Someone from ENSCO said they suspected that the blown tire may have actually been due to a computer malfunction. The jury is still out until they do a detailed analysis of the logs.
Most of those problems are "last mile" issues which vary greatly depending on the endpoints. For many applications (trucking, commuting) the route is known in advance. Driving off road in the desert has a slew of hard problems as well (vibration, dust, random obstacles etc), which we now know are basically solved. The army has mandated that 1/3rd of their fleet will be autonomous within 10 years. Undoubtedly that will entail a couple orders of magnitude more effort but they have the money and the will to do it.
Driving on normal roads is vastly easier than navigating the grand challenge terrain. In fact there have already been cross-country drives of autonomous vehicles on public roads.
We already have traction control, adaptive cruise control, automated parking and drive-by-wire on the consumer market. The only thing that is not automated is steering and braking. Pre-emptive braking and obstacle-avoidance technology is very close and will probably begin to emerge on the market within a few years (motivated by safety concerns). Automated steering at up to freeway speeds will only be a few more years behind. At first it will be a switchable system with manual override like cruise control is now, so there will be nothing for the anti-technologist to scream about (people already have accidents when cruise control systems are engaged and it does not cause an uproar), and given another decade or so when people have really gotten comfortable with the technology, vehicles without drivers at all.
Well there are some rather thorny logistical issues; e.g., if two bots collided then it would be unfair to the one which was not "at fault"; also there is a chase vehicle for every bot, so the chase vehicles would have to pass as well putting the passengers at risk as well. Maybe in the next grand challenge...
hypocritical: professing feelings or virtues one does not have.
Environmentalists drive cars. Overworked doctors cannot spend sufficient time to address the needs of every patient. In "democratic america", judges are appointed to the highest courts with life-long terms. BM needs money, rules and legal services to survive. And yet, these entities still posess some aspect of the virtue they profess, and in no small quantity. As long as they guide their actions with pragmatism and stay true, to the extent that is realistic, to their principles, it is not hypocracy.
To call it hypocracy is extremism. Its a psychologically comfortable place to be because its a logically defensible position -- but strictly logical arguments are almost never applicable in the real world, which is filled with conflict in almost every system. We can pick facts and take quotes out of context all day without breaking the rules of logic... but that does not mean the conclusions are sound.
Political parties constantly exploit this effect to their advantage -- and the media does it also, because extremism is exciting. So its no suprise that the mentality has become so pervasive in mainstream consciousness. I think its unfortunate because this cynicism seems to cause a great deal more suffering than is necessary.
Sometimes I feel like people need to criticize BM so they can come up with an excuse to not go. Its like turning down an invitation to a party, you don't want to look like a dork for doing it so you come up with some stupid reason. I say its not for everyone, just accept that (there are certainly things that I would rather do, it depends on my mood). BM strives to create an "experience" for one week, but that is really where it ends. Unlike Disney, BM is not trying to take over the world.
Mr. Zawinski is does not make factual errors, therefore there is nothing to disagree with on a technical basis -- hovever his analysis is generally uninformed, one-sided and dogmatic suggesting that he does in fact, have no clue (or maybe he does but wants to generate a controversy for the sake of publicity).
His one and only critique is that Burning Man LLC is "hypocritical" because the restrict the actions of the media in their space while claiming to be "free spirited, anarchic, spontaneous, community creation" etc.
Why is this total BS? Quite simply, BM does not make any such claim. Every legal standard that applies in the "real world" also applies at BM, except public nudity, intoxication and pyrotechnics. There are cops. Drugs are still illegal and you can be arrested. BM lays out a whole slew of other rules -- they regulate noise, pollution, use of motor vehicles, activities of media and other professionals, they hold and enforce trademarks, employ lawyers. If they didn't do this, the event would be a catastrophe. It would be discontinued. If you spend any time at all reading their official literature and communications you would notice that they spend a significant portion of it re-iterating the rules because they are the glue that holds it all together. Zawinski has clearly never actually spent time reading this material as his analysis gives only anectodal quotes taken out of context with no reference and quotes from unofficial sources (e.g. media articles).
If BM asks for a cut of the proceeds, does that mean they are automatically going to sell unlimited rights to the highest bidder? NO. They allow what they think is appropriate. If BM files a lawsuit to stop distribution of Voyer Video's material, does that mean they are just after the money? NO. They are seeking control, not money. Therein is the logical disconnect -- there is no hypocracy.
Zawinski's interpretation is totally polarized, and wholly unrealistic. He is living in a fantasy.
And its too bad he let rzr_grl be scared away by the contract, she probably would have gotten some great photos.
Mostly its pretty obvious stuff, and the amount of money is not huge (annual revenue is only something like 10 million); grants to artists, cleanup costs, BLM land use fee, emergency services (fire, police, etc), property acquistion and development, payroll for staff.
