Kerfuffle

They'll fine you, and if you don't pay they'll put a lien on your house. You can't really just ignore them.

Wow, you're not joking. That actually was terrible. He does sort of have a point that if you positively prove something that excludes something else, you have essentially proven a negative. It doesn't work for stuff outside of abstract logical rules though and the way he argued his case is pretty bad.

you can prove that you aren't nonexistent. Congratulations, you've just proven a negative. The beautiful part is that you can do this trick with absolutely any proposition whatsoever. Prove P is true and you can prove that P is not false. Some people seem to think that you can't prove a specific sort of negative claim, namely that a thing does not exist. So it is impossible to prove that Santa Claus, unicorns, the Loch Ness Monster, God, pink elephants, WMD in Iraq, and Bigfoot don't exist. Of course, this rather depends on what one has in mind by 'prove.'

"Can you construct a valid deductive argument with all true premises that yields the conclusion that there are no unicorns? Sure. Here's one, using the valid inference procedure of modus tollens: 1. If unicorns had existed, then there is evidence in the fossil record. 2. There is no evidence of unicorns in the fossil record. 3. Therefore, unicorns never existed."

I bet if we wait 10 years, we'll find evidence of a new creature in the the fossil record. Prior to that point, we could "prove" that the creature doesn't exist?

"Someone might object that that was a bit too fast—after all, I didn't prove that the two premises were true. I just asserted that they were true. Well, that's right. However, it would be a grievous mistake to insist that someone prove all the premises of any argument they might give."

Hahaha. In other words, some might object that to prove something we need to prove something. How about we just don't prove it and say we did?

There are basically two main possibilities:

1. They're unreasonable.
2. You're unreasonable.

If it's the first one, it doesn't really matter how you respond. The best policy is to avoid dealing with people like that as much as possible.

If it's the second one then you should work on trying to fix it. That's the best way to respond.

Makes sense, sure. If you aren't in the category of idiot though it's pretty annoying and it's just plain harder to get the results you're looking for than it used to be.

If it’s a common typo it does that, but below it is a link “search instead for” with your original word.

Pretty sure it's not just common typos. However you're right that it doesn't provide a link to search with the original word. It's just annoying that even I explicitly went through the trouble of quoting my query it still tries to second guess me and makes me follow another link to get to the results I originally requested.

I don't know about your or the other person's particular examples but even when quoting stuff, Google search very frequently thinks it knows better than the user. I use quoting a lot and very often it gives me something I didn't ask for with "I think you meant blah: showing results for blah" even though I specifically quoted my query to ask for something other than "blah".

It was a lot more reliable about giving me what I actually asked for a few years ago. The results are currently a lot worse when you're searching for something specific.

First just think about the logic of what I said before: if there are finite number of combinations in the link, how can you possibly link to a larger number of items? It's just logically impossible.

Then how is it that I was able to link to 800 words with 5 characters, (stripping aside the static portion of the links)?

The fact that you were able to link to 800 words doesn't really mean anything. somesite.com/a could point to a file that was gigabytes. This doesn't meant the file got compressed to a. Right?

There also might be less combinations for that site than it appears. For an 800 word chunk of grammatical English text, there are a lot less combinations than the equivalent length in arbitrary characters. Instead of representing each character in a word, it could just use an id like dog=1, antidisestablishmentarianism=2 and so on. Even using tricks like that though, it's pretty likely you're only able to link to a subset of all the possible combinations.

Regarding compression in general, it's a rule that you can't compress something independent of its content. If you could do that, even if the compression only reduced the file by the tiniest fraction you could just repeatedly apply the algorithm until you end up where the problem I described is obvious. If you could compress any large file down to a single byte, then that single byte can only represent 256 distinct values. However there are more than 256 distinct files that can exist, so clearly something went wrong. This rule is kind of like breaking the speed of light or perpetual motion: if you get an answer that says you have perpetual motion or FTL travel then you automatically know you did something wrong. Same thing with being able to compress without regard to the content.

it would be possible to parse any program or any bit of software into its text equivalent and then generate the URL that attaches to this algorithm for that entire page reducing a thousand characters to 16.

This can't work. Let's use a simpler example, instead of 16 characters for the link let's say it's a single digit and let's say the content of the "page" is 4 digits. One digit has 10 possible values: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. 4 digits have 10,000 possible combinations. With only one digit to index into the 10,000 possible combinations, you can point to only 10 of them.

It's the same thing for pages of text. If you have a 16 character link and the content you're trying to index with it is more than 16 characters then you can only point to some of the possibilities in the larger set.

Get people to fund their own smear campaign? Creative!

I think it's an accessibility option, visual captchas should have a way to get to that alternative. Otherwise visually impaired people would just be screwed.

Let's just say if it was Feces Encrusted Nail(D) vs Anyone(R) I'd be going with my man FEN.

I’ll give CenturyLink a chance because I really hate Comcast.

I can definitely believe that Comcast can manage to be more horrible than CenturyLink. Not an easy task though.

The next best thing is satellite at $100 for 30Mps, versus 200Mps for $40 for CenturyLink, or Comcast.

Don't go with satellite if you care about latency at all. (From what I know, it also tends to have pretty pitiful upload speeds.)

I looked at Centurylink’s “compatible” modems and they’re all rated 3.5 stars and cost $150+ or more.

I had their service for 6-7 years and I have to admit I never had an issue with the modem (and the service was generally reliable with little downtime). Their customer service though...