Had one of these (and only one)... told them I only had Mac's at home, and the guy got belligerent and said I was lying, then finally after telling him that over and over for a good minute he basically said FU and hung up.
That's the wrong way to do it -- instead, pretend to be old and incompetent (and with a similarly old computer). It takes you two minutes to get to your computer, another minute to figure out which button turns it on, another 10 minutes for your computer to boot up (with occasional progress reports so they don't lose heart). In between, you set the phone down and do whatever you were doing before. Like with real tech support, fake tech support requires near-infinite patience and the target demographic is clueless incompetents. The object of this game is to see how long it takes them to run out of patience for your computer to start up.
Telling them you don't run Windows is a losing proposition -- if they accept that, then they just admitted they're scammers, whereas it would be a common enough test by people who do have Windows whereby insisting that they have a virus-laden Windows machine will earn them the target's trust.
There were more people preoccupied with getting a photograph of themselves in front of [the Mona Lisa] than there were people looking at the damn thing.
I'd do that, and I'm not even the sort of person who likes photographs (or worse, selfies). It's not like I haven't seen copies of the most famous art pieces everywhere but it's not every day one can see the original, which would make it a memorable event. I'd personally care more about original art pieces if it weren't for the fact that most art experts attach approximately zero value to the art in question and millions of dollars worth of value to its status as original -- else the value of a painting would not change much after a chemical analysis.
Yes, I had considered that too, before you had mentioned it. It doesn't seem like too difficult a problem to solve -- for example, the original patent holder could retain a non-transferable license to use his patent but have to sell the remaining rights at his declared market value, or perhaps only has to sell a non-transferable license to use the patent. In either case, this means they have to pay for the privilege of preventing others from doing things, but can't be blackmailed by a troll. It seems to me it would encourage competition, which is a win in my book.
You say that as if it would be a bad thing for people with valuable patents who intend to make poor use of them, to be forced to sell them to someone who would make better use of them. Remember, the purpose of patents is not "to protect someone's intellectual property", it is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts".
Incidentally, patent trolls are the least likely to like my suggestion, as not only would they be paying taxes on their arsenal, but anyone could buy their patents relatively cheaply rather than pay for a lawsuit.
When they say "piracy of intellectual property", respond with "copyright infringement".
Or when they say "piracy" respond with "alternate interpretation of 'To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.'".
You're on to something really interesting concerning patents and copyright. I think I can suggest a good way to flesh out the idea more completely: a patent or copyright is worth whatever the owner declares it to be worth, and property taxes are paid based on that value. But if someone thinks that the patent or copyright is worth more than that, they are entitled to buy it at approximately that price because that is its value.
Unless your destination is higher than the place you started, every single bit of energy used for driving is waste. So you can get arbitrarily close to zero expenditure.
Myself, I prefer to ride a spherical horse in simple harmonic motion on a frictionless plane. It gets me where I need to go with zero energy expenditure. Traveling through the perfect classical vacuum is somewhat unpleasant though. The key insight though was the spherical horse, because normally there would be inevitable losses due to friction when compressing the hooves, even steel wheels like on trains have rolling friction from their compression.
Teaching it not to throw dirty clothes that happen to be currently occupied by a human, into the industrial washer, would be a good first step.
I've heard of humans doing similar. You see, caring more about getting the clothes cleaned than that you're not really supposed to wash clothes that contain a human, isn't exclusive to robots.
Even then, it would be possible to anonymize calls by routing them through a third party. Of course, then if caller ID can't be spoofed from there, at least the wrath of the people can be aimed at one of the responsible parties (or such third parties could be blocked).
And how would you know for certain that "wj0ighuagherapnv; u0cu" isn't a compressed form of "mary had a little lamb, who's fleece was white as snow"? In fact, any random data could be one or the other half of a one time pad. Once you try to assign external meaning to something, you have to deal with not just the thing in question but the entire universe as well. I've yet to find any good way to do so.
So your theory is that a perfect crystal that can be completely described in one short sentence, contains more information than a strand of human DNA? Because you think negentropy is information, and if you run the numbers you see that weight for weight a perfect crystal has more negentropy than human DNA. At least you gave something that can be calculated numerically, I'll give you credit for that if you don't change your mind about it now that I calculated a few things.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the complexity and information content of a closed system will increase. Cue Creationists who will insist I am wrong but are unable to describe what any of the terms mean nor how to calculate them.
If you're so confident in your political score-pointing criticism, how would you like to make a bet? Let's say, you predict the average temperature and rainfall for each day the next seven days, and I predict the average temperature and rainfall for each year the next seven years. Whoever is off by the lowest percent wins. And I assume you'd be willing to give me odds of approximately 1:365 in my favor since clearly my task is that much harder.
Slashdot Mirror
And I bet you think entropy is somehow the opposite of information, but you don't know how to calculate either entropy or information numerically.
... cancers piss themselves in terror!
one of the driest parts of the world is in polar regions.
Well, that depends on what you mean by "dry".
Where do you think the water goes when it evaporates?
It vanishes into thin air...
Hotter means more evaporation -- both from the ocean, and from already arid areas.
Had one of these (and only one)... told them I only had Mac's at home, and the guy got belligerent and said I was lying, then finally after telling him that over and over for a good minute he basically said FU and hung up.
