Thread: Which Operating System do you use at home?

Originally Posted by Hanna

Originally Posted by Basil77

Gambling is prohibited in Russia either.

You meant that it IS prohibited, right?
That's a good thing, I think. That will keep some people away from it.

Yes, it IS prohobited now. Situation with gambling was rather bad, but it's improved now after the recent law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_Russia

I changed it because it was not a nick

Funny, I always wanted to change my stupid nick here for my real name (Yuriy) and more likely would have done that already if the forum software had such an option. But I'm just to lazy to write to MasterAdmin or Lampada and ask them about it. BTW many decent members of this forum, like Ramil or Оля (it's a shame that she left) have chosen their real names as their nicknames here. But I understand your reasons.

Originally Posted by Hanna

I am not kidding Scott; if you are going to be involved in that business, work for the house and do not gamble yourself. As business ethics and morals go, these businesses score VERY low, although a few are strictly regulated and work like normal businesses.

I am not saying they cheat in the games, they don't. But they get money from every game you play. Most of their money in Poker, they make is from "side games" the games you see next to the "main" games. Keep track of what you spend and you will see how you lose, lose and lose. Any winnings are marginal and that's how these sites are set up to be.

Gambling is addictive and can really ruin people. There are good reasons it's banned in many countries. Those countries that allow it do it because they can tax the businesses to kingdom come.. and that's an opportunity that is too good to miss. Or they are just corrupt countries. The providers respond by registering the main companies in places like Malta, Alderney, Gibraltar and Curacao.

The house ALWAYS wins. I done a contract for a company like that in the past, and I may or may not be involved in that business right now.

The only way you could make any money was if you found a fool-proof way of cheating the house (this is very unlikely and would soon be detected anyway) or you got incredibly lucky your first time on the site and then never gambled again.

That said, the technology is VERY cool; these types of sites and the software behind them are very cool and the business logic surrounding the operations is very interesting. The industry pays their operational staff as well as banks for equivalent jobs, but require only minumum formality and BS that you can expect at a bank.

But make no mistake, these companies are in it for one reason only: To get as much money off you as they can before you realise you need to quit gaming.

Finally, PokerStars is an Israeli company and their biz in the US is in a very grey area and probably is not legal at all. They should not be allowing Americans to play on their site since it breaks US laws.

Right now I only play for play money. On the twoplustwo.com forums there are discussions on how honest the poker sites are. As to stopping gambling, I'll bet you that I can stop any time that I want.

Scott

I am a Mac user. love it!!!!!!

I mostly use Arch Linux on my desktop machine and Debian goes for my home server. Can't say I'm very happy with them. I used to try Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian before and now like many linux users think about making my own distro .

I use two system: Debian Lenny (linux) and Windows XP. Linux is my prevalent OS but for my wife Win is next. Linux is a cup of freedom but some soft KJVBible, E-Sword, some games work better with Win (but maybe I am not very friendly with Wine? ).