No. I think it very slightly affects the price commanded for the copyright on a successful work. That's more likely to make a difference to company bean counters who make financial decisions about what to do with a given project and less likely to impact a musician's decisions.
I think you want to say that our current modes of transport would be safer than this spaceship when traveling to Alpha Centauri. All our current modes of transport would have a 100% death rate for the same journey, so that spaceship would be much safer than anything we have now. So what I think you want to say is obviously wrong. Was there something other than that that you wanted to say?
Hm, while I think about it, perhaps we could also calculate deathes per operation hour of a facility instead of energy produced.
You could calculate that, yes, but it is not a relevant statistic for comparing energy sources for safety. If you need a given amount of energy, the statistic being offered to you is how many people has died producing that amount of energy for you. A person who dies of radiation poisoning is no more or less dead than a person who dies from falling off a roof while installing a solar panel. If we imagine a whole town dying due to a horrific nuclear accident, then that is no better and no worse than the same amount of people dying due to coal-polluted air, even if all those coal deaths happen distributed over a large country instead of in just one place.
Your arguments are mostly about whether coal is better than nuclear. Even if coal were superior, that wouldn't change the fact that coal kills more people producing the same amount of energy. To say that nuclear is less safe than coal, you must dispute the numbers you were given, it doesn't matter for this discussion whether coal or nuclear has other benefits or disadvantages that are not related to safety. Though I guess you could say that the numbers are correct, but that they will be different in the future for example due to stricter safety standards on coal mines. I'm pretty sure that nuclear is going to get safer at a faster rate than coal is, but that is also an argument you could make.
Adding years adds incentive to create works, probably also beyond 50 years as you say, and that benefits the world so that's good. On the other hand, adding years also destroys value, as a freed work provides more value to the world than a for-pay and locked up work does. I don't see that 50 years should be optimal - I'm thinking somewhere between 5 and 20 years is probably optimal - enough time that the work can be profitable but no more. I don't know what the optimal length of time is, but that should be the discussion, Copyright is a negotiation not a human right. Adding years past 20 might even remove the incentive to work, since then one successful work can sustain a person for life so the best people are exactly those who then no longer have to work at all.
These people are idiots and deserve to be ridiculed and given a hard time as often as possible.
It's not nice to ridicule stupid people for their low intelligence. There is nothing they can do about that. It's like pointing and laughing at someone in a wheelchair for fighting with a flight of stairs. Also, we are all idiots some of the time, and there is nothing we can do about that. We might lower the rate of idiotic things we do by being careful, but we can never eliminate it completely, and there's a limit to how much effort it pays to use on being careful when momentary idiocy doesn't always have to be a big problem if we just let it go. I guarantee that in the next year you'll do something unbelievably stupid, way stupider than the post in question. We all do, and if you think you don't you are deluding yourself for example by giving excuses for why your particular idiocy was different from other people's idiocy. It's not. Compassion trumps ridicule.
The deeper problem with the No True Scotsman fallacy is that the favorable property of the True Scotsman is included in the definition. Is it possible that the definition of True Communism in your mind actually includes several favorable outcomes, so that any regime without those favorable outcomes cannot, by definition, be True Communism? That would be the No True Scotsman fallacy. Is it possible, in your mind, to have a communist regime in which everyone is absolutely miserable? No regime can guarantee happiness, so if that situation is outside the bounds of reality in our mind, perhaps you have indeed included favorable outcomes into your definition of True Communism? I'm pretty sure that True X has never been tried in the real world for any kind of regime X if you use a sufficiently stringent definition of X.
I see that you are correct and that I was wrong in stating that the police and prosecutor are not both executive functions. I find it no less scary - this is really not the way it should be. The police absolutely must record evidence accurately for there to be a semblance of justice, yet their ultimate boss is simultaneously responsible for making sure people go to jail based on evidence, and for the collection of the evidence. That creates an incentive to look harder for damning evidence, to ignore non-damning evidence, to alter evidence and even to completely fabricate evidence. The problem would be apparent if the prosecutor was the one to personally collect the evidence and also gets a promotion for putting people behind bars. The problem is still there, even if reduced, when the person ultimately in charge of the prosecutor is also ultimately in charge of the people collecting the evidence. Now tie this together with the prevalence of plea bargains that people accept even if they are innocent because defending yourself is so expensive and you can't know if you will be found guilty even if you are innocent. Scary.
