> I get happy that this mentality was not present in WW2
Don't put words in my mouth. Fire bombings and atomic weaponry were deployed then for very different reasons than OP is talking about. Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined were like a quarter of a million deaths, not the two million he glibly wants to exterminate for existing in an occupied or contested city.
Its reasonable to assume that they are NOT that tiny, because we exist. More importantly, it is reasonable to assume that they are not tiny because of the diversification of life and the parallel evolution sometimes seen.
If your science relies on a really special case to happen, then it is pretty fucking fragile, and probably not really science. In all things, we have done pretty well assuming that there's NO special event happening. Gravity isn't unique to Earth. The earth isn't the only planet in the solar system. The sun isn't unique to this solar system. Stars aren't unique to the milky way. The milky way isn't unique to the local group. And so on.
> what someone might want to think or believe in
If you believe that there's a nonzero chance that we are the only sentient life in the universe across all time, then that is something YOU want to believe in, and are relying on a "one in gugleplex" chances to prove the case.
Remember, we aren't talking about OBSERVABLE intelligences, and certainly not ones we can interact with on any timescale. We are discussing the observable universe.
That means that whatever your guess for "how many intelligent societies should there be" was several years ago, you would have had to multiply it by a number greater than 1 several times over the years. Meaning that you'd have to be progressively adjusting your "odds for one intelligent species" down, down down down.
The chances of only humanity being an intelligent society are zero. Those odds are dust. The universe is *too damned big*. That's your only conclusion unless you believe in special creation. That's why I say, if we really WERE sure we were the only ones, the ONLY explanation left would some kind of supernatural action- an action outside of nature. Gods, a simulation, whatever the current zeitgeist wants to hypothesize all boil down to, life couldn't start without something else. Again, that's ONLY the case if you had magically gained the infallible knowledge that we were alone, which of course, we have not.
How many intelligent civilizations are out there? Were out there? Will be out there? You are correct that we can't guess the number, but our own existence and the LUDICROUS size and age of the universe means it isn't just one. That's impossible.
> we just don't fucking know shit
We know that other stars exist, other galaxies, other galactic groups, other superclusters. It's absurd. https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
You are correct that we don't fucking know shit, however, over the overall field of astronomy. There's too little matter to explain the gravity we see in galaxies, so we have like 80% of matter being dark matter or something. Then we have the opposite problem at greater scales, so we have dark energy as 70% of everything. So there's 5% of the universe we can explain and 19/20ths of it is totally unknown. We could be in some fucking nature preserve for all we know.
But for "does life exist elsewhere", the answer is "yes, many times" or "no, and it exists here because X", where we cannot solve for X. Unless you have a good argument for X, then the answer is, yup.
A civilian committing a crime, even a capital offense, is still a civilian. The issue you refer to is not really related to the one being discussed. It should obviously go without saying that mass murder is not the answer.
Your solution is to kill about 2 million civilians? What war are you fighting in your head, that such a price would even be worth considering, much less paying?
And that is before even thinking of the fallout- both figurative and literal- of such an attack?
It doesn't. The Drake equation only applies to the Milky Way. If you want to expand the Drake equation to the entirety of the universe, you take whatever number you get from the Drake equation, and multiply by the number of galaxies in the universe, which keeps being revised upwards with more detection. So at minimum, you are looking at whatever your Drake equation is times a hundred billion.
Well, the observable universe increases continually, and will do so either forever or for some great amount of time in the future. So we are forever shrinking the volume of potential marshmallow fluff, moment by moment!
The numbers are too damned big. It's strange enough that we either no not see or do not recognize signs of some vastly distant (and vastly in the past) society. They are TOO damned big. If we exist, then other societies in space exist. If you could wave a wand and KNOW whether or not any intelligent life exists in the universe besides us, and the answer was "no it does not", then it would be an argument for special creation by mathematical certainty.
