having worked at cisco, on and off, for 9 years, I have to agree with you. most of the engineers I worked with knew very little about networking. they were focused on their tiny bit of a 5000000 piece jigsaw puzzle, and didnt have time to learn the fine points. Sure, there was the manditory 2 week 'boot camp' on network protocols for all developers, but it was quickly forgotten when the fire hose of bug reports was turned their way.
the fact that most of them didn't know what a hash table was for is another thing entirely... however, I blame that on the fact that one doesn't need geniuses to maintain legacy code. you basically need people who will show up and keep hammering away until the job is done. the geniuses were always the ones who would try to get creative and end up ignoring the real requirements and do something stupid that nobody cared about.
Cisco is designed around business units, who massage the giant glob of software to do what their sales guys have sold, and a central engineering team who tries to keep the code base from fragmenting too badly. these two jobs require very different skill sets, and nobody really has the time or inclination to mess with how ARP works, except the team who maintains it. the guys who port the software to new hardware typically deal with very low level stuff, and maybe with specialized customer features. the central engineering guys deal with generic new features, and with maintaining the source after the other guys get bored with it.
So, maybe cut those ex cisco guys some slack. their real skills are more like linux kernel guys than java coders. they can find their way around a 20 meg source tree, but dont know all the java API calls.
The rich still die of cancer. One important plot point is the magical medical advances. I suspect that will be much more difficult than building a space station. If that level of medical support was available, folks would be rioting all the time to get it, there would be no stopping them from shooting down Elysium out of spite.
After seeing it, I felt let down. While it is a technical masterpiece (just like District 9), the allegory would have been more successful if all of the characters had been Mexican, instead of having Matt Daemon, Mr blue eyed blonde as the protagonist. I'm sure Blomkamp gave in on that in order to get to make the film. The people on earth should have all been Mexican, and the people 'in the sky' should have all been blonde and blue eyed.
Gaining weight happens because the human body isn't prepared, evolutionarily, to regulate its own food intake very well. We have a high inclination toward absorbing and storing extra energy because that gives us the best chance of surviving a famine. Because sugar is the most basic kind of food, the body uses it as a clue to say "it's time to absorb nutrients!", hence sugary foods make you gain weight even faster. This is part of the normal purpose of the hormone insulin.
The human body is really good at regulating the intake of natural foods. It is refined foods that we have trouble with. Try to get diabetes by eating only meat and vegetables. It was the introduction of agriculture, and the recent commercial introduction of HFCS that really messed us up. Here are some interesting references.
Copyright is 'good for society' in the sense that it allows creative people to benefit from their creativity, which causes more creative works to be produced. Not every creative work is intended to be commercially viable, but most are, and without some protection, these works would not be made.
Back in the 'dark ages', when broadcast was king, everybody said that cable TV would mean shows without commercials. That was the pitch that allowed these cunts to get their cable strung on OUR poles. Now, to get shows without commercials means you need to get them from an illegal source, and comcast will spike you up the ass (eventually) for it. The current 'scareware' thing is just a test to see how viable their detection code is.
Before freeways went everywhere, we had corner grocery stores. Now, we can't buy lettuce unless we hop in the car and drive 20 miles to the nearest costco. The internet has made lots of things possible, and more things much easier than before. However, now, because of those things that you just can't do anymore without it, we are dependent on it.
We need another transition point, away from cable, towards some sort of radio technology. Satellite internet makes the most sense to me. Anybody who can put up a satellite can start selling access. That leads to competition, which prevents ISPs from pulling this kind of stupid shit.
History may well remember that the information age was just the prelude to a whole new dark age. And it'll be recorded that we doomed ourselves trying to protect ourselves from pedophiles, murderers, terrorists, and every other boogieman. But... it's not exactly the first time in human history that a sudden leap forward in technology or industry created a power vaccum that led to social collapse. Actually... this would be the first time it hasn't happened, in case it doesn't.:/
Sigh....
There was no social collapse after the invention of the telephone, which was far more exciting for most people than the internet will ever be. There was no collapse after the telegraph allowed the first communication over more than 20 miles that didn't take a horse. There was no collapse after film and television brought the world to people who had not seen anything outside of a 10 mile radius of their home.
