If Will is right, and there is a certain art to cheating (an argument I haven't thought about yet), then we're back to the taxonomy game Will and I were playing a few days ago, with torture.

There is, presumably, one type of cheating (ameliorative cheating?), which involves the kind of creativity Will is talking about. But back when I played chess more often, and more often online, there was a kind of cheater who ran positions through extremely sophisticated chess engines in order to make sure he won. Now, while there was almost no benefit to cheating on a chess server (unlike in poker, no money ever changes hands), this kind of cheating also produces almost no innovative side effects. The computer program is commercial, not produced by the cheater in question. The computer linked player was cheating, in other words, but artlessly.

So for Will, one imagines, this kind of cheater is worse than the poker bot programmer, who is engaged not so much in poker, as in some other competitive activity involving a struggle with the web site's programmers. And if this is true, maybe Professor Bainbridge's wrath is better aimed at the barren cheaters of the chess board rather than the poker hackers.

Unlike Raffi and Professor Bainbridge, I don't play online poker any more-- partly because it is particularly ill-suited to my tight/confused style of play, but partly because I spend so much time tethered to the internet as is that where close substitutes exist, I prefer to switch to offline activity (phone over IM, print-outs over LEXIS, &c.) wherever possible.

And I also agree that creating computer programs to play in one's stead is cheating, if and only if the poker site has a rule against it. (I presume most programs do.) This also answers Raffi's question, of course-- using a cheat sheet is illegal if and only if there's a posted rule against it on the site (I presume some sites ban such things, to little effect, and others do not; on the site Raffi uses I found rules against robots and collusion but not against crib sheets).

But I'm writing because I think Professor Bainbridge is too quick to insult the cheaters, deriding them as "unable to compete with real people" and worse things (which he has since retracted). This misses the central appeal of cheating, hacking, rule-breaking-- it, too, is a sport. There is an art and a science to creating ways to break the rules while flouting enforcement mechanisms, to staying one step ahead of whatever forms of counter-intelligence exist, to finding systems with the ripest and most persistent marks, and so on. This, too, is "competing with real people"-- what annoys Professor Bainbridge is the terms of this other competition. All of this answers, to some extent, the Professor's question about why this personality type seems to end up in the computer industry-- the nature and culture of the medium makes it particularly feasible to defy the rule of law in this way.

Again, this is cheating, to be sure, and perhaps also law-breaking depending on the terms of the relevant contracts, and various statutes about which I am rationally ignorant. To the extent that those things are morally bad, then I suppose this is morally bad too. But that doesn't mean it's necessarily wimpy or cowardly or particularly surprising-- it's just another, rougher, game.

Professor Bainbridge recently went after those designing bots to pay online poker as cheaters. He's certainly right - they are cheating. But when I play online poker (as I occasionally do) I have a sheet with a table of hands I like to play, how I like to play them (that is, do I tend to raise, or call, or check/raise), and then a table with some useful odds for me to remember when calculating pot odds (if I'm holding two hearts, and two more have come on the flop, how likely am I to get my flush?) Am I cheating? Or just learning?

Jacob Levy discusses old and new money.

I notice with a little bit of glee this Anne Applebaum column (via Todd Zywicki). When I was in Steven Levitt's Economics of Crime class in Spring 2002 one of our papers assigned us to do a back-of-the-envelope comparison of the costs and benefits of 1, increased airport screening, 2, racially-profiled airport screening, 3, reinforced cockpit doors, and 4, a proposal of our own.

The result, just as Applebaum points out, is that reinforced cockpit doors are far and away the biggest winner, because the biggest potential terrorism cost by far is the possibility of a plane being hijacked as opposed to "merely" crashed or blown-up.

[My own proposal, for what it is worth, was letting pilots carry guns, perhaps with dum-dum rounds, in the cockpit, but with training only to use them when the plane has been taken over and the cockpit breached. The theory is similar to reinforced doors-- at the very very worst, a gun in the cockpit will crash the plane, but keep the plane from being taken over and used as a massive missile. Jeremy Reff and I blog-argued about this years ago.]

1: While I have no substantive commentary on the Senate's apology for lynching, I do wish to note that this sort of thing-- public apologizing-- would be easier if we were to adopt the proposal in last year's Green Bag, Eugene R. Fidell, Sorry, 71 Fed. Reg. 1 (2006). Of course, making public apologizing easier would (presumably?) make it less valuable.

2: Daniel Solove suggests that the Presidents' decision to rely on speechwriters is not much different from Milli Vanilli's decision to lip-synch. While I like the romanticism of Lincoln writing his own speeches on the train as much as the next guy, Solove is surely wrong. For starters, M.V. deceived the American public, whereas Solove acknowledges that few people think the President actually writes that material. Second, there's no particular reason to think that the virtues of personal authorship in art are also present in politics-- the presidency is both a ceremony and a position of power but there's no particular reason to think it is or should be judged as a performance. The first commenter to the post suggests that maybe it is not intended seriously-- if it is, it is rather puzzling.

3: Finally, the New York Times runs a not-too-positive story on NYC's Restaurant Week. Even on a limited budget, I would far rather drop my money on top-notch groceries, or else save up and go out at a time when the restaurant won't be flooded with underpaying and undiscriminating crowds. The chefs interviewed claim that quality and quantity drop only slightly during the Week, but I cannot imagine that they are telling the truth.