It's too big. It's too old. If you accept anything resembling evolution, then there are aliens in that void, and a shit lot of them.
Touch disease is probably based on the iPhone 6 Plus being able to torque a bit more than is desired, resulting in some contacts having more play than they should, which eventually messes them up. Probably. Most iPhones don't have this issue, including the 6S Plus, which has a bit more reinforcement in the body, or any of the non-plus phones, which don't seem to torque as much. That would be totally unrelated to a tech like this (or even other smartphones).
Touchscreens are interesting, because in some cases they are generally superior, and in others they are abysmal. One thing I think may actually be temporary is the idea that a touchscreen device can be permitted almost no other inputs, ever. That is strange.
Games are a really interesting one, because touchscreens simultaneously opened up a bunch of interesting new control methods, while completely being bonkers for any game where you meaningfully control an avatar on the screen. We've seen a bunch of workarounds including controls on the screens, and they DO work, but... they are nothing compared to a controller. Interesting for sure.
For raw productivity, there's only a few things that they seem to be good at. For viewing and reading, they seem to be great.
> You can turn hyper threading off on Intel systems too
You can, and if you are paying by the core, you should. Many instructions aren't actually split per core- the core handling two threads with hyperthreading really can do some instructions from each thread at the same time, but not all of them. The boost was originally very low, like 10%, and is decently higher now (like 40%?), but it is nowhere as good as another physical core.
I'm sure Intel isn't too happy with this pricing model, either. They COULD have found other ways to increase performance instead of hyperthreading, of course- they just figured (correctly) that this would be a good bang for the buck, and maybe didn't consider that it would be used as a bat-to-the-knees on their end users.
> Nobody's being forced to buy 20 core processors
Some people sure are.
> Intel still makes a four core version of everything as far as I know
And you know why that sucks.
Here's the problem with that pricing model: you are paying twice. You pay for the hardware, and then you pay for the software. If games were priced that way, they'd cost more to run on a good graphics card than a bad one. You'd be stuck at 30 fps until you paid a license fee, after you installed your latest nvidia. And as you point out, there's ways around it- there's ways to decrease the TOTAL processing power of your box (buy buying a chip that has less cores, but each core runs faster, for the same money and less total processing power), and then save enough to justify that based on the arbitrary license fee of running on X cores instead of Y cores with the software. It's total shit. It's basically as if the software guy capped the processing at 500 MHz, and charged you more for each increment of 500 MHz your processor runs at- it is just that threads are much easier to control for in software.
I spent a bit under 4k on a box this year. Also a dual Xeon, and probably not as saucy as yours. But I because I built mine from parts, it wouldn't even count in the statistics of "shipped PCs". I bought chips offa eBay (don't hate!), and got the components from newegg, amazon, and the local microcenter. That list in there is just the PCs that the guys who ship stuff sell. Going through my *entire life*, and counting the computer my parents bought me as a gift when I went into college, I would count for about four computer sales- one Gateway 2000, and three laptops. But I've certainly BUILT several towers between now and then- they just wouldn't add onto those metrics. I don't care if HP sells enough desktops (and not just because they really sell servers). I don't care if Lenovo has some downturn. As long as the guys making mobos, CPUs, RAM, HDDs, SDDs, etc are making products, I'm good on non-mobile PCs.
I'm not a typical use case, but I'm far from unique, especially in a place like slashdot. Hell, in a few years, it may even be possible to assemble a laptop from components without being a crazy man. The industry is a lot bigger than just full shipped PCs, after all.
I'm pretty damned sure we can beat 5% with a new i7. You have some Sandy Bridge era processor, and the current ones are Skylake. Your processor runs at 2-3.5 GHz (or faster if you OC, but I'll ignore that- you can OC a new one too). New ones run from 2.5 to 4GHz, so you are getting an increase there, and it could easily be your 5%. But there's also been moderate instructions-per-clock gains across those generations- easily all by itself worth 5% of CPU performance.