The pedophiles and terrorists are just going to come up with another way to do their business, and the 99.999% of people who are using the internet for legitimate activity will continue as they have been doing. No dark age is coming. Things are getting better every day. Think about 15 years ago, when 1% of the world's population had access to cell phones. Now, 75% of the world's population has access. That fact in itself is going to change everything.
It is MUCH cheaper to fling things AT earth than to fling things from earth to space. Imagine an elite that had control over a space station such as this, who also controlled mining in the asteroid belt, which they would probably need anyway for consumables. The would have an unlimited supply of rocks to throw at any city or state that got out of line.
However, that being said, I'm guessing this is actually the future of mankind, precisely because of this danger. If we don't somehow get off the planet, we are going to be hit by a comet, and that will be game over.
We could house the entire population of the world in 50 orbital space stations of the proper size. They will all be protected from solar radiation by near earth orbit. We will get consumables from the asteroid belt, energy from solar and HE3 from the moon, and live indefinitely with a great view of earth, which will be left to the poor who couldn't afford the lift ticket. However, robots will continuously construct new habitats from the asteroids in the belt, sell lift tickets, and make lots of money for their masters. Nobody will use the earth for a 'farm' or for resources, since getting things into orbit is too expensive, and I don't believe orbital tethers are viable. The earth will continue as it is until it is hit by that comet.
The 'speed enforced by aircraft' signs USED to be accurate. The California highway patrol used to have small aircraft that would time motorists, and radio the results to waiting patrol cars. I've seen the aircraft (15 years ago) at Napa airport, where they used to fuel.
If my route to Sydney is down, deliberately breaking my route to Melbourne wont help if there is a physical cable problem or some idiot down in the NOC changed the route cost to 10000 on the router. Nope, instead of one route to Australia down, I now have two.
Hmmm. If your route to Sydney went down momentarily, and your router decided that the best way to get there was through Tasmania, and it takes 20 minutes for the routing system to figure out that Sydney came back up, then yes, it might be that after Sydney comes up again, killing your route to Tasmania would make things better overall, because it would force the system to figure out a better way.
Another example would be an optimization algorithm that picked a local minimum. Breaking a link might enable the system to pick a global minimum by allowing it to escape from the local minimum. The result tells the system which link to break to escape the local minimum.
I thought that gun owners would be against this so that they could avoid the break-ins by people trying to GET their guns. Nobody is home all the time, and criminals clearly like guns, if only because they are small, compact, and expensive.
Lets see how misguided you were by the news. The woman in question:
- was previously arrested for domestic violence and no complaint was ever registered against her husband.
- went out of the room and into the garage to get a gun and got back to fire. She didn't run, she didn't lock herself in a room and called the police. And her husband stayed at the room and didn't follow her.
She fired several shots at arbitrary directions that could not only have hurt her family as could have hurt or killed innocent people in the neighborhood.
No, it wasn't about race or gender, it was just a crazy, violent and irresponsible woman playing the domestic violence card to falsely accuse her husband in the hope of getting a free out-of-jail card. An attempt that fortunately failed.
Even her husband, the 'target' disputes your version of events. In case you have trouble following the link:
On Aug. 1, 2010, Marissa Alexander, a 31-year-old mother of three, with a Master’s degree and no criminal record, was working for a payroll software company in Jacksonville. She was estranged from her abusive husband, Rico Gray, and had a restraining order against him. Thinking he was not at home, she went to their former house to get some belongings. The two got into an argument. Alexander says that Gray threatened her and she feared for her life. Gray corroborates Alexander’s story: “I was in a rage. I called her a whore and bitch and... I told her if I can’t have you, nobody going to have you,” he said, in a deposition. When Alexander retreated into the bathroom, Gray tried to break the door. She ran into the garage, but couldn’t leave because it was locked. She came back, he said, with a registered gun, which she legally owned, and yelled at him to leave. Gray recalls, “I told her I ain’t going nowhere, and so I started walking toward herI was cursing and all that and she shot in the air.” Even Gray understands why Alexander fired the warning shot: “If my kids wouldn’t have been there, I probably would have put my hand on her. Probably hit her. I got five baby mommas and I put my hands on every last one of them, except for one . I honestly think she just didn’t want me to put my hands on her anymore so she did what she feel like she have to do to make sure she wouldn’t get hurt, you know. You know, she did what she had to do.” And Gray admits Alexander was acting in self-defense, intending to scare and stop but not harm him: “The gun was never actually pointed at me The fact is, you know... she never been violent toward me. I was always the one starting it.” Ultimately nobody was hurt. Nobody died. On May 12, 2012, it took a jury 12 minutes to find Alexander guilty of aggravated assault. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The irony here is that the judge would not let her use the "Stand your Ground" law in her defense.