I don't know about Sweden, but in the US, prosecution is an executive function.
You don't think it would be the least bit scary if the police were simultaneously responsible for finding suspects, collecting evidence and directly prosecuting you? That is, you believe that it's fine that the people whose job it is to impartially and accurately record the evidence against you are also the same people whose job the next day is to argue as pointedly as possible that you are guilty? That's quite a conflict of interest.
A conversation is an exchange of facts, but it is also more than that. It is a social interaction. If you were having a discussion and the other guy suddenly struck you, that changes the conversation even if a strike is irrelevant to facts and arguments. Of course you can't be violent in text, but perhaps the analogy could be illuminating. Starting off "whine whine whine" doesn't invalidate your arguments, it invalidates the interaction with you. It changes the subject from facts to a fight to be the bigger dick, and it is hard-to-impossible to change the subject back to arguments and facts. Your point is not being ignored, you yourself changed the subject to something else. The word "whining" is an attack and not an argument, it is no different from calling the OP an idiot or any other generic word like that. You can do that, but then you change the subject and you can't go back to the discussion you wanted to have.
That is a misunderstanding - the objection is not that the conclusion is wrong, it's that your argument for it was wrong. Your original argument is not helped by coming up with a different argument that shows the same thing. I told you to use practical evidence instead of incorrectly applying theory, and then when you did that, you think that that shows that what I said was wrong.
If you listen to the interview, you'll hear John Carmack saying that built-in cards might out-perform dedicated cards for some things in future if they grant better memory access by virtue if using system memory directly. How do you know that the hardware interface between graphics cards never change? That doesn't sound right to me, but if you have an inside source, feel free to enlighten us.
Everything you wrote is mathematically accurate, yet the actually interesting thing is exactly how big N has to get.
You know that this very question has been researched, right? I am amazed that you are intent to discuss this issue without having actually done any research in this matter.
What I'm discussing is what can and cannot be concluded from big-O asymptotic complexity. You were drawing a mathematically correct conclusion that "for big enough N, raytraycing is better." You then made an incorrect further conclusion that "eventually, raytraycing is better." Big-O notation never guarantees that you'll ever be able to solve an input so big that the complexity estimate becomes accurate as to which algorithm is better. You then chose to heed my advice and present data on what actually matters - which algorithm is better in practice for which inputs. Good on you, even if the quote above is a very dickish way to accept advice.
They make more than 1 graphics card each. Btw Intel sells more graphics cards than anyone else. You've probably got one integrated on your computer without knowing about it. There are also many flavors of each graphics card that the big companies come out with.
That is the bad old days of computer graphics and sound - if a given game wasn't written for your particular hardware, too bad. It's hard to write to the hardware when there is a proliferation of distinct graphics cards out in the world and many more are added every year. On top of that, the way to talk to a given graphics card is often secret. There's a reason that people use OpenGL and DirectX.
Everything you wrote is mathematically accurate, yet the actually interesting thing is exactly how big N has to get. The mathematics of big-O notation tells you nothing about that, yet that is the crux of the matter. For example, if N has to be bigger than 10^123478234897298, the apparent better asymptotic complexity has no impact on the real world.
The point is that if I tell you that one algorithm is O(1) and the other is O(2^n), you haven't actually learned anything useful about which algorithm you should use for your program - you also need to know the point at which one becomes better than the other. But if you know that, you don't have to know the complexity to choose which algorithm will work better for you! So you see, big-O notation can be useful for understanding how your program behaves. It is never by itself (!) useful for deciding between two algorithms at any size of input - it doesn't give you enough information.
So don't just tell me the complexities, tell me that one method is better than another at X multiple of current performance.
