You just totally glossed over the HTML, CSS, and Javascript part of his sentence.
As far as I'm concerned, cross-linked HTML + online syncing = web. Even CSS and Javascript are being a bit over-specific. For instance, one can imagine a different programming language that communed with the browser OM (older versions of IE even let a flavour of Visual Basic in, hilariously).
After all, the majority of websites are completely agnostic to whether you are online between the time you download the html page and the time you click the link. So it's not like "continuously online" is a traditional requirement of the web; before "Web 2.0" syncing was basically always user-initiated and discrete.
In other words, if you open wikipedia, then unplug your ethernet cable, are you no longer viewing a website?
Only if you use definition 4 of "hurt" from the same source. I think you know very well that the generally agreed-upon definition of violence is compatible with definition one of hurt, "to cause physical damage or pain", not all.
When you try to stretch words in this way they lose all meaning. It's okay to say "I don't like violence and I don't like hindering legitimate businesses". That's way clearer than claiming that hindering a legitimate business is violence.
But actually, when I searched for violence on dictionary.com I didn't get the definition you're quoting:
There are some obviously similar definitions but none are the same or even close enough to just be a typo apart. In particular, the word "hurt" does not appear on that page.
Why does everybody always assume that the unintended consequences of an action will be:
1. A net negative 2. *More* negative than the intended consequences 3. Non-mitigable
Also, why do multiple browsers put red-squiggles under "mitigable"? It's a real adjective.
Also, my imagination is capable of encompassing species-wide extinction and also species-wide eternal slavery to parasitic mind slugs. I don't think there's any way that eliminating the common cold could fuck us over worse than those outcomes.
(And i admit, i'm as guilty of that as the next geek.)
You did it in this very post. I'm curious how many people realize the irony* of calling that comic reference obligatory. Linking an obligatory comment is at the heart of what that particular comic was attacking.
To be fair, some of the sketches, like the "Four Yorkshireman" skit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo) lend themselves very well to ad-libbing without entirely descending into snowclone memes.
*I don't care about your particular definition of irony.
hey, AC...it's actually really, really easy for one person to develop something and another 'publicly present' it;)
I'm sure he understands that. He's asking why you think that happened, based on the link.
the link shows alot more than what you listed...it shows the other two acknowledging the truth that the one guy had the idea for the messages disappearing...
I don't see that in the link. Are you sure you pasted the right link? The article you linked is ENTIRELY about one email mentioning three people, and one mentioning two. It doesn't say anything about the "third guy" being the one who had the idea for the messages.
It didn't say that 100k terms returned no results at all. It said that 100k terms returned no child abuse results.
It looks like what they're doing is removing the sites from their index, not really screwing around with the algorithms (which is why it's possible for Bing and Google to share their work here).
As such, none of the things you mentioned are particularly relevant, because none of them would be removed. In fact, by removing child porn from the results, they would be promoted. You could argue that some things will be removed with the excuse that they are child porn, but honestly, they don't need the child porn excuse to remove it and have you never even find out about it, so that is kind of a null worry.
Another argument is that something can legitimately be "on the fence", eg. something that's legal age in place A but illegal in place B because place B has an age of consent of 30 years old or somesuch thing.
Another one is a site like the old geocities that happens to host some child porn on arm A, and arm B on that site hosts no child porn, and A and B are unaware of each other.
But those problems aren't really particular to child porn. They are search optimization problems in general.
If they buy all the circulating bitcoins, the ones that are deliberately held out of circulation become essentially worthless because they cannot circulate.
Does it require a perfect circle? I'm wondering if you could, for example, make a helix-shaped particle accelerator. It can have a constant curvature and torsion, just like a circular accelerator, so my naive thinking is that it would suffer the same radiation problems as a circular one, plus the problem that linear accelerators have (they don't loop around), but you could get significantly more length out of this on Earth.
In which case, you could get more than 40 megameters of accelerator without leaving the planet.
Small towns have shitty building codes and horrible drivers.
Is there any evidence of this whatsoever?