This case forms a wonderful argument for gun control. If Zimmerman did not have a gun, he would have ended up with a black eye, maybe a concussion, and Trevon Martin would have ended up in jail for his stupid assault. That is what would have happened in England, France, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, Austria, Spain, etc.
The fact that Zimmerman was carrying a deadly weapon was the cause of this heartbreak. His following of the kid was probably due to racial profiling, and the typical teenage response to being harassed would have been anger and outrage. White OR black. Martin was a fool to attack an armed man, but teenagers, particularly boys, are pretty much fools. Should he have died for being a fool?
Zimmerman's gun was legal, he appears to have acted legally, and so, in my opinion, the free access to guns that we Americans enjoy was the real culprit. The law is to blame. The truly sad thing is that similar scenarios are being acted out 10s of thousands of times a year all across the U.S. It is a needless heartbreak every time it happens.
The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one (e.g., the median of {3, 5, 9} is 5).
So, 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,100 has a median of 1. The definition of median means that picking a random value in a sequence gives you values less than the median 1/2 the time.
The mode is the value with the highest number of identical entries. So, it is the value that you are most likely to obtain with a random pick. In the sequence above, the mode and median are equal, both are 1.
Your argument would make sense if you used the average value of income, which can be either lower or higher. The old joke about everybody's kid being above average illustrates this point; if you have a bunch of kids, and they all have identical IQs, except poor Billy in the corner, who has a lower IQ, then everybody except Billy has an IQ that is above average, since Billy brings down the average. So, everybody's kid (except poor Billy) is 'above average'.
The wealth in this country is like that. The value of the united states (as of 2008, it is more now) is $188 Trillion dollars. If the ownership was divided equally, that would give every man, woman, and child in the country $750k net worth. However, the median net worth of people in the US is now something like $60,000, INCLUDING their house. So, nearly everybody is below average. The net worth of more than 50% of the country is less than 1/10 of the average net worth in the country. That is shocking for a society that prides itself on being egalitarian.
Cars are machines that turn dollars into miles. Using that perspective makes the following easier to grasp.
The problem is that the only way you know how far your car goes on a gallon of gas is if you measure it yourself. The mpg rating for a car is very dependent on how you drive. The purpose of giving mpg for a new car is so that it can be used as a comparison tool as to how much it will cost you to drive the car. Even your example that " the car has twice the utility per dollar spent on gasoline. So, for that reason, it also make sense to compare in miles/gallon." Except that if I am comparing more than two cars, the gp100m is more useful. It tells me how much more I will be saving on the car that gets better gas mileage and does a better job of putting that savings in a context that lets me balance it against other things.
Imagine three cars. One gets 5Lp100km, another gets 6Lp100km, the final one gets 7lp100km. I know that if I drive them all 100 km, the first one will use 5L, the second 6L, the third 7L. So what is the 'efficiency' of the cars? You can't compute it without computing the reciprocal of those numbers (that is, the km/L number). How much more efficient is the first than the second? How much more is the second from the third? MPG (or km/L) are both direct measurements of efficiency, since what you want is the distance per dollar, and dollars are directly proportional to fuel volume.
Once more, I get more value from going from a car that gets 10 mpg to a car that gets 20 mpg than I get from going from a car that gets 20 mpg to a car that gets 40 mpg, but using miles per gallon makes it seem like I am getting as much or more value in the second case.
When I say "I get value" from something, I think in terms of economic efficiency. So, the efficiency is getting some measured thing for a particular number of units of value. Miles driven per dollar is a good example. If I have a car that gets 10 MPG, and gas costs 5$/G, then it is easy to see that the 'value' in miles per dollar is 2 miles per dollar. If you have a car that gets 20 MPG, then you get 4 miles per dollar. If you have another car that gets 40 MPG, then you get 8 miles per dollar. So, the first is 1/2 the efficiency of the second, which is 1/2 the efficiency of the third. So, the economic efficiency of the first compared to the second is the same as the economic efficiency of the second compared to the third.
