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User: MHolmesIV

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  1. No, he was asked a leading question by someone about us being in a simulation, and answered it using the standard philosophical argument people use for the simulation argument. And then he clarified that he and his brother are no longer allowed to discuss these things in hot tubs anymore.

    Everyone, I assume, has entertained these ideas and thought about them. He didn't bring it up, he wasn't out to make some real point. You can use similar arguments to argue that we are at, or close to, one of the last human generations, or that the traffic in the other lane really does go faster.

    They are all examples of the observation selection effect, wherein you make the assumption that you as the observer are a randomly chosen sample in the population space. In my mind, that right there is the trouble with all the arguments using that principle. You start out with an assumption of the distribution of a random sample, then you _force_ that random sample to be you, and then make conclusions based on the (no longer) random sample. Any conclusions made after the force are not valid. Just like in magic, if every time the magician shows you a "random" card from a deck, it's the 3 of clubs, then obviously the whole deck contains only 3 of clubs, right?

  2. Re:Cool but so small on Renewable Energy Shows Strong Gain In U.S. (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    you can hit 4 petawatt/hours in a year with 456gigawatts of production (Making the assumption of constant production, which is a false assumption with wind and solar, but meh.) 3% in a single year isn't horrible.

    What I'd really like to see is some sort of utility level grid storage solution take off. We could turn off half our coal plants today if we had enough batteries on the grid to be able to handle peak demand loads.

  3. Re:1.1 Gigawatts on Renewable Energy Shows Strong Gain In U.S. (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    I know! I saw this and thought, "what nuclear engineer designing this saw 1.1 Gigawatts and didn't think, 'hey, with just a slight tweak, we could produce 1.21 Gigawatts!'"

  4. Re:Playing Devil Advocate on Microsoft Unhappy With Beta Testers, Demands Answers (computerworld.com) · · Score: 1

    It's a little exaggerated, because MS still has "QA Analysts", but they don't do what the old Test org did, they're merely telemetry analyzers. Over the past two years MS has completely transitioned the old test engineering org to either developers, Analysts, or get laid off. This is across all business units and products.

  5. Re:I already posted this on another site.... on Yelp Employee Posts Open Letter About Cost Of Living And Low Wages, Gets Fired (modernreaders.com) · · Score: 1

    Your numbers are busted. Her salary was minimum. 12.25 an hour. Rent was 1200.
    Now rework your math and maybe you will start to see her issue.

    The problem is that yelp was paying minimum for a job that should be, in your words, $10 over minimum.

  6. Yeah, some entitled privileged girl "schooling" someone with no concept of their circumstances. She made assumptions that Talia was being helped by her family, which is a false assumption. Just because she could suckle from mom's teat until age 25 doesn't mean everyone can.

  7. Re:Not a problem, nothing to see here on T-Mobile's Binge On Violates Net Neutrality, Says Stanford Report (tmonews.com) · · Score: 1

    Er? Access to Binge on is free for providers. No one has to pay to be added to the list.

    This was called out specifically in their briefing, and is mentioned in their binge on materials.

    Now, some providers co-marketed with t-mobile to get prime placement on the _advertised_ list. There's nothing wrong with that. If apple buys an Ad on TV, does that make Dell not exist?

  8. Re:1 word answer to "why not any website?" questio on Why Won't T-Mobile Let Us Binge On All Of It? · · Score: 1

    Actually, this question was asked at the uncarrier event, and the answer was, unequivocally, "Yes! Any legal content that can meet our technical requirements is welcome on the service"
    https://youtu.be/xac9tGkUtTA?t...

  9. Re: Lovely summary. on Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Votes · · Score: 1

    I read that blog post all the way through. For the first time, mind you, and nowhere does it state that he has a slate, and he's voting for it and that everyone else must do the same. In fact, he was a lot more creditable than I was. If everyone had done as he suggested, there would have been a lot fewer no-awards, which basically disproves your assertion that he was the one running the show.

  10. Re:Headline is Bad on Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Votes · · Score: 1

    Wow, where did you get that from???

    The "special awards" you are referring to are George RR Martin's "Hugo Loser" awards, that he's been handing out for more than 30 years. And it wasn't given to people who had been preselected to win, it was given to people who would have been on the ballot if not for Vox Day's ballot manipulations.

    There was no rigging except for the rabid puppies, this magical cabal of people the puppies believe control access to Hugo awards are the actual fans who vote.

  11. Re:The Sad Puppies won. on Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Votes · · Score: 1

    Ugh, I meant "Best Novella", not "Associated Work"

  12. Re:The Sad Puppies won. on Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Votes · · Score: 1

    I love how everyone mentions Jim Butcher when trying to justify the puppies actions, but fails to talk about the fact that John C Wright had 3 of the 5 associated works nominations. And they were utter drivel.

    If all the puppies had done was get Jim Butcher onto the ballot, we wouldn't be here talking about the Hugos today. No. They instead shut out everyone but their own nominees by taking up all 5 slots in as many categories as they could.

    _Of course_ there was going to be a backlash. There was no "fixing". There was only angry fans seeing someone tromping shit over their lawn and saying "NO".