Five years doesn't buy you what it used to, but man, it trivially gets you way over 5%.
Phones do break more often, but they also aren't quite as much of a commodity as a full PC. That is in part because the market still has so many things that just haven't been done yet, and many of the barriers are still being broken by industry leaders- they are simply a less mature market. Throw in that almost everyone can make use of a phone with superpowers, whereas a sit-down computer requires way more tradeoffs, and it makes perfect sense, to me at least.
But here's another example: Apple's new 7 phone is about twice as fast at most tasks as their 6 phone from two years ago. Android phones haven't had that exact huge boost, but they are still a lot more powerful than 2-4 years ago as well. That is a big gain in performance- both for whatever computing tasks you do on your phone, but also phones are still making huge strides in GUI and responsiveness. PCs mostly hit a wall where everything that could be fast is effectively instant, and everything that is slow is still pretty slow, but marginally faster now. The machine I'm typing this on gives me letters as soon as I press them: so did my machine twenty years ago. My first iPhone did not, it was clearly struggling to do that simple task, and that was just a few years ago. You can easily find games that work amazing on a new phone, decently on an old phone, and not at all on an early phone, and we are talking just the span of a few years. If you, as a game developer, come out with a game that needs a top-end two year old computer, you are ignoring the vast majority of your userbase- no one will fund that idea. But if you had that development model in 1992, it would be defensible, even if not optimal.
So I really think that the power increase drives the market, but not in the sense of "most people want a bigger processing peen", in the sense of "can you make a computer that uses the new power to make me more productive". A GUI does that, a bunch of 3D effects do not (or at least not trivially). An on screen keyboard that is more accurate and faster does, hyperthreading does not. Etc. In the areas where the new tech helps, the new tech has taken off. And phones and tablets have had an open field there.
> So the one thing you cannot say is that he is driving voters away.
No, the one thing you cannot say is 'ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn', both because it lacks useful vowels, and will likely summon Cthulhu. But your point is still mostly valid.
> If she gets 4% (which would be amazing) it won't influence anyone or get reported.
If 4% of America votes Green, that would be unprecedented, and it would be reported everywhere. More importantly, it would send a strong message to Democrats about what values they should display.
Likewise if Johnson gets close to the 10% he's polling at, but aimed at both major parties, both of which have libertarian wings that are generally suppressed.
It is unlikely that Johnson or Green get ANYTHING close to what they are polling at. This is actually a big part of why the polls are dicked up: if 10-15% of your electorate is claiming they will vote third or fourth party, then you have a serious issue, given that the historical precedent is like 1% for libertarians and half a percent for Greens. Either we are about to see shattering third party numbers, or many of these voters will actually vote Clinton or Trump (or both, frankly- with that many votes in the hopper, who knows). The attempt to control for this is to ask voters who they would vote for if they JUST had Clinton or Trump, which doesn't have the same level of respondents, and may or may not be accurate.
If Johnson gets 3% and Stein gets 1%, that would be a ludicrous change in our elections, which normally see all third party stuff in the sub 2% range. And yes, people who make policy would definitely take note of this.
There's plenty wrong with the TPP. Enough wrong that the only two remaining candidates are opposed to the TPP- Trump for real, and Clinton at least nominally (and possibly genuinely, depending on if her recent statements about what it turned into can be taken at value).
The TPP enjoys broadbased opposition for very good reason. It will make the poor of the world poorer, so the progressives are opposed to it (including Sanders). It will spread ludicrous copyright crap all around, so a lot of techies are opposed to it. It is mostly a list of things preventing local governments from governing democratically on a bunch of trade and "intellectual property" issues, so the "states rights" types are opposed to it. And it will enable the outflow of jobs, so the civic nationalists are opposed to it.