To extend the example, 80 mpg seems like a major improvement over 40 mpg and 160 mpg seems like and even greater improvement, but 80 mpg will only save me 1.25 gallons per 100 miles and 160 mpg will only save me 0.625 gallons per 100 miles. The cost to build a car that gets 80 mpg is much higher than the cost to build one that goes 40 mpg and 160 mpg even more (to the point that it is not practical to do so for a consumer car at this point in time). But in practical terms those increases are only incremental improvements. Going from 5 mpg to 10 mpg seems like an incremental improvement compared to 40 mpg to 80 mpg, when in fact it is the reverse 40 mpg to 80 mpg is an incremental improvement compared to 5 mpg to 10 mpg.
40 MPG gives me 40 miles for every gallon. 80 MPG gives me 80 miles for every gallon. 160 MPG gives me 160 miles for every gallon. Since I'm paying for gallons, and expect miles for my dollars, it turns out that the 160 MPG car is 4x the economic value of the 40 MPG car. What could be simpler than that? Assume that the 40 MPG car and the 160 MPG car has the same size gas tank. Fill them both up. You can go 4x the distance in the second than the first. So, it is, in the most rational sense, worth 4x as much, since what you are buying when you buy a car is miles/dollar.
However, MPG is only part of the equation defining how much a car is worth to me. There are lots of other features, such as speed, styling, size, etc that also factor into the equation. I suspect that for most people, MPG is only a
Slashdot Mirror
For more information, see Manufacturing Concent
tablet market share in 2012
The alien virus is fattening us up. It is almost time 'to serve man' and other mammals...
having worked at cisco, on and off, for 9 years, I have to agree with you. most of the engineers I worked with knew very little about networking. they were focused on their tiny bit of a 5000000 piece jigsaw puzzle, and didnt have time to learn the fine points. Sure, there was the manditory 2 week 'boot camp' on network protocols for all developers, but it was quickly forgotten when the fire hose of bug reports was turned their way.
the fact that most of them didn't know what a hash table was for is another thing entirely... however, I blame that on the fact that one doesn't need geniuses to maintain legacy code. you basically need people who will show up and keep hammering away until the job is done. the geniuses were always the ones who would try to get creative and end up ignoring the real requirements and do something stupid that nobody cared about.
Cisco is designed around business units, who massage the giant glob of software to do what their sales guys have sold, and a central engineering team who tries to keep the code base from fragmenting too badly. these two jobs require very different skill sets, and nobody really has the time or inclination to mess with how ARP works, except the team who maintains it. the guys who port the software to new hardware typically deal with very low level stuff, and maybe with specialized customer features. the central engineering guys deal with generic new features, and with maintaining the source after the other guys get bored with it.
So, maybe cut those ex cisco guys some slack. their real skills are more like linux kernel guys than java coders. they can find their way around a 20 meg source tree, but dont know all the java API calls.
chambers mentioned thinning out middle management.
The rich still die of cancer. One important plot point is the magical medical advances. I suspect that will be much more difficult than building a space station. If that level of medical support was available, folks would be rioting all the time to get it, there would be no stopping them from shooting down Elysium out of spite.
After seeing it, I felt let down. While it is a technical masterpiece (just like District 9), the allegory would have been more successful if all of the characters had been Mexican, instead of having Matt Daemon, Mr blue eyed blonde as the protagonist. I'm sure Blomkamp gave in on that in order to get to make the film. The people on earth should have all been Mexican, and the people 'in the sky' should have all been blonde and blue eyed.
Gaining weight happens because the human body isn't prepared, evolutionarily, to regulate its own food intake very well. We have a high inclination toward absorbing and storing extra energy because that gives us the best chance of surviving a famine. Because sugar is the most basic kind of food, the body uses it as a clue to say "it's time to absorb nutrients!", hence sugary foods make you gain weight even faster. This is part of the normal purpose of the hormone insulin.