It might even be true; I certainly haven't surveyed a representative sample of small towns. In the one I grew up in, and the ones around it, and the others I've been to enough to about these things, these things are not true. And my instinct is to say that city drivers are much shittier than small town drivers, particularly during inclement weather (partly because city-dwellers they have the option of not driving during inclement weather). Building codes, I really don't know. I would have guess that both cities and small towns have wide variance, but the average of cities and average of small towns is about the same.
In the interest of fairness, I'm also not sure of the "most heroes are from small towns" claim. I wonder if it's just unreported when [city A dweller] does cool thing in [city A], since you assume by default that he lives there so it doesn't need to be mentioned.
If you got Windows pre-loaded, there's a fair chance that you paid *negative* dollars for it. Using made-up numbers, if Dell puts Windows on the PC for $25 bucks, then gets paid $10 for each piece of crapware they pre-install on it, and they put 3 items of crapware there, the cost to Dell was -$5, so the cost to you should be down, not up, and you didn't have to suffer any of the crapware because as you say, you didn't use Windows in the first place.
The people distributing crapware got boned, though.
This would also be why Microsoft didn't try much harder to stop the crapware preloads, which Microsoft *knows* cause a lot of pain for their users and endless nightmares. It's a Faustian deal for them. They suffered through it for years because that's how they can compete on price with free software.
I don't know for your particular case, or most particular cases. I know it's a pattern that existed. You see the phenomenon when the big players sometimes flirt with Linux preinstalls, and Slashdot flips their shit because they sometimes charge *more* for the same system configuration except Linux preinstalled instead of Windows.
In this new world of tablets, I'm not sure that trend still exists (not sure it doesn't, either, though obviously Microsoft's own products don't fill up with 3rd party BS for a discount, only 1st party BS that everybody gets).
For a fine to be effective, it must be clearly greater than:
max(cost of damage done, profit taken by doing the harm) / perceived risk of being caught
This can be difficult to calculate, so there also needs to be a safety factor to ensure all relevant parties agree that the cost is higher. Note that actual risk of being caught and perceived risk of being caught are different things.
This can be a problem because it can lead to an unjust solution. For instance, the perceived risk of being caught for downloading music was very, very low, and the cost of damage done was, at most, the price of the music * the number of people it was distributed to. This lead to obscene fines that basically made downloading a very small risk of being fiscally annihilated forever, vs. no consequences. There isn't perfect agreement as to what degree it's "wrong" to download music in violation of copyright in the first place, but I think virtually everybody agrees that some of the lawsuits involved obscene amounts of money for trivial crimes.
It is not necessarily the case that a fine can be both just *and* effective. Sometimes it can. I think there's a widespread assumption that it can be both at once, and among a different (overlapping) set of people there's also a widespread assumption that the purpose of fines is just one or the other of the "just" or "effective".
Using the stock ticker symbol as the "only valid abbreviation" is bizarre.
Otherwise Microsoft wants the name spelled out.
This might even be true in some senses eg. for publicity (I can't find anything to specifically confirm or deny that in a quick search), but it definitely wasn't always true and they're still generating new things with MS as the abbreviation so it's at best inconsistent.
Trying over and over and over to tell people they are "childish" just makes you look childish.
How so? I don't see it. And obviously since you're telling him he looks childish, you therefore look childish for telling him that (and by extension, I'm being childish now by pointing that out).
If it's "childish" then it will stand on it's own that way
People like you posting this sort of knee-jerk response every single time somebody says M$ just looks like desperation.
I don't even understand. Desperation? I literally don't know what you're trying to communicate there -- I know it's negative, but I don't know what negative thing.
There are a lot of childish nicknames that go around for things people don't like: M$, Faux News, Obummer, Mittens (for Mitt Romney), Rethuglicans, Demoncrats, Scroogled, Crapple, and on and on and on. Even when I'm on somebody's "side" in a particular argument, it makes me discount them (for instance, I'm unlikely to be on the side of Republicans on many debates, but "Rethuglicans" is just crass).