Where exactly do you think there is a shroud of secrecy? It all looks pretty open (and obvious) to me.
I challenge you to find *any* weeklong event that costs less than $150/head, let alone one sufficiently interesting to attract 30,000+ people to a rather remote area. Its only absurd if you go for 2 days which they actively discourage anyways.
Re:Jamie Zawinski said it better than I could have
on
The Tech of Burning Man
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You sir have no idea what you are talking about.
Burning Man is NOT anarchy and has never claimed to be. Its not a free market, quite the contrary. Rules exist for a damned good reason, and this one in particular is supported by an overwhelming majority of participants. Until people think its "cool" for Fox News to broadcast live coverage from the Playa, until people think its "cool" for 2-bit pornographers to shoot footage of naked people for profit, that rule is not going to change. People go to Burning Man to have fun, not to be the animals in a media circus.
Yes, Burning Man is a (non-profit) corporation. They annually raise and spend millions of dollars on the event. They deal with nasty legal problems and miles of beurocratic tape to make it happen. Comparing them to Disney is totally absurd.
If you don't agree to the terms then don't go there. Everyone knows the rules. They are published well in advance on their website. If you don't agree, then don't go. Its called a choice. If you are a pro photographer and you want to shoot naked people in funny costumes without rights-encumberment, then hire some models.
Check the specs on the drive to see if the drive is rated for 100% duty cycle or not. If not then to maximize drive lifespan the drive should be powered down (or sleeping) for about 50% of the time (usually when you are sleeping, too). If you use one of these drives in a 100% uptime environment (e.g. web or e-mail server) it will usually fail prematurely (within about 2 years in my experience). The engineering of the motors, actuators and bearings simply cannot withstand abuse (probably a combination of insufficient heat management and less precise tolerances in the manufacturing of parts and/or cheaper technology).
In the fine print of the Seagate warranty they mention that they won't cover this type of failure unless the drive is rated for server use.
Somehow I always found those concepts to be more intuitive than complex functions. Actually I'm not sure if I *ever* found complex functions to be intuitive.:)
It also says "24/7 reliability" which I think means "100% duty cycle" so ostensibly they are not designed to be used less (as most ide desktop type drives are).
IIRC Seagate is the only other company to offer a 5 year warranty on ide type drives (also subject to proper use -- no desktop drives in servers).
Due to fluid dynamic bearings, better motors and other former SCSI-only technology the reliability of ide type drives has gone up a lot in recent times (thank god).
how big a leap is it to say "exp(x) can be extended to the complex plane so that exp(ix) = cis(x)"
I dunno, kind of a big one I think because its not immediately intuitive. IIRC in complex analysis it was proved using a taylor expansion in the complex plane. I think you would need at least two semesters of calculus to understand that on a basic level. Really you need quite a bit more (e.g. analysis/topology) just to understand the significance of taking a derivative in the complex plane.
accessing the data is not really the issue -- claiming the discovery is. i'm sure its not a *criminal* act but it is a form of plagarism and probably grounds for termination from employment at a university or other scientific institution, and certainly grounds for the IAU to rescind the attribution.
also; most other forms of art can be explained in roughly the same terms, with some variation on the definiton of #1 (e.g., two dimensional spatial organization of matter == painting). due to the enormous amount of effort it takes to master pts 2 and 3 within a given mode of expression (pt 1), it is necessary for artists to specialize in a fairly narrow set of forms.
scientific domains, engineering (production of goods/services etc), advertising, politics, programming etc are distinct from art forms in that their product in terms of cognitive availability/influence (or physical availability/function) is constrained to fit within a certain form -- respectively, information derived from repeatable initial conditions, a fintely defined product or service that meets a requirement, stimulation of a compulsion to participate in the economy, influence on morals, functionality etc. some forms fall into multiple categories (e.g. industrial design, mainstream pop music, political art, perl poetry, etc...). the reason art is interesting is that it is underconstrained -- it resonates with or stimulates consciousness (i.e., roughly, free will).
1. characterized by temporal arrangement of energy (organized vibration of matter in various states).
2. cognitivly availble and influential to the listener (though strictly speaking the listening does not necessarily happen through the ears -- vibration is perceptible through various senses such as touch as well)
3. created by the composer/performer using an intentional process -- and the intentional process must be guided by knowledge of its effects on #2 -- this is why playing scales, random environmental sounds, and a stereo playing with no-one listening are not music, why it is *possible* to have music generated by a computational process, and why badly practised performers (and wolframtones) create bad music (because they lack intentional control and/or lack the understanding of their actions on cognitive availability/influence wrt. the audience)).