That's the wrong way to do it -- instead, pretend to be old and incompetent (and with a similarly old computer). It takes you two minutes to get to your computer, another minute to figure out which button turns it on, another 10 minutes for your computer to boot up (with occasional progress reports so they don't lose heart). In between, you set the phone down and do whatever you were doing before. Like with real tech support, fake tech support requires near-infinite patience and the target demographic is clueless incompetents. The object of this game is to see how long it takes them to run out of patience for your computer to start up.
Telling them you don't run Windows is a losing proposition -- if they accept that, then they just admitted they're scammers, whereas it would be a common enough test by people who do have Windows whereby insisting that they have a virus-laden Windows machine will earn them the target's trust.
There were more people preoccupied with getting a photograph of themselves in front of [the Mona Lisa] than there were people looking at the damn thing.
I'd do that, and I'm not even the sort of person who likes photographs (or worse, selfies). It's not like I haven't seen copies of the most famous art pieces everywhere but it's not every day one can see the original, which would make it a memorable event. I'd personally care more about original art pieces if it weren't for the fact that most art experts attach approximately zero value to the art in question and millions of dollars worth of value to its status as original -- else the value of a painting would not change much after a chemical analysis.
Yes, I had considered that too, before you had mentioned it. It doesn't seem like too difficult a problem to solve -- for example, the original patent holder could retain a non-transferable license to use his patent but have to sell the remaining rights at his declared market value, or perhaps only has to sell a non-transferable license to use the patent. In either case, this means they have to pay for the privilege of preventing others from doing things, but can't be blackmailed by a troll. It seems to me it would encourage competition, which is a win in my book.
You say that as if it would be a bad thing for people with valuable patents who intend to make poor use of them, to be forced to sell them to someone who would make better use of them. Remember, the purpose of patents is not "to protect someone's intellectual property", it is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts".
Incidentally, patent trolls are the least likely to like my suggestion, as not only would they be paying taxes on their arsenal, but anyone could buy their patents relatively cheaply rather than pay for a lawsuit.
When they say "piracy of intellectual property", respond with "copyright infringement".
Or when they say "piracy" respond with "alternate interpretation of 'To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.'".
You're on to something really interesting concerning patents and copyright. I think I can suggest a good way to flesh out the idea more completely: a patent or copyright is worth whatever the owner declares it to be worth, and property taxes are paid based on that value. But if someone thinks that the patent or copyright is worth more than that, they are entitled to buy it at approximately that price because that is its value.
The real question is, who gives a shit?
Of all places to locate a nuclear reactor, they argue, who could possibly make a case for this one
Presumably, the engineers who considered the location and decided it would be safe. Did they make a mistake? Who cares -- journalism!!!
Unless your destination is higher than the place you started, every single bit of energy used for driving is waste. So you can get arbitrarily close to zero expenditure.
Myself, I prefer to ride a spherical horse in simple harmonic motion on a frictionless plane. It gets me where I need to go with zero energy expenditure. Traveling through the perfect classical vacuum is somewhat unpleasant though. The key insight though was the spherical horse, because normally there would be inevitable losses due to friction when compressing the hooves, even steel wheels like on trains have rolling friction from their compression.
Some people would say that that is too complicated a topic for a robot to learn all the ins and outs and ins and outs.
Teaching it not to throw dirty clothes that happen to be currently occupied by a human, into the industrial washer, would be a good first step.
I've heard of humans doing similar. You see, caring more about getting the clothes cleaned than that you're not really supposed to wash clothes that contain a human, isn't exclusive to robots.
Even then, it would be possible to anonymize calls by routing them through a third party. Of course, then if caller ID can't be spoofed from there, at least the wrath of the people can be aimed at one of the responsible parties (or such third parties could be blocked).
And how would you know for certain that "wj0ighuagherapnv; u0cu" isn't a compressed form of "mary had a little lamb, who's fleece was white as snow"? In fact, any random data could be one or the other half of a one time pad. Once you try to assign external meaning to something, you have to deal with not just the thing in question but the entire universe as well. I've yet to find any good way to do so.
So your theory is that a perfect crystal that can be completely described in one short sentence, contains more information than a strand of human DNA? Because you think negentropy is information, and if you run the numbers you see that weight for weight a perfect crystal has more negentropy than human DNA. At least you gave something that can be calculated numerically, I'll give you credit for that if you don't change your mind about it now that I calculated a few things.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the complexity and information content of a closed system will increase. Cue Creationists who will insist I am wrong but are unable to describe what any of the terms mean nor how to calculate them.
"Honey, do you even know what color my eyes are?"
Liar! Everyone knows that [profitable thing] does not cause [expensive health problem].
$1825 for a year of fancy coffee, instead of $5000 for blue eyes of -1 protection from sunlight.
If you're so confident in your political score-pointing criticism, how would you like to make a bet? Let's say, you predict the average temperature and rainfall for each day the next seven days, and I predict the average temperature and rainfall for each year the next seven years. Whoever is off by the lowest percent wins. And I assume you'd be willing to give me odds of approximately 1:365 in my favor since clearly my task is that much harder.
When the comment basically amounts to "I'm not sorry and I'd do it again and encourage others to do likewise"...