You are trying to play this off as you not being serious to protect your ego, but you weren't trolling, you were expressing yourself. You see yourself as having made a valid point and we are all trying to deny you the bragging rights of your insightful critique. When that didn't happen, you attacked. When that failed, you tried to play it off with a joke. Life won't go well for you until you realize what the problem here was - it wasn't your point being ignored.
That makes two of us then since my userid is #36999690 and yours is #36999802. I guess you should have signed up before breakfast that day, then you wouldn't have missed me by 112 or 0.0003%. Anyway your response is another example of what I was talking about.
If you start out with describing the other person in terms of "whine whine whine", it really doesn't matter what you say after that, which was my original point and that you clearly still haven't taken to heart. I have no stake in Wikipedia wars.
Whine whine whine... It is hard to take you and anyone else seriously unless you link to Wikipedia. Citation needed.
I find it much harder to take you seriously if you believe that putting in "whine whine whine" does something positive for you. If you argue like that on Wikipedia, some introspection may be in order on how not to drive editors away.
Your G+ account can be banned without your entire Google account (e.g. GMail) being closed. This would happen e.g. if you register with a name that isn't actually your name - your GMail account will still be available after that. Your G+ account will still be available too as soon as you put in your actual name. However, if they ban you for something more sinister like mass spamming, phishing or fraud, then they may ban your whole Google account because they want nothing more to do with you. They have the power to yank your whole account if you misbehave badly enough, and it is entirely up to them how to define "badly enough". That does seem reasonable for a free service.
Don't ban them, just don't count their +1s until the behavior of the account gives sufficient evidence that it is legit. The humans who erroneously get flagged as possible bots wouldn't even know it and there would be no adverse impact on them. Since there is no ban, it's not as clear to the SEOs what it was that tipped Google off.
Number theory was known as the most useless of all branches of mathematics, yet now you couldn't pay your bills online without the public key cryptography it has made possible. By your standard of what should be investigated, we would still be banging big rocks together. Now we are banging tiny, tiny atoms together. That's progress.
Slashdot Mirror
No. I think it very slightly affects the price commanded for the copyright on a successful work. That's more likely to make a difference to company bean counters who make financial decisions about what to do with a given project and less likely to impact a musician's decisions.
I think you want to say that our current modes of transport would be safer than this spaceship when traveling to Alpha Centauri. All our current modes of transport would have a 100% death rate for the same journey, so that spaceship would be much safer than anything we have now. So what I think you want to say is obviously wrong. Was there something other than that that you wanted to say?
Hm, while I think about it, perhaps we could also calculate deathes per operation hour of a facility instead of energy produced.
You could calculate that, yes, but it is not a relevant statistic for comparing energy sources for safety. If you need a given amount of energy, the statistic being offered to you is how many people has died producing that amount of energy for you. A person who dies of radiation poisoning is no more or less dead than a person who dies from falling off a roof while installing a solar panel. If we imagine a whole town dying due to a horrific nuclear accident, then that is no better and no worse than the same amount of people dying due to coal-polluted air, even if all those coal deaths happen distributed over a large country instead of in just one place.
Your arguments are mostly about whether coal is better than nuclear. Even if coal were superior, that wouldn't change the fact that coal kills more people producing the same amount of energy. To say that nuclear is less safe than coal, you must dispute the numbers you were given, it doesn't matter for this discussion whether coal or nuclear has other benefits or disadvantages that are not related to safety. Though I guess you could say that the numbers are correct, but that they will be different in the future for example due to stricter safety standards on coal mines. I'm pretty sure that nuclear is going to get safer at a faster rate than coal is, but that is also an argument you could make.
Adding years adds incentive to create works, probably also beyond 50 years as you say, and that benefits the world so that's good. On the other hand, adding years also destroys value, as a freed work provides more value to the world than a for-pay and locked up work does. I don't see that 50 years should be optimal - I'm thinking somewhere between 5 and 20 years is probably optimal - enough time that the work can be profitable but no more. I don't know what the optimal length of time is, but that should be the discussion, Copyright is a negotiation not a human right. Adding years past 20 might even remove the incentive to work, since then one successful work can sustain a person for life so the best people are exactly those who then no longer have to work at all.