Basically, to back it, you need a principled stand on free trade and a willingness to hold your nose for its stance on censorship. Johnson's quote on it: “It is my understanding that the TPP does advance free trade,” says Johnson, “Is it a perfect document? Probably not. But based on my understanding of the document, I would be supporting it [though] in a perfect world there wouldn’t be a document like that, there would just be free trade.”
The TPP seems very popular on capital hill, contentious within the ranks of libertarians, and roundly opposed by the electorate.
"has been around since at least the Second Century" is perfectly understandable. It means that the minimum amount of time IT HAS BEEN AROUND is bounded, at a minimum, by the second century. The amount of time it has been around is AT LEAST that long: it could be longer.
This is a perfectly normal construct logically, and perfectly common in English.
Yea, that's not really disputed. The issue at hand does involve WHY, however, and the supposedly-neutral DNC actively strategizing against him is literally what everyone is complaining about with "establishment" candidates this year.
It's a fact that the DNC CFO was in emails trying to get play on Sanders' religious status ("My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist."). It's a fact that Schlutz shat all over him in emails that clearly showed her allegiance against him, and was promptly promoted into the Hillary campaign as soon as she resigned (arguably, she was already part of it, yukyuk yuk!). It's a fact that Hillary's lawyer emails the DNC with advice that sounds like they just coordinate like, all the time, against Sanders.
It definitely proved what everyone on both sides suspects- the amount of power in these closed groups is large, and their fairness (at least on the Democrat side) is just a farce. If Trump didn't have huge support on the right, he would have been erased as well.
So no, Sanders couldn't get all the votes. But it is clear he was never playing by the same rules as Hillary, and that groups that should have helped him or stayed neutral instead did the opposite.
I get that you are going to vote for Hillary, and it is in your best emotional interest to downplay the fact that everyone around her always seems to be up to some shady shit. But there's really not much room on this topic: the emails show a lot of bullshit, and they are presumably just the tip of the iceberg, the only part we got to see due to the actions of some hacker. It doesn't take much creativity to extrapolate from what we do have. This was a rigged game. It was unethical at the very least, and I wouldn't be surprised if something criminal popped up at some point, either.
When I was younger, I ran a D&D game involving a very alien, energy world. The midway point of the story was finding out that it was a simulation, and breaking out (into a normal version of the physical world), and helping a resistance force. Separate stats for both simulated and real words, etc. I got a lot of cred with my gaming buddies years later when that Matrix movie came out, lemme tell you!
The point is, the concept has been around for awhile- the Matrix packaged their simulation in such a way that there was a real world that everyone was being deliberately lied to about, such that you could be insulted and have a bad guy to rail against. In the Matrix, the bad guys were even murder robots, making the choice all the clearer. Exactly as you say, however, if we are simulated by a substrate universe, then that universe doesn't need to have much, or anything, in common with ours. This is gotten around by the assumption of an "ancestor simulation" - that we may be simulated by a real universe that looks pretty much same as ours, by people who are effectively the descendants of our "real versions". But, why is this all that likely? The assumption that at least one substrate universe exists means that either that one (or a further down turtle) is profoundly alien, their only relation to us being that they want to see some piece of the way a universe with our physical laws does something. We could be here to calculate 42, or to observe how the stars work for some scientific reason, or perhaps each galaxy is just a really sweet screensaver. There's no reason to assume that the substrate universe ultimately has anything in common with our universe- merely that they perceive some gain from the simulation, or the end result thereof.
> the possibility that any reality can open any other reality or even the same reality in eternity mode and access any point in any reality's spacetime with a pointer
Betcha the first scientist to try it forgets to populate the segment register, tries to reference kernel space, and triggers a general protection fault. Prepare now by overwriting your save file with that of a laser-dolphin, so on reboot you get to be, well, a laser-dolphin.
Slashdot Mirror
> I get happy that this mentality was not present in WW2
Don't put words in my mouth. Fire bombings and atomic weaponry were deployed then for very different reasons than OP is talking about. Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined were like a quarter of a million deaths, not the two million he glibly wants to exterminate for existing in an occupied or contested city.
