT853 ♥ ♦ ♣ AKT8764 North had the 3 missing Aces and a singleton Club Q

It is nice that you have provided your "impression". I am sure everyone was particularly interested in it. It was also probably much easier for you to provide, since it did not involve actually finding the financial statements of the NRA to see what their revenues and expenses really are. That said, would you change your impression if you had the facts? What does it cost to be a member of the NRA? How many members does it have? How many people like what they are doing, but do not pay any membership fees? What is the thing that makes their membership drives particularly successful? What percentage of their revenues comes from membership fees? What are their expenses? Does your congressman understand what that membership represents? Does he need to be bribed to vote? Damn the facts! Full speed ahead!

I was going through the process, documenting how to start a team match on BBO web. Try setting up a team match, and just enter yourself and your partner. You will get tons of requests. You will have a team match going pronto, in all likelihood. LOL - In my case it was awkward declining them, because I was not even setting one up! Only trying to do screen captures of the steps.

Tech support will ask you what browser you use, then google "clear cache <your browser here>" In most browsers, you can set your search engine to Google. If you do not know how to do that, then type "google.com" into your browser. Then "clear cache internet explorer", or "clear cache google chrome", or "clear cache firefox", etc. You can also enter "make google my default search engine"

Well good luck whatever you do. Another possibility is your server takes too long to respond. But since it sometimes works, that seems less likely. Maybe wrong hosting is the issue. Do they have a "service level agreement"? If they have to bring a server down for "preventive maintenance" shouldn't they be handling that by rerouting the IP address internally to a server that is up and running your software? I have had a site up on GoDaddy in the US for several years now and have never heard of an outage on the site. We changed the registrar to them when the registration was about to expire. I have no experience with whether they work well outside the US. This site is only of very local interest (Central New Jersey). Maybe heroku would work for you. You can get '750 hours' per month free from them. For that, you are running just a single server 24 hours per day (or 2 - 12 hours per day, etc.). You can also scale it up and down as needed.

In 2010 in the US, about 2,500,000 people died. 62 were children between 1 and 14 due to 'accidental discharge of firearms', 208 from firearm homicide. I suppose if you were an expert at CDC statistics, you would know which category the event described fits. Presumably the homicides were by adults or near adult age minors. For comparison, transport accidents and non-transport accidents came in at 1425 and 1612 respectively. With 50 times as many events (accidents) to choose from, not to mention all the other reasons, isn't it weird that this event has been chosen as worthy of discussion? In any event, the rant on guns is all about an event of probability seither 2 in 100,000 or 8 in 100,000. To me this does not rise to the level of needing new legislation. It is covered quite well by existing state laws - which laws were clearly prescribed as states' rights in the Constitution so long as they did not conflict with Article 2. Yes. The parent's did not show common sense - a fairly low bar, since that is presumably a level somewhere around the mean - and therefore reasonably often wrong. BTW - The cause of death for 2 in the 1-14 age range was 'legal intervention'. Now that sounds like a primo thread topic.

You seem to have problems with your server. Are you hosting this on a 24x7 site with a static IP address? Is your server crashing and not restarting itself? Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to www.bridgegod.com Suggestions: Try reloading the pageSearch on Google:

As opposed to passing 397, 398, or 399! Huh? Why was 400 the magic number? 2 zeros? I think 402 was the tipping point. ROFL. Is π a power of 10? How about e. Or c, the speed of light. Avogadros' number?, Planck's constant?

Nice! Working now.