I'm pretty sure Microsoft themselves aren't all that pleased with South Korea's ActiveX install base. If you follow the browser at all, they've been trying to kill ActiveX more and more for the past half decade or so (with Flash as a very notable exception).
There's a near-zero chance that your exact genetic sequence would ever come into existence during the course of the universe as we understand it, and yet you exist. The same is true for basically everyone else, yet identical twins exist which doubly-defy the odds! You're more likely to bit struck by lightning than to jackpot a big lottery, yet those lottery winners exist too. So do people struck by lightning, as a matter of fact.
By definition, the planet we arose on is Earth-like because that's the prototype to which all other planets are compared for Earth-likeness. There is a 100% chance that the planet we arose on is Earth-like. Also, there's nearly 100% chance that the first non-Earth planet that we inhabit to the same degree that we inhabit Earth now is also Earth-like, since we'll likely aim for the Earth-like ones, since, again pretty much by definition, we are biologically adapted to live in Earth-like planets.
I think you can argue that religion is a medium, and one of the most effective and robustly self-reinforcing.
Sadly, for the same reasons as it is robust, it's not very flexible. The content is ideas of all sorts, both good and bad. "Brush your teeth" could be a religious cleanliness ritual. So can "throw rocks at unmarried pregnant women".
Some of the oddest things come out of the mouths of people who truly believe their religions in a literal sense. Not believing in a literal sense is tantamount to applying a filter on which content of the religion you will accept (hopefully tossing some of the "throw rocks" stuff that accumulates over the years and retaining only neutral-to-good ideas like "brush your teeth").
I mean, if Marshall McLuhan can argue that a light bulb is a medium then surely religion is one (though I kind of argue against a light bulb being a medium, unless used as a semaphore or something like that).
Opposing nuclear power may not mean loving coal, but a blanket opposition of nuclear is a de facto support of coal. Yes, you can throw examples where renewables work, and guess-what: I support that. Use renewables there. Keep making renewables better. Do it! It's worth it. And be ready to admit there are a few places where it doesn't work out, and you have to make a decision: coal, nuclear, human evacuation, whatever it is -- my money's on nuclear since the negative effects are concentrated and that's a good thing, except for the PR
It's not going to be easy, because if it was, we'd have already done it and saved the Internet a lot of arguments.
People who are stuck on a single silver-bullet are broken. Even coal has advantages. But it looks like the downsides aren't worth it most of the time, and with all the available alternatives, including but not limited to nuclear, we don't have to deal with them.
I know lots of people who Skype, especially grandparents with far-flung grandchildren. I've never heard of andrex in my life, and I'm only theoretically aware that apparently some people use hoover for vacuuming (or xerox for photocopying).
I expect this varies with geography (and Wikipedia tells me that "Andrex" implies you're probably in the UK). I remember going to school in Canada and everybody MSN'd each other (MSN messenger) yet apparently that never had significant inroads into the United States. But I assure you, Skype is very well known in a lot of significant markets.
It's absolutely more inevitable than that. Non-bitcoin money gets created and destroyed constantly. Part of the point of bitcoin was a limited supply -- just under 21 million can ever be in the supply at most. If you burn the mattress full of USB keys with bitcoin wallets, they will never be replaced (once the last coin is mined, anyway).
Apparently the current limitation on divisibility of bitcoins can technically be worked around, but nobody cares to because it's already divisible to fractions of pennies. That will become worthwhile as the currency deflates from ever-decreasing supply.
Though I'm skeptical of bitcoin lasting nearly long enough to have that kind of problem.
They are specifically descriptions of things we've observed hold up after spending a great deal of effort specifically attempting to observe something to the contrary.
That doesn't mean we can't observe something different in the future, but I think your claim was a bit weak since it seems to evoke a passive, dispassionate observer.
That argument is invalid because it applies universally. For instance, if you said "the price of raw materials is not a factor in product development", and somebody else said "yes it is, consider a recent time when I had to choose between a $200 material and a $10 material for a product we planned to sell at $250 per unit", you can't go use a counterargument the fact that they didn't mention what they were getting for the extra $190, or the increased marketshare they might have at that price, etc..