> if the probabilities are tiny enough
Its reasonable to assume that they are NOT that tiny, because we exist. More importantly, it is reasonable to assume that they are not tiny because of the diversification of life and the parallel evolution sometimes seen.
If your science relies on a really special case to happen, then it is pretty fucking fragile, and probably not really science. In all things, we have done pretty well assuming that there's NO special event happening. Gravity isn't unique to Earth. The earth isn't the only planet in the solar system. The sun isn't unique to this solar system. Stars aren't unique to the milky way. The milky way isn't unique to the local group. And so on.
> what someone might want to think or believe in
If you believe that there's a nonzero chance that we are the only sentient life in the universe across all time, then that is something YOU want to believe in, and are relying on a "one in gugleplex" chances to prove the case.
Remember, we aren't talking about OBSERVABLE intelligences, and certainly not ones we can interact with on any timescale. We are discussing the observable universe.
That means that whatever your guess for "how many intelligent societies should there be" was several years ago, you would have had to multiply it by a number greater than 1 several times over the years. Meaning that you'd have to be progressively adjusting your "odds for one intelligent species" down, down down down.
The chances of only humanity being an intelligent society are zero. Those odds are dust. The universe is *too damned big*. That's your only conclusion unless you believe in special creation. That's why I say, if we really WERE sure we were the only ones, the ONLY explanation left would some kind of supernatural action- an action outside of nature. Gods, a simulation, whatever the current zeitgeist wants to hypothesize all boil down to, life couldn't start without something else. Again, that's ONLY the case if you had magically gained the infallible knowledge that we were alone, which of course, we have not.
How many intelligent civilizations are out there? Were out there? Will be out there? You are correct that we can't guess the number, but our own existence and the LUDICROUS size and age of the universe means it isn't just one. That's impossible.
> we just don't fucking know shit
We know that other stars exist, other galaxies, other galactic groups, other superclusters. It's absurd.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
You are correct that we don't fucking know shit, however, over the overall field of astronomy. There's too little matter to explain the gravity we see in galaxies, so we have like 80% of matter being dark matter or something. Then we have the opposite problem at greater scales, so we have dark energy as 70% of everything. So there's 5% of the universe we can explain and 19/20ths of it is totally unknown. We could be in some fucking nature preserve for all we know.
But for "does life exist elsewhere", the answer is "yes, many times" or "no, and it exists here because X", where we cannot solve for X. Unless you have a good argument for X, then the answer is, yup.
A civilian committing a crime, even a capital offense, is still a civilian. The issue you refer to is not really related to the one being discussed. It should obviously go without saying that mass murder is not the answer.
>A nuke here or there
Your solution is to kill about 2 million civilians? What war are you fighting in your head, that such a price would even be worth considering, much less paying?
And that is before even thinking of the fallout- both figurative and literal- of such an attack?
It doesn't. The Drake equation only applies to the Milky Way. If you want to expand the Drake equation to the entirety of the universe, you take whatever number you get from the Drake equation, and multiply by the number of galaxies in the universe, which keeps being revised upwards with more detection. So at minimum, you are looking at whatever your Drake equation is times a hundred billion.
Well, the observable universe increases continually, and will do so either forever or for some great amount of time in the future. So we are forever shrinking the volume of potential marshmallow fluff, moment by moment!
Bullshit.
The numbers are too damned big. It's strange enough that we either no not see or do not recognize signs of some vastly distant (and vastly in the past) society. They are TOO damned big. If we exist, then other societies in space exist. If you could wave a wand and KNOW whether or not any intelligent life exists in the universe besides us, and the answer was "no it does not", then it would be an argument for special creation by mathematical certainty.
It's too big. It's too old. If you accept anything resembling evolution, then there are aliens in that void, and a shit lot of them.