I did post graduate work in physics - not atmospheric science. That said, the climate debate has serious flaws by parties on both sides in blogs like this. What are sides? For the most part, they seem to be "believers", not researchers, or people with open minds with the ability to question in any useful way a claim, prediction, or a methodology. 1) Science is not democratic 100% of scientist believe ... is junk. The most significant advances in science have been made by people like Einstein, Heisenberg, and many others who discovered disruptive principles by thinking outside the box of what contemporary scientists believed. 2) Scientists - even big name ones - make mistakes. Einstein - God does not play dice - could not agree to quantum mechanics. Enrico Fermi (Italian walk on water level physicist) gets Nobel Prize in physics for discovery of fission, which Lise Meitner questioned and was right - oops - was a chemistry issue, not fission. (Which would be very embarrassing to the Nobel Prize Committee, if it were better known.) 3) Yogi Berra - "Prediction is very hard, especially about the future" - The corollary to this is that the further into the future you predict, the harder it is. So 50-70 year predictions about the earth are simply bunk. They project today's conditions AND predictions about populations, politics, and all sorts of non-physical variables into physical models. In 1890 - the same modeling technique would have had us awash in horse manure based upon population growth and current (at the time) transportation options. 4) Plain old Newtonian physics is rock solid. That said, we can't accurately predict solar orbits 100 years into the future. Even with low uncertainties about, mass, position, and speed of various asteroids, our window of where they will be in the future is more a problem of things like solar flux, the cross section of the object and how it moves and rotates, than even the multi-body uncertainties of the other solar objects in the solar gravitational field. If you do not know this, look at NASA predictions for potential catastrophic collisions with the earth. Measurement of time, position, mass, speed, etc. are orders of magnitude higher than things like temperature. 5) True science is testable under controlled conditions. - Climate science can't do this. They can't set up two earths and keep all variables constant except one, and compare predictions about the two. 6) Atmospheric science is inherently statistical - Statistical mechanics for temperature, heat flow, chemistry, etc. Everything about climate science is statistical modeling combined with atmospheric chemistry, atmospheric physics and that BIG FAT rock and water planet below the atmosphere. (This is more like predicting stock prices - you might be right or wrong, and less likely to be right the further into the future you make the predictions - see drunken walk problem.) 7) Dynamic atmospheric models depend on differential equations, measurements of constants in those equations, and boundary conditions. (The butterfly effect limits the valid time frame of a model.) - Meteorologists use entirely different models to predict the temperature over the next 24 hours, (next week?), next month, next year, future decades. 8) Scientists will agree - not that it proves anything - with most of what has been said in 1-7. 9) That does not mean that climate science predictions are wrong. 10) It also does not mean that when scientists discover that the polar ice melted faster than the model predicted [substitute any predictive error here] that things are worse than they predicted. Hello - it means that their modeling was wrong - nothing more or less. 11) Most of what you read (unless you are reading original scientific literature - you aren't doing this if you are not an expert in the field), was written by some reporter, whose primary skill is writing - not science. 12) Much of the source material for the writers in 11 are things like the IPCC reports, which are written by politicians, not scientists. 13) That said, even the IPCC reports are a bit beyond the scientific comprehension of journalists - and certainly beyond their ability to discern fact from opinion, so what you get from them is the "executive summary". What should you believe? This might be hard to swallow, but you should probably believe nothing that you have read [if you are reading scientific publications, you should look at the facts - and question whether they are both plausible and whether how they were measured has flaws]. It is probably much more useful to understand the knowledge, perspectives, expertise, and motives of the parties writing what you see and question what you have read. Other things to consider. 1) Does what somebody ask, scale? If he suggests converting your car to run on used french fry oil, try to consider how many fries, and how much oil is being used in your town. This is good enough, because all towns wil have the same answer. (Hint - if your family does not eat enough fries to run your car(s), the town's families have the same problem.) 2) If his hypothesis is that the problem is caused by the US, consider the world population - nearly 7 billion - versus US populations 0.3 billion. The rest of the world has a 20 times bigger effect than the US. Sure maybe the US is 2nd or third now - It used to be first in CO2... But the rest of the world fully intends to catch up - quickly - How many coal electric generation plants did India and China (Germany) build last year?. What will we do to prevent that - LOL. If we are buyers of their cheap products... If we are selling our services to them ... 3) Motives and "religion" of the person proselytizing - Does he read Mother Jones or does he realize that nuclear energy (fission) is viable and far cleaner today than any scalable alternatives. 4) Does he understand that today's decisions have to be based on reality? Energy density is important. If you are generating it, it must be consumed at the same rate, or the difference stored. It can't be consumed at a higher rate than generated. When the sun goes down in the summer or winter, we still need energy for cooling or heating. When it gets hot and the wind stops blowing - not that that ever happens simultaneously - LOL, consumers still need energy to connect to BBO. 5) Should you just ignore the "problem". No! It is very likely real. 6) It is very important that you select the most likely options to work - practice finesses are not solutions. What can I do? 1) Educate yourself to the point that you could get an A in high school physics. 2) Same thing in chemistry. 3) Mathematics - at least algebra and calculus. Statistics and numeracy are probably important, too. 4) Do you know the difference between power and energy? The units of either? (Most reporters do not, so if you don't, you have company - not good company) a) Power is the rate at which energy is generated or consumed. Think of energy like miles and power like speed. So power is expressed in kilowatts and energy in kilowatt hours. b) If somebody says that a plant generated 1000 megawatts last year, you know he does not know what he is talking about. It would be the equivalent of him trying to describe how many miles you drove and saying the you drove 75 mph last year. 5) Question what you read critically - Yesterday I read an article, from what should be a reputable source, that suggested that gun homicides only trailed 4 other causes of death for people in the US - it trailed accidents, unintentional poisoning, gun suicides, falls and some category that I can't remember offhand. Credibility check - 2010 homicides were about 11,000. Suicides are about 38,000 per year - half of which were by firearms, auto accidents 30,000 ish. Would you quickly come to the conclusion that Americans are not dying, or are emigrating fast enough to make up for a birth rate. Check CDC.. Suicides are the TENTH most common cause of death (but only if you aggregate all the cancers into one category. In the real world, in 1000 deaths, only 4 are likely to be as the result of a gun homicide. Why did I say credibility check? Follow the numbers - 340,000,000 people in the country and only 11,000 died from the 5th leading cause of death! It doesn't take much to imagine that if the average life expectancy is about 75 years that we must be seeing about 2,500,000 people dying each year - unless we are pretty much celibate or emigrating. Ratios. Population:deaths:gun homicides = 340,000 : 2,500 : 11. http://www.cdc.gov/n...tats/deaths.htm For a reality check, think of all the people that you personally know that have died (not people that have been reported to have died). In which of the top ten categories in that link were they? For me 1-6 had at least one, 7-9, zero, and 10 - 2 both minors, neither involving guns.