He never once said or implied that Moore's Law was the sole factor in any decision. He was only arguing against your statement, which is that it is not and has never been useful for predicting things with resources.
Moore's Law is just a specific case of extrapolation based on known data points. Extrapolation is not a guarantee, but it's absolutely useful and is widely used in many fields, including in everyday life. I'm absolutely certain you've predicted that most consumer electronics will either be cheaper in 5 years, or more powerful in some way (not necessarily the way you want, but some way). If you're considering whether to buy an extended warranty, it's absolutely relevant how much cheaper/more powerful your stuff will become.
Where does the word "except" come into play there? They are about 8 years newer than the last gen and even if the last gen was top of the line and this is mid-bottom it's still a 5 year advance, if we assume that it takes 3 years for top of the line gaming hardware to mainstream itself.
noun, used with singular verbs. Regardless of the derivation, it's not a plural. And if you can't say maths without it sounding like a speech impediment, I think that's your problem (note: I say math). Can you say "baths" without it sounding like you have a speech impediment? That's a real plural and it is a word that you're likely to encounter in North American life.
Maybe it should be "math's", since it seems like more of a contraction than a strict abbreviation.
Slashdot Mirror
You're just fishing for that "The Onion" link, aren't you?
Well, here you go.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/
You just totally glossed over the HTML, CSS, and Javascript part of his sentence.
As far as I'm concerned, cross-linked HTML + online syncing = web. Even CSS and Javascript are being a bit over-specific. For instance, one can imagine a different programming language that communed with the browser OM (older versions of IE even let a flavour of Visual Basic in, hilariously).
After all, the majority of websites are completely agnostic to whether you are online between the time you download the html page and the time you click the link. So it's not like "continuously online" is a traditional requirement of the web; before "Web 2.0" syncing was basically always user-initiated and discrete.
In other words, if you open wikipedia, then unplug your ethernet cable, are you no longer viewing a website?
Only if you use definition 4 of "hurt" from the same source. I think you know very well that the generally agreed-upon definition of violence is compatible with definition one of hurt, "to cause physical damage or pain", not all.
When you try to stretch words in this way they lose all meaning. It's okay to say "I don't like violence and I don't like hindering legitimate businesses". That's way clearer than claiming that hindering a legitimate business is violence.
But actually, when I searched for violence on dictionary.com I didn't get the definition you're quoting:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/violence?s=t
There are some obviously similar definitions but none are the same or even close enough to just be a typo apart. In particular, the word "hurt" does not appear on that page.
Why does everybody always assume that the unintended consequences of an action will be:
1. A net negative
2. *More* negative than the intended consequences
3. Non-mitigable
Also, why do multiple browsers put red-squiggles under "mitigable"? It's a real adjective.
Also, my imagination is capable of encompassing species-wide extinction and also species-wide eternal slavery to parasitic mind slugs. I don't think there's any way that eliminating the common cold could fuck us over worse than those outcomes.
(And i admit, i'm as guilty of that as the next geek.)
You did it in this very post. I'm curious how many people realize the irony* of calling that comic reference obligatory. Linking an obligatory comment is at the heart of what that particular comic was attacking.
To be fair, some of the sketches, like the "Four Yorkshireman" skit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo) lend themselves very well to ad-libbing without entirely descending into snowclone memes.
*I don't care about your particular definition of irony.
hey, AC...it's actually really, really easy for one person to develop something and another 'publicly present' it ;)
I'm sure he understands that. He's asking why you think that happened, based on the link.
the link shows alot more than what you listed...it shows the other two acknowledging the truth that the one guy had the idea for the messages disappearing...
I don't see that in the link. Are you sure you pasted the right link? The article you linked is ENTIRELY about one email mentioning three people, and one mentioning two. It doesn't say anything about the "third guy" being the one who had the idea for the messages.