These people are idiots and deserve to be ridiculed and given a hard time as often as possible.
It's not nice to ridicule stupid people for their low intelligence. There is nothing they can do about that. It's like pointing and laughing at someone in a wheelchair for fighting with a flight of stairs. Also, we are all idiots some of the time, and there is nothing we can do about that. We might lower the rate of idiotic things we do by being careful, but we can never eliminate it completely, and there's a limit to how much effort it pays to use on being careful when momentary idiocy doesn't always have to be a big problem if we just let it go. I guarantee that in the next year you'll do something unbelievably stupid, way stupider than the post in question. We all do, and if you think you don't you are deluding yourself for example by giving excuses for why your particular idiocy was different from other people's idiocy. It's not. Compassion trumps ridicule.
The deeper problem with the No True Scotsman fallacy is that the favorable property of the True Scotsman is included in the definition. Is it possible that the definition of True Communism in your mind actually includes several favorable outcomes, so that any regime without those favorable outcomes cannot, by definition, be True Communism? That would be the No True Scotsman fallacy. Is it possible, in your mind, to have a communist regime in which everyone is absolutely miserable? No regime can guarantee happiness, so if that situation is outside the bounds of reality in our mind, perhaps you have indeed included favorable outcomes into your definition of True Communism? I'm pretty sure that True X has never been tried in the real world for any kind of regime X if you use a sufficiently stringent definition of X.
I see that you are correct and that I was wrong in stating that the police and prosecutor are not both executive functions. I find it no less scary - this is really not the way it should be. The police absolutely must record evidence accurately for there to be a semblance of justice, yet their ultimate boss is simultaneously responsible for making sure people go to jail based on evidence, and for the collection of the evidence. That creates an incentive to look harder for damning evidence, to ignore non-damning evidence, to alter evidence and even to completely fabricate evidence. The problem would be apparent if the prosecutor was the one to personally collect the evidence and also gets a promotion for putting people behind bars. The problem is still there, even if reduced, when the person ultimately in charge of the prosecutor is also ultimately in charge of the people collecting the evidence. Now tie this together with the prevalence of plea bargains that people accept even if they are innocent because defending yourself is so expensive and you can't know if you will be found guilty even if you are innocent. Scary.
I don't know about Sweden, but in the US, prosecution is an executive function.
You don't think it would be the least bit scary if the police were simultaneously responsible for finding suspects, collecting evidence and directly prosecuting you? That is, you believe that it's fine that the people whose job it is to impartially and accurately record the evidence against you are also the same people whose job the next day is to argue as pointedly as possible that you are guilty? That's quite a conflict of interest.
You may want to Google the term "no true Scotsman".
A conversation is an exchange of facts, but it is also more than that. It is a social interaction. If you were having a discussion and the other guy suddenly struck you, that changes the conversation even if a strike is irrelevant to facts and arguments. Of course you can't be violent in text, but perhaps the analogy could be illuminating. Starting off "whine whine whine" doesn't invalidate your arguments, it invalidates the interaction with you. It changes the subject from facts to a fight to be the bigger dick, and it is hard-to-impossible to change the subject back to arguments and facts. Your point is not being ignored, you yourself changed the subject to something else. The word "whining" is an attack and not an argument, it is no different from calling the OP an idiot or any other generic word like that. You can do that, but then you change the subject and you can't go back to the discussion you wanted to have.
That is a misunderstanding - the objection is not that the conclusion is wrong, it's that your argument for it was wrong. Your original argument is not helped by coming up with a different argument that shows the same thing. I told you to use practical evidence instead of incorrectly applying theory, and then when you did that, you think that that shows that what I said was wrong.
If you listen to the interview, you'll hear John Carmack saying that built-in cards might out-perform dedicated cards for some things in future if they grant better memory access by virtue if using system memory directly. How do you know that the hardware interface between graphics cards never change? That doesn't sound right to me, but if you have an inside source, feel free to enlighten us.
You don't like it when you make mistakes, do you?