Touch disease is probably based on the iPhone 6 Plus being able to torque a bit more than is desired, resulting in some contacts having more play than they should, which eventually messes them up. Probably. Most iPhones don't have this issue, including the 6S Plus, which has a bit more reinforcement in the body, or any of the non-plus phones, which don't seem to torque as much. That would be totally unrelated to a tech like this (or even other smartphones).
*** glibc detected *** /dritchie/: double free or corruption
Touchscreens are interesting, because in some cases they are generally superior, and in others they are abysmal. One thing I think may actually be temporary is the idea that a touchscreen device can be permitted almost no other inputs, ever. That is strange.
Games are a really interesting one, because touchscreens simultaneously opened up a bunch of interesting new control methods, while completely being bonkers for any game where you meaningfully control an avatar on the screen. We've seen a bunch of workarounds including controls on the screens, and they DO work, but... they are nothing compared to a controller. Interesting for sure.
For raw productivity, there's only a few things that they seem to be good at. For viewing and reading, they seem to be great.
"Finding pictures of blue jays"
> You can turn hyper threading off on Intel systems too
You can, and if you are paying by the core, you should. Many instructions aren't actually split per core- the core handling two threads with hyperthreading really can do some instructions from each thread at the same time, but not all of them. The boost was originally very low, like 10%, and is decently higher now (like 40%?), but it is nowhere as good as another physical core.
I'm sure Intel isn't too happy with this pricing model, either. They COULD have found other ways to increase performance instead of hyperthreading, of course- they just figured (correctly) that this would be a good bang for the buck, and maybe didn't consider that it would be used as a bat-to-the-knees on their end users.
> Nobody's being forced to buy 20 core processors
Some people sure are.
> Intel still makes a four core version of everything as far as I know
And you know why that sucks.
Here's the problem with that pricing model: you are paying twice. You pay for the hardware, and then you pay for the software. If games were priced that way, they'd cost more to run on a good graphics card than a bad one. You'd be stuck at 30 fps until you paid a license fee, after you installed your latest nvidia. And as you point out, there's ways around it- there's ways to decrease the TOTAL processing power of your box (buy buying a chip that has less cores, but each core runs faster, for the same money and less total processing power), and then save enough to justify that based on the arbitrary license fee of running on X cores instead of Y cores with the software. It's total shit. It's basically as if the software guy capped the processing at 500 MHz, and charged you more for each increment of 500 MHz your processor runs at- it is just that threads are much easier to control for in software.
I spent a bit under 4k on a box this year. Also a dual Xeon, and probably not as saucy as yours. But I because I built mine from parts, it wouldn't even count in the statistics of "shipped PCs". I bought chips offa eBay (don't hate!), and got the components from newegg, amazon, and the local microcenter. That list in there is just the PCs that the guys who ship stuff sell. Going through my *entire life*, and counting the computer my parents bought me as a gift when I went into college, I would count for about four computer sales- one Gateway 2000, and three laptops. But I've certainly BUILT several towers between now and then- they just wouldn't add onto those metrics. I don't care if HP sells enough desktops (and not just because they really sell servers). I don't care if Lenovo has some downturn. As long as the guys making mobos, CPUs, RAM, HDDs, SDDs, etc are making products, I'm good on non-mobile PCs.
I'm not a typical use case, but I'm far from unique, especially in a place like slashdot. Hell, in a few years, it may even be possible to assemble a laptop from components without being a crazy man. The industry is a lot bigger than just full shipped PCs, after all.
I'm pretty damned sure we can beat 5% with a new i7. You have some Sandy Bridge era processor, and the current ones are Skylake. Your processor runs at 2-3.5 GHz (or faster if you OC, but I'll ignore that- you can OC a new one too). New ones run from 2.5 to 4GHz, so you are getting an increase there, and it could easily be your 5%. But there's also been moderate instructions-per-clock gains across those generations- easily all by itself worth 5% of CPU performance.