The human body is really good at regulating the intake of natural foods. It is refined foods that we have trouble with. Try to get diabetes by eating only meat and vegetables. It was the introduction of agriculture, and the recent commercial introduction of HFCS that really messed us up. Here are some interesting references.
Paleolithic Diet.
Good Calories, Bad Calories
High Fructose Corn Syrup
Telephone sanitizers welcome!
Copyright is 'good for society' in the sense that it allows creative people to benefit from their creativity, which causes more creative works to be produced. Not every creative work is intended to be commercially viable, but most are, and without some protection, these works would not be made.
Back in the 'dark ages', when broadcast was king, everybody said that cable TV would mean shows without commercials. That was the pitch that allowed these cunts to get their cable strung on OUR poles. Now, to get shows without commercials means you need to get them from an illegal source, and comcast will spike you up the ass (eventually) for it. The current 'scareware' thing is just a test to see how viable their detection code is.
Before freeways went everywhere, we had corner grocery stores. Now, we can't buy lettuce unless we hop in the car and drive 20 miles to the nearest costco. The internet has made lots of things possible, and more things much easier than before. However, now, because of those things that you just can't do anymore without it, we are dependent on it.
We need another transition point, away from cable, towards some sort of radio technology. Satellite internet makes the most sense to me. Anybody who can put up a satellite can start selling access. That leads to competition, which prevents ISPs from pulling this kind of stupid shit.
History may well remember that the information age was just the prelude to a whole new dark age. And it'll be recorded that we doomed ourselves trying to protect ourselves from pedophiles, murderers, terrorists, and every other boogieman. But... it's not exactly the first time in human history that a sudden leap forward in technology or industry created a power vaccum that led to social collapse. Actually... this would be the first time it hasn't happened, in case it doesn't. :/
Sigh....
There was no social collapse after the invention of the telephone, which was far more exciting for most people than the internet will ever be. There was no collapse after the telegraph allowed the first communication over more than 20 miles that didn't take a horse. There was no collapse after film and television brought the world to people who had not seen anything outside of a 10 mile radius of their home.
The pedophiles and terrorists are just going to come up with another way to do their business, and the 99.999% of people who are using the internet for legitimate activity will continue as they have been doing. No dark age is coming. Things are getting better every day. Think about 15 years ago, when 1% of the world's population had access to cell phones. Now, 75% of the world's population has access. That fact in itself is going to change everything.
It is MUCH cheaper to fling things AT earth than to fling things from earth to space. Imagine an elite that had control over a space station such as this, who also controlled mining in the asteroid belt, which they would probably need anyway for consumables. The would have an unlimited supply of rocks to throw at any city or state that got out of line.
However, that being said, I'm guessing this is actually the future of mankind, precisely because of this danger. If we don't somehow get off the planet, we are going to be hit by a comet, and that will be game over.
We could house the entire population of the world in 50 orbital space stations of the proper size. They will all be protected from solar radiation by near earth orbit. We will get consumables from the asteroid belt, energy from solar and HE3 from the moon, and live indefinitely with a great view of earth, which will be left to the poor who couldn't afford the lift ticket. However, robots will continuously construct new habitats from the asteroids in the belt, sell lift tickets, and make lots of money for their masters. Nobody will use the earth for a 'farm' or for resources, since getting things into orbit is too expensive, and I don't believe orbital tethers are viable. The earth will continue as it is until it is hit by that comet.
The success of anarchy depends on self discipline and voluntary cooperation.
Humor +1
The 'speed enforced by aircraft' signs USED to be accurate. The California highway patrol used to have small aircraft that would time motorists, and radio the results to waiting patrol cars. I've seen the aircraft (15 years ago) at Napa airport, where they used to fuel.
If my route to Sydney is down, deliberately breaking my route to Melbourne wont help if there is a physical cable problem or some idiot down in the NOC changed the route cost to 10000 on the router. Nope, instead of one route to Australia down, I now have two.
Hmmm. If your route to Sydney went down momentarily, and your router decided that the best way to get there was through Tasmania, and it takes 20 minutes for the routing system to figure out that Sydney came back up, then yes, it might be that after Sydney comes up again, killing your route to Tasmania would make things better overall, because it would force the system to figure out a better way.
