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Windows Meets New Motherboard - Scott Adams' Experience

posted by LaminatorX on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the genuine-advantage dept.

Nuke writes:

In his blog, Scott Adams describes his exasperating experience following a change of motherboards. Central to the story is the fact that he has two phone numbers for Windows re-activation, both of which claim they are an official Microsoft call center and that the other is a scam. Neither are any help anyway. Seems to be a topical issue right now.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:46PM

    by cafebabe (894) on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:46PM (#128041) Journal

    Central to the story is the fact that he has two phone numbers for Windows re-activation, both of which claim they are an official Microsoft call center and that the other is a scam.

    That's the two guard, two door problem and the solution is well known [stackexchange.com] partly because it appeared in the film Labyrinth [wikipedia.org].

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:18PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:18PM (#128086) Journal

    That's the two guard, two door problem

    Except that it isn't. The people on the false hotline are not obsessive liars, they are fraudsters who will say whatever supports their fraud. If for a given question the truth supports their fraud, they will tell you the truth.

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    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

    • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Sunday December 21 2014, @11:33PM

      by cafebabe (894) on Sunday December 21 2014, @11:33PM (#128152) Journal

      It doesn't matter if a party lies consistently because you only have to craft questions to expose them and the structure of such questioning is well known and allows for the possibility of dealing with two rogue parties [wikipedia.org]. Admittedly, it is a secondary consideration when you're contacting such parties because you have one or more technical faults but it is possible.

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      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday December 22 2014, @09:51AM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday December 22 2014, @09:51AM (#128262) Journal

        From the linked Wikipedia article (emphasis by me):

        Knights and Knaves is a type of logic puzzle where some characters can only answer questions truthfully, and others only falsely.

        Which directly contradicts your claim

        It doesn't matter if a party lies consistently

        Indeed, a fraudster constructs a fiction and tells you the truth about that fiction with the only lie being the claim that this fiction were the reality. And the only ways to catch fraudsters is to either detect a contradiction to reality, or get them beyond the borders of their ability to consistently maintain their fiction, so they get into self-contradiction.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.