Five years doesn't buy you what it used to, but man, it trivially gets you way over 5%.
Phones do break more often, but they also aren't quite as much of a commodity as a full PC. That is in part because the market still has so many things that just haven't been done yet, and many of the barriers are still being broken by industry leaders- they are simply a less mature market. Throw in that almost everyone can make use of a phone with superpowers, whereas a sit-down computer requires way more tradeoffs, and it makes perfect sense, to me at least.
But here's another example: Apple's new 7 phone is about twice as fast at most tasks as their 6 phone from two years ago. Android phones haven't had that exact huge boost, but they are still a lot more powerful than 2-4 years ago as well. That is a big gain in performance- both for whatever computing tasks you do on your phone, but also phones are still making huge strides in GUI and responsiveness. PCs mostly hit a wall where everything that could be fast is effectively instant, and everything that is slow is still pretty slow, but marginally faster now. The machine I'm typing this on gives me letters as soon as I press them: so did my machine twenty years ago. My first iPhone did not, it was clearly struggling to do that simple task, and that was just a few years ago. You can easily find games that work amazing on a new phone, decently on an old phone, and not at all on an early phone, and we are talking just the span of a few years. If you, as a game developer, come out with a game that needs a top-end two year old computer, you are ignoring the vast majority of your userbase- no one will fund that idea. But if you had that development model in 1992, it would be defensible, even if not optimal.
So I really think that the power increase drives the market, but not in the sense of "most people want a bigger processing peen", in the sense of "can you make a computer that uses the new power to make me more productive". A GUI does that, a bunch of 3D effects do not (or at least not trivially). An on screen keyboard that is more accurate and faster does, hyperthreading does not. Etc. In the areas where the new tech helps, the new tech has taken off. And phones and tablets have had an open field there.
I'm pretty sure you can in WINE. And Truecrypt has Linux versions for sure.
> So the one thing you cannot say is that he is driving voters away.
No, the one thing you cannot say is 'ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn', both because it lacks useful vowels, and will likely summon Cthulhu. But your point is still mostly valid.
Michael Badnarik?
Pretty sure Windows 10 is just one of their options.
> If she gets 4% (which would be amazing) it won't influence anyone or get reported.
If 4% of America votes Green, that would be unprecedented, and it would be reported everywhere. More importantly, it would send a strong message to Democrats about what values they should display.
Likewise if Johnson gets close to the 10% he's polling at, but aimed at both major parties, both of which have libertarian wings that are generally suppressed.
It is unlikely that Johnson or Green get ANYTHING close to what they are polling at. This is actually a big part of why the polls are dicked up: if 10-15% of your electorate is claiming they will vote third or fourth party, then you have a serious issue, given that the historical precedent is like 1% for libertarians and half a percent for Greens. Either we are about to see shattering third party numbers, or many of these voters will actually vote Clinton or Trump (or both, frankly- with that many votes in the hopper, who knows). The attempt to control for this is to ask voters who they would vote for if they JUST had Clinton or Trump, which doesn't have the same level of respondents, and may or may not be accurate.
If Johnson gets 3% and Stein gets 1%, that would be a ludicrous change in our elections, which normally see all third party stuff in the sub 2% range. And yes, people who make policy would definitely take note of this.
There's plenty wrong with the TPP. Enough wrong that the only two remaining candidates are opposed to the TPP- Trump for real, and Clinton at least nominally (and possibly genuinely, depending on if her recent statements about what it turned into can be taken at value).
The TPP enjoys broadbased opposition for very good reason. It will make the poor of the world poorer, so the progressives are opposed to it (including Sanders). It will spread ludicrous copyright crap all around, so a lot of techies are opposed to it. It is mostly a list of things preventing local governments from governing democratically on a bunch of trade and "intellectual property" issues, so the "states rights" types are opposed to it. And it will enable the outflow of jobs, so the civic nationalists are opposed to it.