It didn't say that 100k terms returned no results at all. It said that 100k terms returned no child abuse results.
It looks like what they're doing is removing the sites from their index, not really screwing around with the algorithms (which is why it's possible for Bing and Google to share their work here).
As such, none of the things you mentioned are particularly relevant, because none of them would be removed. In fact, by removing child porn from the results, they would be promoted. You could argue that some things will be removed with the excuse that they are child porn, but honestly, they don't need the child porn excuse to remove it and have you never even find out about it, so that is kind of a null worry.
Another argument is that something can legitimately be "on the fence", eg. something that's legal age in place A but illegal in place B because place B has an age of consent of 30 years old or somesuch thing.
Another one is a site like the old geocities that happens to host some child porn on arm A, and arm B on that site hosts no child porn, and A and B are unaware of each other.
But those problems aren't really particular to child porn. They are search optimization problems in general.
Nuclear does indeed manage near 90% on average. Sources: http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/US-Nuclear-Power-Plants/US-Nuclear-Capacity-Factor, http://en.openei.org/apps/TCDB/ (click on capacity factor, which also confirms your wind capacity number by giving it a median of 38%).
He also specifically said unplanned maintenance, not planning maintenance.
If they buy all the circulating bitcoins, the ones that are deliberately held out of circulation become essentially worthless because they cannot circulate.
Does it require a perfect circle? I'm wondering if you could, for example, make a helix-shaped particle accelerator. It can have a constant curvature and torsion, just like a circular accelerator, so my naive thinking is that it would suffer the same radiation problems as a circular one, plus the problem that linear accelerators have (they don't loop around), but you could get significantly more length out of this on Earth.
In which case, you could get more than 40 megameters of accelerator without leaving the planet.
Small towns have shitty building codes and horrible drivers.
Is there any evidence of this whatsoever?
It might even be true; I certainly haven't surveyed a representative sample of small towns. In the one I grew up in, and the ones around it, and the others I've been to enough to about these things, these things are not true. And my instinct is to say that city drivers are much shittier than small town drivers, particularly during inclement weather (partly because city-dwellers they have the option of not driving during inclement weather). Building codes, I really don't know. I would have guess that both cities and small towns have wide variance, but the average of cities and average of small towns is about the same.
In the interest of fairness, I'm also not sure of the "most heroes are from small towns" claim. I wonder if it's just unreported when [city A dweller] does cool thing in [city A], since you assume by default that he lives there so it doesn't need to be mentioned.
If you got Windows pre-loaded, there's a fair chance that you paid *negative* dollars for it. Using made-up numbers, if Dell puts Windows on the PC for $25 bucks, then gets paid $10 for each piece of crapware they pre-install on it, and they put 3 items of crapware there, the cost to Dell was -$5, so the cost to you should be down, not up, and you didn't have to suffer any of the crapware because as you say, you didn't use Windows in the first place.
The people distributing crapware got boned, though.
This would also be why Microsoft didn't try much harder to stop the crapware preloads, which Microsoft *knows* cause a lot of pain for their users and endless nightmares. It's a Faustian deal for them. They suffered through it for years because that's how they can compete on price with free software.
I don't know for your particular case, or most particular cases. I know it's a pattern that existed. You see the phenomenon when the big players sometimes flirt with Linux preinstalls, and Slashdot flips their shit because they sometimes charge *more* for the same system configuration except Linux preinstalled instead of Windows.
In this new world of tablets, I'm not sure that trend still exists (not sure it doesn't, either, though obviously Microsoft's own products don't fill up with 3rd party BS for a discount, only 1st party BS that everybody gets).
For a fine to be effective, it must be clearly greater than:
max(cost of damage done, profit taken by doing the harm) / perceived risk of being caught
This can be difficult to calculate, so there also needs to be a safety factor to ensure all relevant parties agree that the cost is higher. Note that actual risk of being caught and perceived risk of being caught are different things.