IMO - I would recommend - fugedaboudit... Everything that follows presumes that you meant Full Disclosure CC (FDCC) BBO's support for it is really problematic, and IMO they pretty much don't care about adding support for it. 1) FDCCs can ONLY be added from PCs running the BBO client software (not web) 2) There is no non-PC site for generating one.. (note there is a thread on forum that does it in python.... so maybe that would help on other platforms) a) but you would still need a PC to get it onto BBO 3) Even if you have one: a) It does not support true alerts, but rather b) treats what is on the card as an announcement 4) If you use one, then a) opponents can elect to turn it off, if and only if, they are on the PC client b) they may have it turned off to prevent seeing stuff from robots and won't see your alert/announcements c) your partner can't turn it off, so sees you alert/announcements, if he is on the web version d) I don't know how this works if partner or opps are on tablet version e) if you have to turn it off, to be fair to opponents because partner is on web, then you have to do normal alerting anyway f) The FDCC alerts may not show up in handviewer replays of the hand - which makes it look like you never alerted.

BBO also has the "view new content" link (maybe it is a bit hidden - see upper right...) If you want "friends" bridge chats, maybe google circles or facebook is the way to go. ;) And I guess probably an RSS feed.

Various scripts can be found on BBO forum for generating goulash hands. Once you get a good script you can generate hands here: http://www.bridgebase.com/tools/dealer/dealer.php Documentation for scripting can be found on that page.

You must be doing something seriously wrong on the web technical side. Your links do not work in Safari or Chrome on a Mac at 2315 USEDT. Safari show the server is not responding. It is too late for me to debug this. Are you running on a real server with legit DNS addressing, or your own PC with an IP address that is dynamically assigned?

Or as was suggested by Mr Gitelman in another thread, that you are just so against change, you would not be willing to spend as much time learning an improved replacement as you spent learning the original. Really strange reason to use for not switching operating systems and hardware. Stay away from iPads and smartphones. ;) And chrome books which cost less than Microsoft's operating system! LOL.

With my regular partner: 1♣ = 16+ any distribution except 4441 2♣ = 11-15 with strong 5 card clubs, example AQJT9, or decent 5 card clubs and 4 card major. Partner can ask for major with 2♦ 3♣ = 11-15 6 card clubs and 4 card major or very weak 7+ card club suit. So 4♣ is our first available preempt in clubs - our bid on this hand With something like: ♠ xx ♥ ♦ xxxx ♣ AKJT942 at these colors, I might consider 5♣ in 1st seat Red v White with that hand, 3♣ looks OK.

Are you looking for partners who play against better opponents than they are, and average a plus against them? Or did I misread this?

It is easy to understand that no cemetery would take him. For that matter, it is easy to understand that you would need to be paid a lot of money to bury him in your front or back yard. But with enough money, his body might be laid to rest along side Bin Laden. For far less - one might be able to charter a boat from a local fisherman.