Basically, to back it, you need a principled stand on free trade and a willingness to hold your nose for its stance on censorship. Johnson's quote on it:
“It is my understanding that the TPP does advance free trade,” says Johnson, “Is it a perfect document? Probably not. But based on my understanding of the document, I would be supporting it [though] in a perfect world there wouldn’t be a document like that, there would just be free trade.”
The TPP seems very popular on capital hill, contentious within the ranks of libertarians, and roundly opposed by the electorate.
"has been around since at least the Second Century" is perfectly understandable. It means that the minimum amount of time IT HAS BEEN AROUND is bounded, at a minimum, by the second century. The amount of time it has been around is AT LEAST that long: it could be longer.
This is a perfectly normal construct logically, and perfectly common in English.
> He failed to get the votes.
Yea, that's not really disputed. The issue at hand does involve WHY, however, and the supposedly-neutral DNC actively strategizing against him is literally what everyone is complaining about with "establishment" candidates this year.
It's a fact that the DNC CFO was in emails trying to get play on Sanders' religious status ("My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.").
It's a fact that Schlutz shat all over him in emails that clearly showed her allegiance against him, and was promptly promoted into the Hillary campaign as soon as she resigned (arguably, she was already part of it, yukyuk yuk!).
It's a fact that Hillary's lawyer emails the DNC with advice that sounds like they just coordinate like, all the time, against Sanders.
It definitely proved what everyone on both sides suspects- the amount of power in these closed groups is large, and their fairness (at least on the Democrat side) is just a farce. If Trump didn't have huge support on the right, he would have been erased as well.
So no, Sanders couldn't get all the votes. But it is clear he was never playing by the same rules as Hillary, and that groups that should have helped him or stayed neutral instead did the opposite.
I get that you are going to vote for Hillary, and it is in your best emotional interest to downplay the fact that everyone around her always seems to be up to some shady shit. But there's really not much room on this topic: the emails show a lot of bullshit, and they are presumably just the tip of the iceberg, the only part we got to see due to the actions of some hacker. It doesn't take much creativity to extrapolate from what we do have. This was a rigged game. It was unethical at the very least, and I wouldn't be surprised if something criminal popped up at some point, either.
When I was younger, I ran a D&D game involving a very alien, energy world. The midway point of the story was finding out that it was a simulation, and breaking out (into a normal version of the physical world), and helping a resistance force. Separate stats for both simulated and real words, etc. I got a lot of cred with my gaming buddies years later when that Matrix movie came out, lemme tell you!
The point is, the concept has been around for awhile- the Matrix packaged their simulation in such a way that there was a real world that everyone was being deliberately lied to about, such that you could be insulted and have a bad guy to rail against. In the Matrix, the bad guys were even murder robots, making the choice all the clearer. Exactly as you say, however, if we are simulated by a substrate universe, then that universe doesn't need to have much, or anything, in common with ours. This is gotten around by the assumption of an "ancestor simulation" - that we may be simulated by a real universe that looks pretty much same as ours, by people who are effectively the descendants of our "real versions". But, why is this all that likely? The assumption that at least one substrate universe exists means that either that one (or a further down turtle) is profoundly alien, their only relation to us being that they want to see some piece of the way a universe with our physical laws does something. We could be here to calculate 42, or to observe how the stars work for some scientific reason, or perhaps each galaxy is just a really sweet screensaver. There's no reason to assume that the substrate universe ultimately has anything in common with our universe- merely that they perceive some gain from the simulation, or the end result thereof.
> the possibility that any reality can open any other reality or even the same reality in eternity mode and access any point in any reality's spacetime with a pointer
Betcha the first scientist to try it forgets to populate the segment register, tries to reference kernel space, and triggers a general protection fault. Prepare now by overwriting your save file with that of a laser-dolphin, so on reboot you get to be, well, a laser-dolphin.