This can be a problem because it can lead to an unjust solution. For instance, the perceived risk of being caught for downloading music was very, very low, and the cost of damage done was, at most, the price of the music * the number of people it was distributed to. This lead to obscene fines that basically made downloading a very small risk of being fiscally annihilated forever, vs. no consequences. There isn't perfect agreement as to what degree it's "wrong" to download music in violation of copyright in the first place, but I think virtually everybody agrees that some of the lawsuits involved obscene amounts of money for trivial crimes.
It is not necessarily the case that a fine can be both just *and* effective. Sometimes it can. I think there's a widespread assumption that it can be both at once, and among a different (overlapping) set of people there's also a widespread assumption that the purpose of fines is just one or the other of the "just" or "effective".
In addition "MS" is no more valid of an abbreviation than "M$".
Completely wrong.
* It's their vender prefix on the Internet: http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/vendorspecific. Note also that mso is called out separately as Microsoft Office.
* Until the latest IE they had MSIE for "Microsoft Internet Explorer" in their user agent string
* The Microsoft developer network is called msdn.
* Microsoft Network is abbreviated msn.
* Look at their original logo: http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Microsoft-Firma-15584/News/Microsoft-Logo-Windows-8-1020153/galerie/1984053/
* It's composed of the words Microcomputer Software
* It's in a lot of the old 8.3 exe file names, eg. msoffice.exe
* Look at all of these MIME-types that specifically have ms as the abbreviation for Microsoft: http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application, http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/video
Using the stock ticker symbol as the "only valid abbreviation" is bizarre.
Otherwise Microsoft wants the name spelled out.
This might even be true in some senses eg. for publicity (I can't find anything to specifically confirm or deny that in a quick search), but it definitely wasn't always true and they're still generating new things with MS as the abbreviation so it's at best inconsistent.
Trying over and over and over to tell people they are "childish" just makes you look childish.
How so? I don't see it. And obviously since you're telling him he looks childish, you therefore look childish for telling him that (and by extension, I'm being childish now by pointing that out).
If it's "childish" then it will stand on it's own that way
People like you posting this sort of knee-jerk response every single time somebody says M$ just looks like desperation.
I don't even understand. Desperation? I literally don't know what you're trying to communicate there -- I know it's negative, but I don't know what negative thing.
There are a lot of childish nicknames that go around for things people don't like: M$, Faux News, Obummer, Mittens (for Mitt Romney), Rethuglicans, Demoncrats, Scroogled, Crapple, and on and on and on. Even when I'm on somebody's "side" in a particular argument, it makes me discount them (for instance, I'm unlikely to be on the side of Republicans on many debates, but "Rethuglicans" is just crass).
I'm pretty sure Microsoft themselves aren't all that pleased with South Korea's ActiveX install base. If you follow the browser at all, they've been trying to kill ActiveX more and more for the past half decade or so (with Flash as a very notable exception).
There's a near-zero chance that your exact genetic sequence would ever come into existence during the course of the universe as we understand it, and yet you exist. The same is true for basically everyone else, yet identical twins exist which doubly-defy the odds! You're more likely to bit struck by lightning than to jackpot a big lottery, yet those lottery winners exist too. So do people struck by lightning, as a matter of fact.
By definition, the planet we arose on is Earth-like because that's the prototype to which all other planets are compared for Earth-likeness. There is a 100% chance that the planet we arose on is Earth-like. Also, there's nearly 100% chance that the first non-Earth planet that we inhabit to the same degree that we inhabit Earth now is also Earth-like, since we'll likely aim for the Earth-like ones, since, again pretty much by definition, we are biologically adapted to live in Earth-like planets.
I think you can argue that religion is a medium, and one of the most effective and robustly self-reinforcing.
Sadly, for the same reasons as it is robust, it's not very flexible. The content is ideas of all sorts, both good and bad. "Brush your teeth" could be a religious cleanliness ritual. So can "throw rocks at unmarried pregnant women".
Some of the oddest things come out of the mouths of people who truly believe their religions in a literal sense. Not believing in a literal sense is tantamount to applying a filter on which content of the religion you will accept (hopefully tossing some of the "throw rocks" stuff that accumulates over the years and retaining only neutral-to-good ideas like "brush your teeth").