Another example would be an optimization algorithm that picked a local minimum. Breaking a link might enable the system to pick a global minimum by allowing it to escape from the local minimum. The result tells the system which link to break to escape the local minimum.
I thought that gun owners would be against this so that they could avoid the break-ins by people trying to GET their guns. Nobody is home all the time, and criminals clearly like guns, if only because they are small, compact, and expensive.
Lets see how misguided you were by the news. The woman in question: - was previously arrested for domestic violence and no complaint was ever registered against her husband. - went out of the room and into the garage to get a gun and got back to fire. She didn't run, she didn't lock herself in a room and called the police. And her husband stayed at the room and didn't follow her. She fired several shots at arbitrary directions that could not only have hurt her family as could have hurt or killed innocent people in the neighborhood. No, it wasn't about race or gender, it was just a crazy, violent and irresponsible woman playing the domestic violence card to falsely accuse her husband in the hope of getting a free out-of-jail card. An attempt that fortunately failed.
Even her husband, the 'target' disputes your version of events. In case you have trouble following the link:
On Aug. 1, 2010, Marissa Alexander, a 31-year-old mother of three, with a Master’s degree and no criminal record, was working for a payroll software company in Jacksonville. She was estranged from her abusive husband, Rico Gray, and had a restraining order against him. Thinking he was not at home, she went to their former house to get some belongings. The two got into an argument. Alexander says that Gray threatened her and she feared for her life. Gray corroborates Alexander’s story: “I was in a rage. I called her a whore and bitch and ... I told her if I can’t have you, nobody going to have you,” he said, in a deposition. When Alexander retreated into the bathroom, Gray tried to break the door. She ran into the garage, but couldn’t leave because it was locked. She came back, he said, with a registered gun, which she legally owned, and yelled at him to leave. Gray recalls, “I told her I ain’t going nowhere, and so I started walking toward herI was cursing and all that and she shot in the air.” Even Gray understands why Alexander fired the warning shot: “If my kids wouldn’t have been there, I probably would have put my hand on her. Probably hit her. I got five baby mommas and I put my hands on every last one of them, except for one . I honestly think she just didn’t want me to put my hands on her anymore so she did what she feel like she have to do to make sure she wouldn’t get hurt, you know. You know, she did what she had to do.” And Gray admits Alexander was acting in self-defense, intending to scare and stop but not harm him: “The gun was never actually pointed at me The fact is, you know ... she never been violent toward me. I was always the one starting it.” Ultimately nobody was hurt. Nobody died. On May 12, 2012, it took a jury 12 minutes to find Alexander guilty of aggravated assault. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The irony here is that the judge would not let her use the "Stand your Ground" law in her defense.
The difference is that if Zimmerman was black, he would have been arrested on the spot and he would already be serving his life sentence.
You are right
This case forms a wonderful argument for gun control. If Zimmerman did not have a gun, he would have ended up with a black eye, maybe a concussion, and Trevon Martin would have ended up in jail for his stupid assault. That is what would have happened in England, France, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, Austria, Spain, etc.
The fact that Zimmerman was carrying a deadly weapon was the cause of this heartbreak. His following of the kid was probably due to racial profiling, and the typical teenage response to being harassed would have been anger and outrage. White OR black. Martin was a fool to attack an armed man, but teenagers, particularly boys, are pretty much fools. Should he have died for being a fool?
Zimmerman's gun was legal, he appears to have acted legally, and so, in my opinion, the free access to guns that we Americans enjoy was the real culprit. The law is to blame. The truly sad thing is that similar scenarios are being acted out 10s of thousands of times a year all across the U.S. It is a needless heartbreak every time it happens.
garsh. From YOUR link:
The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one (e.g., the median of {3, 5, 9} is 5).
So, 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,100 has a median of 1. The definition of median means that picking a random value in a sequence gives you values less than the median 1/2 the time.
The mode is the value with the highest number of identical entries. So, it is the value that you are most likely to obtain with a random pick. In the sequence above, the mode and median are equal, both are 1.
Your argument would make sense if you used the average value of income, which can be either lower or higher. The old joke about everybody's kid being above average illustrates this point; if you have a bunch of kids, and they all have identical IQs, except poor Billy in the corner, who has a lower IQ, then everybody except Billy has an IQ that is above average, since Billy brings down the average. So, everybody's kid (except poor Billy) is 'above average'.
