What you are actually seeing is that modulo is not a great way to pick random numbers from a range. You have to understand the greater range you are getting the modulo for.

Let's use some simple numbers: You have random numbers from 0-100 as your source. Now, if you pick numbers from that in modulo 24, you will get uneven representation as 24 is not a whole multiple of the range. If we claim open ended, 24 means numbers 0-23 (24 numbers) over:

0-23 : 0-23
24-47 : 0-23
48-71 : 0-23
72-95 : 0-23
96-99 : 0-3

Thus your numbers 0-3 will be over-represented by a small fraction (enough to notice)

Now, this does not mean that the random number generator was good but even the best random number generator when used incorrectly will produce poor results.

Thus you would need to scale the whole range into your range - and usually it is done with numbers from 0.0-1.0 but you can do it over integer ranges too, albeit if two ranges are too close together in the integer ranges you can get beat frequencies.

Most people who code these days have zero understanding of how a CPU works or what a register is, let alone what an instruction set is other than there are ARM and x86 versions.

Does this mean they can't code?

Look, a lot of programmers could not write a reliable C program, let alone assembly. If they can use the higher level tools (Python, JavaScript) to be productive, who are we (old people) to claim they are not programmers.

So, I used to complain and send data that identified the company or the group doing the calls (including call trace data, etc)

Nothing happened. And the number of calls have increased to such an extent that I could never take the time to report them all. I am lucky if I only get 10 in a day on my cell phone.

And that does not include the "political" robocalls that are expressly allowed (WTF!)

So, the statistic is going down because people are just too frustrated with the lack of results from reporting the calls.

The reason for turning off the solar energy generation is that they don't want power pushed up into the grid when the grid is down. That can cause further damage and, even worse, injure or kill the line workers trying to fix the outage.

Now, a better system does exist where it will stop pushing to the grid when the grid is down and just provide power locally. However, that has other problems since you now need to have something to handle power imbalance - you don't want to brown-out or over-voltage the system in your house so you will need a big battery (guess what Tesla makes :-) ) to deal with that. So now you have a complex switch for feeding the grid / pulling from the grid (an automatic transfer switch) and some batteries (or large capacitors, albeit at that scale they are scary) and that adds to the cost (but also gets you the grid-down benefits)

Chapter 13 does not mean that the creditors got all of their money back, just that the debt got restructured. That can include things like taking a "hair cut" on the amount owed or, at a minimum, removing interest charges (which is basically destroying time-value of the money - aka opportunity costs)

Actually, the correlation of lower birth rates is usually related to education and occupation. Lower skilled, lower educated groups tend to have more children. Part of this could be explained by the actual need for "labor" in the family farm/business/etc if there was a conscious choice made in that direction.

We are just prisoners in a cave. Höhlengleichnis (or the Allegory of the Cave) is about the limit of understanding from seeing limited information (shadows on the wall).

Our view of the universe really is just like looking at shadows on the wall. One can come up with so many stories that seem to fit. Science is about eliminating those stories that seem to contradict something. We do this filtering by using our theory to predict something and then try to observe that "shadow" to validate it or fail to observe it to invalidate it.

While we have done a great job eliminating so many theories, the shadows still are so low in information that many theories still seem to fit. This is one that, by definition, would fit since, well, no matter what shadow we see we can claim that it is part of the simulation. In fact, maybe the shadows themselves are all there is to the simulation.

I do not think the railroad is a necessary *evil* - railroads do some things much more efficiently and reliably than any other technology available today. It may not be the sexy thing anymore but railroads are vital.

Now, Microsoft is currently not seen as sexy, but there are things that they are doing well. Windows Phone is actually a nice product. It does not have the installed base or app selection or public mindset but from a usability standpoint, I would pick Windows Phone over Android any day (and especially if I had to pick one of those two for my wife or my mother).

The *buzz* is not with Microsoft right now but I think that may change - but even as such, I would not count Microsoft out. There is a lot of interesting and advanced technology in Microsoft R&D - it will just be a matter of delivering to the market things that the market gets excited about. That is not easy when you don't have automatic buzz about your products and your competitors (Apple) gets front page news coverage about rumors about future unannounced products.

Let me see, 5 million pixels, 4 bytes per pixel = 20megabytes. Lets say we tripple buffer that, we are at 60megabytes. So how is 1,000megabytes (1GB) of video memory a limiting factor? You would have over 900megabytes available for 3D models and shaders even if tripple buffering *and* keeping the desktop display separate.

6% for 40 years is a bit over 10x (not 8%)

The math is (1 + %) ^ 40 == 10 which means if you put in 6% you get 1.06 ^ 40 == 10.28 thus 40 years at 6% will get you 10.28 times the number.

Now, add in the extras (anti-lock breaks, water cooled engine, airbags, air conditioning, power windows, etc) and you seem to have a much better/nicer/safer car for around the same price given your 6% number.

Note that inflation has been all over the map over the last 40 years. Since time value of money can not trivially be reduced to averages, it is not clear what the right number is, but if you look at the 3.5% number I have seen as the effective average over the last 40 years we see that you get only a 4x multiple rather than the 10x. This seems much closer to reasonable considering the significant differences between the VW bug from 1968 (a very simple device) to the one from 2008 (a rather complex and sophisticated device).

I wish that were the case. As web pages make use of more complex layout and dynamic data, the browsers have become key to not just rendering speed but debugging. Firebug was, for a long time now, key reason to use firefox.

Take a look at http://sinz.org/Maze/ for what turned into an interesting benchmark of layout and js/dom manipulation. (It was not the intent but it sure shows significant differences). Since I did that page, Firefox actually got much slower than it was but it still beats IE but loses badly to Chrome.

They are asking us to use their property and we even pay to use it, many times, under service contracts. There is no misappropriation of private property or resources. If they don't want others to use it, don't ask them to and don't sell them the service.

+1

Even worse, what if they don't throttle a child porn distributor but do throttle someone sending/downloading a Linux distribution?

What happens when they are then found to be co-conspirators in the illegal acts due to the fact that they claim that it is their microphone? Deep pockets to sue, that is for sure...

I wonder if they really want to say that the network they built is their microphone. Doing so would state that it is their speech and thus they would be liable for any illegal speech.

Note that as a common carrier (like phone companies of old) they would not be liable for any illegal activities that were committed via their network. This is long standing law.

Once you start filtering, controlling, limiting the content that is transmitted then you can no longer to seen as just a carrier of opaque information and can then be held liable for that information (illegal data, illegal speech, etc.)

It would be interesting to see what stance they would take on that. For example, if their network was used to distribute child porn and thus they would be held equally responsible along with those who sent and received it.