  13. Re:WIRED has it right on Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Votes · · Score: 1

    In this case the relatively small number was 2500-3500. Due to the australian rules, the small number had to be _a majority of the voters_

  14. Re:Headline is Bad on Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Votes · · Score: 1

    There was no voting bloc. Toni was tainted by unethical ballot stuffing. If she had done the right thing, like Annie Bellet and Black Gate did, there would have been a groundswell of support for her, and she may have gotten a 2016 or 2017 Hugo free of Vox Day taint. There was no way she was winning a Hugo this year, nor should she want to, considering how she got onto the ballot. (And I'm saying that as someone who actually voted for her)

    Toni is an amazing editor, but Baen doesn't really push the boundaries of scifi in it's works. They're like Scifi Mac'n'cheez. Comforting, easily digestible, exactly what you wanted, guilty indulgence.

  15. Re: Lovely summary. on Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Votes · · Score: 1

    Wait, what?

    The only cliques were the puppies. the 2500 no-awards were not organized, I voted no award for every category that had only puppy-backed folks on it, except for Toni Weisskopf, who I truly believe deserves a Hugo. I did it without some shadowy cabal of liberal elites telling me to, I did it because the puppies gamed the system, and the best way to discourage that sort of behavior is nuke it from orbit.

    And I'm one of the people the puppies should be courting as an ally. I will read any Baen author sight unseen. I love hard scifi. I own every Heinlein novel published, and kept them, even after I converted to ebook only. They're the only paper books I still have. I love military scifi and space opera. I'm exactly the demographic that would vote for some of the things the puppies want to see on the ballot.

    I still nuked them, and I would do it again if they attempted to stuff the ballot again.

    And the very fact that they could stuff the ballot they way they did disproves the idea of there being a shadowy clique controlling the nominations.

  16. Re:Insightful video on Leaked Microsoft Video Parodies Chrome Ad · · Score: 1

    Um, what? Citation needed.

    They scan and flag pictures you send via outlook.com and hotmail.com, and probably upload to skydrive. If they didn't, they could be legally liable for distributing kiddy porn. they do not randomly scan your PC or thrash your hard drives, unless you're talking about the system indexer, but that isn't searching or flagging anything, and you can turn it off if you prefer long-ass slow filesystem searches.

  17. Re:Unusual? on Microsoft Makes Millions Renting Campus Space to Vendors · · Score: 2

    Exactly, MS increases it's "rental" charge, the vendor increases their hourly rate to recoup the cost, and essentially, the entire $25 million MS "made", they already paid to the vendor in the first place. It's like if I give my kid a $100 allowance and then "charged" $10 for his rent. I might as well have just given him $90 to start with.

    Ooh, unless I want him to move out, I suppose.

  18. Re:Advertisements even after paying yearly! on Xbox Originator: "Stupid, Stupid Xbox!!" · · Score: 0

    Wow, bet you haven't ever paid for a magazine then, or a newspaper, or how about cable television? The ads are allowing big companies to subsidize your gold subscription. You're welcome.

  19. Re:Why are ISPs in bed with big content? on Software That Flagged HBO.com For Piracy Will Power U.S. 'Six Strikes' System · · Score: 2

    I would hazard a guess that the folks pirating movies on their networks are also the network's heaviest users. Dump those few people, and their infrastructure costs don't go up as fast. It's a win-win for the ISP. (A pirate pays the same monthly fee as a regular user, but they can support hundreds of regular users on a single pirate's monthly transfer)

  20. Re:Notice one thing... on Why Eric Schmidt Is Wrong About Microsoft Not Mattering Anymore · · Score: 4, Funny

    Damn, I can't work out which one you're referring to...

  21. Re:Aside from Microsoft's history.... on TypeScript: Microsoft's Replacement For JavaScript · · Score: 3, Informative

    Exactly, it's basically a preprocessor for javascript that allows your IDE to help you write better code.

  22. Re:And this suprises you? on TypeScript: Microsoft's Replacement For JavaScript · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Um, the Apache License is significantly more free than the GPL. Just sayin'.

  23. Re:Remember the old addage on TypeScript: Microsoft's Replacement For JavaScript · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Rubbish. Not a good view of the technology. You might want to watch the channel 9 video and see how the language works before sounding the war horns. Essentially it's an overlay on javascript code that allows the developer to infer useful information about their code. The output from the "compiler" is bog standard javascript, no microsoft extensions at all.

    So if the "carpet" ever got pulled out from under you, all you would do is go back to editing the standard .js directly.

  24. Re:Looks bad for SBB on Swiss Railway: Apple's Using Its Clock Design Without Permission · · Score: 2

    Except it is a clock in the phone, and if you watch the shadow on the second hand, it's clearly in three dimensions. And it's not copyright, it's trade dress, exactly what Apple sued Samsung for, with the difference being that Samsung's designs weren't nearly as exact a copy as this is.

  25. Re:Microsoft Breaks Windows on CowboyNeal Weighs In On the Windows 8 "Metro" GUI · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well. Windows 8 is one of the first operating systems in history that uses less resources than it's predecessor. That alone should be cause for celebration. There are a lot of changes under the covers, like a rewritten network stack, faster and better file copying and moving, class drivers for printers etc that most people won't really notice other than it just feels better in use. If you don't like it, stick with Win 7. I can't help but feel that if Apple had introduced the start screen concept, people would be hailing it as the most impressive invention in the history of computing.