I mean, if Marshall McLuhan can argue that a light bulb is a medium then surely religion is one (though I kind of argue against a light bulb being a medium, unless used as a semaphore or something like that).
Opposing nuclear power may not mean loving coal, but a blanket opposition of nuclear is a de facto support of coal. Yes, you can throw examples where renewables work, and guess-what: I support that. Use renewables there. Keep making renewables better. Do it! It's worth it. And be ready to admit there are a few places where it doesn't work out, and you have to make a decision: coal, nuclear, human evacuation, whatever it is -- my money's on nuclear since the negative effects are concentrated and that's a good thing, except for the PR
It's not going to be easy, because if it was, we'd have already done it and saved the Internet a lot of arguments.
People who are stuck on a single silver-bullet are broken. Even coal has advantages. But it looks like the downsides aren't worth it most of the time, and with all the available alternatives, including but not limited to nuclear, we don't have to deal with them.
I know lots of people who Skype, especially grandparents with far-flung grandchildren. I've never heard of andrex in my life, and I'm only theoretically aware that apparently some people use hoover for vacuuming (or xerox for photocopying).
I expect this varies with geography (and Wikipedia tells me that "Andrex" implies you're probably in the UK). I remember going to school in Canada and everybody MSN'd each other (MSN messenger) yet apparently that never had significant inroads into the United States. But I assure you, Skype is very well known in a lot of significant markets.
It's absolutely more inevitable than that. Non-bitcoin money gets created and destroyed constantly. Part of the point of bitcoin was a limited supply -- just under 21 million can ever be in the supply at most. If you burn the mattress full of USB keys with bitcoin wallets, they will never be replaced (once the last coin is mined, anyway).
Apparently the current limitation on divisibility of bitcoins can technically be worked around, but nobody cares to because it's already divisible to fractions of pennies. That will become worthwhile as the currency deflates from ever-decreasing supply.
Though I'm skeptical of bitcoin lasting nearly long enough to have that kind of problem.
That would be deflation, since it's the money supply being reduced.
They are specifically descriptions of things we've observed hold up after spending a great deal of effort specifically attempting to observe something to the contrary.
That doesn't mean we can't observe something different in the future, but I think your claim was a bit weak since it seems to evoke a passive, dispassionate observer.
Regardless, certainly more than guidelines.
The first word he said was "Most".
That argument is invalid because it applies universally. For instance, if you said "the price of raw materials is not a factor in product development", and somebody else said "yes it is, consider a recent time when I had to choose between a $200 material and a $10 material for a product we planned to sell at $250 per unit", you can't go use a counterargument the fact that they didn't mention what they were getting for the extra $190, or the increased marketshare they might have at that price, etc..
He never once said or implied that Moore's Law was the sole factor in any decision. He was only arguing against your statement, which is that it is not and has never been useful for predicting things with resources.
Moore's Law is just a specific case of extrapolation based on known data points. Extrapolation is not a guarantee, but it's absolutely useful and is widely used in many fields, including in everyday life. I'm absolutely certain you've predicted that most consumer electronics will either be cheaper in 5 years, or more powerful in some way (not necessarily the way you want, but some way). If you're considering whether to buy an extended warranty, it's absolutely relevant how much cheaper/more powerful your stuff will become.
Where does the word "except" come into play there? They are about 8 years newer than the last gen and even if the last gen was top of the line and this is mid-bottom it's still a 5 year advance, if we assume that it takes 3 years for top of the line gaming hardware to mainstream itself.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mathematics?s=t
noun, used with singular verbs. Regardless of the derivation, it's not a plural. And if you can't say maths without it sounding like a speech impediment, I think that's your problem (note: I say math). Can you say "baths" without it sounding like you have a speech impediment? That's a real plural and it is a word that you're likely to encounter in North American life.
Maybe it should be "math's", since it seems like more of a contraction than a strict abbreviation.