The wealth in this country is like that. The value of the united states (as of 2008, it is more now) is $188 Trillion dollars. If the ownership was divided equally, that would give every man, woman, and child in the country $750k net worth. However, the median net worth of people in the US is now something like $60,000, INCLUDING their house. So, nearly everybody is below average. The net worth of more than 50% of the country is less than 1/10 of the average net worth in the country. That is shocking for a society that prides itself on being egalitarian.
because of these problems
Or, you have located all the crack cooks in the area.
Users won't report minor bugs, but bugs that destroy their data are typically reported. So, always make sure any bugs destroy data.
to read the crystal skulls we already have. They probably contain the accumulated tweets of the ancient aliens.
Cars are machines that turn dollars into miles. Using that perspective makes the following easier to grasp.
The problem is that the only way you know how far your car goes on a gallon of gas is if you measure it yourself. The mpg rating for a car is very dependent on how you drive. The purpose of giving mpg for a new car is so that it can be used as a comparison tool as to how much it will cost you to drive the car. Even your example that " the car has twice the utility per dollar spent on gasoline. So, for that reason, it also make sense to compare in miles/gallon." Except that if I am comparing more than two cars, the gp100m is more useful. It tells me how much more I will be saving on the car that gets better gas mileage and does a better job of putting that savings in a context that lets me balance it against other things.
Imagine three cars. One gets 5Lp100km, another gets 6Lp100km, the final one gets 7lp100km. I know that if I drive them all 100 km, the first one will use 5L, the second 6L, the third 7L. So what is the 'efficiency' of the cars? You can't compute it without computing the reciprocal of those numbers (that is, the km/L number). How much more efficient is the first than the second? How much more is the second from the third? MPG (or km/L) are both direct measurements of efficiency, since what you want is the distance per dollar, and dollars are directly proportional to fuel volume.
Once more, I get more value from going from a car that gets 10 mpg to a car that gets 20 mpg than I get from going from a car that gets 20 mpg to a car that gets 40 mpg, but using miles per gallon makes it seem like I am getting as much or more value in the second case.
When I say "I get value" from something, I think in terms of economic efficiency. So, the efficiency is getting some measured thing for a particular number of units of value. Miles driven per dollar is a good example. If I have a car that gets 10 MPG, and gas costs 5$/G, then it is easy to see that the 'value' in miles per dollar is 2 miles per dollar. If you have a car that gets 20 MPG, then you get 4 miles per dollar. If you have another car that gets 40 MPG, then you get 8 miles per dollar. So, the first is 1/2 the efficiency of the second, which is 1/2 the efficiency of the third. So, the economic efficiency of the first compared to the second is the same as the economic efficiency of the second compared to the third.
To extend the example, 80 mpg seems like a major improvement over 40 mpg and 160 mpg seems like and even greater improvement, but 80 mpg will only save me 1.25 gallons per 100 miles and 160 mpg will only save me 0.625 gallons per 100 miles. The cost to build a car that gets 80 mpg is much higher than the cost to build one that goes 40 mpg and 160 mpg even more (to the point that it is not practical to do so for a consumer car at this point in time). But in practical terms those increases are only incremental improvements. Going from 5 mpg to 10 mpg seems like an incremental improvement compared to 40 mpg to 80 mpg, when in fact it is the reverse 40 mpg to 80 mpg is an incremental improvement compared to 5 mpg to 10 mpg.
40 MPG gives me 40 miles for every gallon. 80 MPG gives me 80 miles for every gallon. 160 MPG gives me 160 miles for every gallon. Since I'm paying for gallons, and expect miles for my dollars, it turns out that the 160 MPG car is 4x the economic value of the 40 MPG car. What could be simpler than that? Assume that the 40 MPG car and the 160 MPG car has the same size gas tank. Fill them both up. You can go 4x the distance in the second than the first. So, it is, in the most rational sense, worth 4x as much, since what you are buying when you buy a car is miles/dollar.
However, MPG is only part of the equation defining how much a car is worth to me. There are lots of other features, such as speed, styling, size, etc that also factor into the equation. I suspect that for most people, MPG is only a