Everything you wrote is mathematically accurate, yet the actually interesting thing is exactly how big N has to get.
You know that this very question has been researched, right? I am amazed that you are intent to discuss this issue without having actually done any research in this matter.
What I'm discussing is what can and cannot be concluded from big-O asymptotic complexity. You were drawing a mathematically correct conclusion that "for big enough N, raytraycing is better." You then made an incorrect further conclusion that "eventually, raytraycing is better." Big-O notation never guarantees that you'll ever be able to solve an input so big that the complexity estimate becomes accurate as to which algorithm is better. You then chose to heed my advice and present data on what actually matters - which algorithm is better in practice for which inputs. Good on you, even if the quote above is a very dickish way to accept advice.
They make more than 1 graphics card each. Btw Intel sells more graphics cards than anyone else. You've probably got one integrated on your computer without knowing about it. There are also many flavors of each graphics card that the big companies come out with.
That is the bad old days of computer graphics and sound - if a given game wasn't written for your particular hardware, too bad. It's hard to write to the hardware when there is a proliferation of distinct graphics cards out in the world and many more are added every year. On top of that, the way to talk to a given graphics card is often secret. There's a reason that people use OpenGL and DirectX.
Everything you wrote is mathematically accurate, yet the actually interesting thing is exactly how big N has to get. The mathematics of big-O notation tells you nothing about that, yet that is the crux of the matter. For example, if N has to be bigger than 10^123478234897298, the apparent better asymptotic complexity has no impact on the real world. The point is that if I tell you that one algorithm is O(1) and the other is O(2^n), you haven't actually learned anything useful about which algorithm you should use for your program - you also need to know the point at which one becomes better than the other. But if you know that, you don't have to know the complexity to choose which algorithm will work better for you! So you see, big-O notation can be useful for understanding how your program behaves. It is never by itself (!) useful for deciding between two algorithms at any size of input - it doesn't give you enough information. So don't just tell me the complexities, tell me that one method is better than another at X multiple of current performance.
You are trying to play this off as you not being serious to protect your ego, but you weren't trolling, you were expressing yourself. You see yourself as having made a valid point and we are all trying to deny you the bragging rights of your insightful critique. When that didn't happen, you attacked. When that failed, you tried to play it off with a joke. Life won't go well for you until you realize what the problem here was - it wasn't your point being ignored.
Post IDs. Yeah... I'm a moron.
You are new here, ain't you?
That makes two of us then since my userid is #36999690 and yours is #36999802. I guess you should have signed up before breakfast that day, then you wouldn't have missed me by 112 or 0.0003%. Anyway your response is another example of what I was talking about.
If you start out with describing the other person in terms of "whine whine whine", it really doesn't matter what you say after that, which was my original point and that you clearly still haven't taken to heart. I have no stake in Wikipedia wars.
Whine whine whine... It is hard to take you and anyone else seriously unless you link to Wikipedia. Citation needed.
I find it much harder to take you seriously if you believe that putting in "whine whine whine" does something positive for you. If you argue like that on Wikipedia, some introspection may be in order on how not to drive editors away.
Your G+ account can be banned without your entire Google account (e.g. GMail) being closed. This would happen e.g. if you register with a name that isn't actually your name - your GMail account will still be available after that. Your G+ account will still be available too as soon as you put in your actual name. However, if they ban you for something more sinister like mass spamming, phishing or fraud, then they may ban your whole Google account because they want nothing more to do with you. They have the power to yank your whole account if you misbehave badly enough, and it is entirely up to them how to define "badly enough". That does seem reasonable for a free service.
Don't ban them, just don't count their +1s until the behavior of the account gives sufficient evidence that it is legit. The humans who erroneously get flagged as possible bots wouldn't even know it and there would be no adverse impact on them. Since there is no ban, it's not as clear to the SEOs what it was that tipped Google off.
Number theory was known as the most useless of all branches of mathematics, yet now you couldn't pay your bills online without the public key cryptography it has made possible. By your standard of what should be investigated, we would still be banging big rocks together. Now we are banging tiny, tiny atoms together. That's progress.