Cage understood music as such and challenged the prevailing assumptions (e.g. "music is X, X a member of the set {string quartet, jazz trio, etc}") in order to reveal the core definition -- and he did it by force -- by pushing music right out to the extreme limits of the definition (which made many people uncomfortable (I have a historic live recording of a Cage piece where after it is finished, half of the audience is wildly cheering and the other half is booing).
On pt. #1 -- that the organization of energy could include the total lack of energy (e.g. four and a half minutes of silence), which regardless still has a profound effect on the listener. That temporal arrangements could include intentional disarrangements (by the influence of chance to create non-repeatable performances).
On pts #2 and #3 -- that the degree of cognitive availability could include intentionally steering the music to be totally unavailable (another byproduct of using randomness as a source for composition).
The mind seems to have an automatic system for fuzzy categorization of phenomena, which produces incomplete paraconsistent semantics. As long as the definition of a concept/phenomenal-set remains incomplete there is a proliferation of philosophically useless question-begging and circular reasoning (i.e. "don't be a fuckwit", as you put it). However many such things are eventually resolved in the light of new information (e.g., the recent advances in the theory of consciousness). Cage was truely a pioneer in this sense by presenting some rather startling new information. That said I don't particuarly enjoy listening to much of his music, but that is mostly a matter of personal taste.
I've always felt there is something really captivating about the sound of random accents on a regular rhythmic pattern -- there is something interesting about the unpredictability combined with the absolute regularity.
The wolfram tones stuff, on the other hand, sounds like bad elevator music. Calling it a "New Kind of Music" is criminal.
David Cope at UCSC (and perhaps others) has been a major innovator in this area for years. His programs can analyze scores and learn to compose music in the style of various composers. He has a book about this called "Virtual Music" and a slew of other publications.
The idea of algorithmic composition has been around for a long time. There are a lot of interesting aspects; use of statistical modelling (markov processes, machine learning, etc), computational models of music cognition (Temperly, Lerhdal and Jackendorf et al).
Since NKS there have been a number of attempts to use CA processes for musical generation (e.g., multiple papers at ICMC 2004 on this). None of it thus far has been terribly convincing (IMHO). As various people have pointed out, these sorts of attempts to use various arcane mathematical/computational models as the basis for music generation introduce a vocabulary to music which is fundamentally non-musical -- its not grounded in any perceptual theory, there is no evidence to support that it has any meaning with respect to a human listener. It might be acceptable if the audience is a gaggle of mathematicians, but until that bridge is crossed, its all of dubious value aesthetically for "the rest of us". Unfortunately WolframTones does not get us any closer.
there is no mandate to *listen* but free speech is the right to make noise (i.e. to be heard by those not wearing ear plugs) in public space (within reasonable limits (which is where we get the debate about if protestors should be confined to certain zones for "security" (or whatever BS reason the man cooks up next))).
telemarketers want the right to be heard in *private* space -- on the phone line that you pay for. coke and pepsi ads are also private space (at least, last I checked they are not tax-payer funded). apples and oranges... there is simply no comparison.
needless to say whoever has been running the show in NO is a giant turd, probably of the extremely smelly variety, and probably maintains close ties with various other breathing piles excrement.
It is well known that for various small problems the less efficient algorithms are actually faster. e.g., sorting when n < 5 or so is faster using a naive approach. Big-O analysis includes worst/best/average case analysis as well as input constraints. Maybe your software engineers partied too much in school (or didn't go at alll) because Big-O done right is not just a matter of drilling some mantra.
Rules of thumb; 1) optimize constant factors last (simple economics... witness the massive popularity of scripting languages). 2) benchmark and use a profiler under conditions as close as possible to expected in the real world. To do otherwise is irrational hubris or just plain naive.
As I said before, all of those things add up to a constant overhead. (but maybe you never took a class on algorithms so you don't know what I'm talking about...)
In order to say that an RDBMS is an order of magnitude slower, one most show that as load increases the overhead of the DB grows faster than that of a FS doing the same task. (and, generally, to say that this difference is "an order of magnitude" the spread between them should increase at least linearly).
Doing a trace on a DB for a simple query tells you absolutely nothing about its scalability.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone from ENSCO said they suspected that the blown tire may have actually been due to a computer malfunction. The jury is still out until they do a detailed analysis of the logs.
Most of those problems are "last mile" issues which vary greatly depending on the endpoints. For many applications (trucking, commuting) the route is known in advance. Driving off road in the desert has a slew of hard problems as well (vibration, dust, random obstacles etc), which we now know are basically solved. The army has mandated that 1/3rd of their fleet will be autonomous within 10 years. Undoubtedly that will entail a couple orders of magnitude more effort but they have the money and the will to do it.
Driving on normal roads is vastly easier than navigating the grand challenge terrain. In fact there have already been cross-country drives of autonomous vehicles on public roads.
We already have traction control, adaptive cruise control, automated parking and drive-by-wire on the consumer market. The only thing that is not automated is steering and braking. Pre-emptive braking and obstacle-avoidance technology is very close and will probably begin to emerge on the market within a few years (motivated by safety concerns). Automated steering at up to freeway speeds will only be a few more years behind. At first it will be a switchable system with manual override like cruise control is now, so there will be nothing for the anti-technologist to scream about (people already have accidents when cruise control systems are engaged and it does not cause an uproar), and given another decade or so when people have really gotten comfortable with the technology, vehicles without drivers at all.
Just my $2.0e-2...
Well there are some rather thorny logistical issues; e.g., if two bots collided then it would be unfair to the one which was not "at fault"; also there is a chase vehicle for every bot, so the chase vehicles would have to pass as well putting the passengers at risk as well. Maybe in the next grand challenge...
Wow, sentence really took some effort to parse.
Ack... I meant to write LOAN forgivness... (don't be ... hasty!)
Load forgivness programs are pretty common in the medical industry... I've never heard of it in the tech field though.
hypocritical: professing feelings or virtues one does not have.
Environmentalists drive cars. Overworked doctors cannot spend sufficient time to address the needs of every patient. In "democratic america", judges are appointed to the highest courts with life-long terms. BM needs money, rules and legal services to survive. And yet, these entities still posess some aspect of the virtue they profess, and in no small quantity. As long as they guide their actions with pragmatism and stay true, to the extent that is realistic, to their principles, it is not hypocracy.
To call it hypocracy is extremism. Its a psychologically comfortable place to be because its a logically defensible position -- but strictly logical arguments are almost never applicable in the real world, which is filled with conflict in almost every system. We can pick facts and take quotes out of context all day without breaking the rules of logic... but that does not mean the conclusions are sound.
Political parties constantly exploit this effect to their advantage -- and the media does it also, because extremism is exciting. So its no suprise that the mentality has become so pervasive in mainstream consciousness. I think its unfortunate because this cynicism seems to cause a great deal more suffering than is necessary.
Sometimes I feel like people need to criticize BM so they can come up with an excuse to not go. Its like turning down an invitation to a party, you don't want to look like a dork for doing it so you come up with some stupid reason. I say its not for everyone, just accept that (there are certainly things that I would rather do, it depends on my mood). BM strives to create an "experience" for one week, but that is really where it ends. Unlike Disney, BM is not trying to take over the world.
Mr. Zawinski is does not make factual errors, therefore there is nothing to disagree with on a technical basis -- hovever his analysis is generally uninformed, one-sided and dogmatic suggesting that he does in fact, have no clue (or maybe he does but wants to generate a controversy for the sake of publicity).
His one and only critique is that Burning Man LLC is "hypocritical" because the restrict the actions of the media in their space while claiming to be "free spirited, anarchic, spontaneous, community creation" etc.
Why is this total BS? Quite simply, BM does not make any such claim. Every legal standard that applies in the "real world" also applies at BM, except public nudity, intoxication and pyrotechnics. There are cops. Drugs are still illegal and you can be arrested. BM lays out a whole slew of other rules -- they regulate noise, pollution, use of motor vehicles, activities of media and other professionals, they hold and enforce trademarks, employ lawyers. If they didn't do this, the event would be a catastrophe. It would be discontinued. If you spend any time at all reading their official literature and communications you would notice that they spend a significant portion of it re-iterating the rules because they are the glue that holds it all together. Zawinski has clearly never actually spent time reading this material as his analysis gives only anectodal quotes taken out of context with no reference and quotes from unofficial sources (e.g. media articles).
If BM asks for a cut of the proceeds, does that mean they are automatically going to sell unlimited rights to the highest bidder? NO. They allow what they think is appropriate. If BM files a lawsuit to stop distribution of Voyer Video's material, does that mean they are just after the money? NO. They are seeking control, not money. Therein is the logical disconnect -- there is no hypocracy.
Zawinski's interpretation is totally polarized, and wholly unrealistic. He is living in a fantasy.
And its too bad he let rzr_grl be scared away by the contract, she probably would have gotten some great photos.
Correct, it is an LLC.
o .htmlt .html
They do publish a yearly report on where the money goes.
http://afterburn.burningman.com/04/financial_intr
http://afterburn.burningman.com/04/financial_char
Mostly its pretty obvious stuff, and the amount of money is not huge (annual revenue is only something like 10 million); grants to artists, cleanup costs, BLM land use fee, emergency services (fire, police, etc), property acquistion and development, payroll for staff.
Where exactly do you think there is a shroud of secrecy? It all looks pretty open (and obvious) to me.
I challenge you to find *any* weeklong event that costs less than $150/head, let alone one sufficiently interesting to attract 30,000+ people to a rather remote area. Its only absurd if you go for 2 days which they actively discourage anyways.
You sir have no idea what you are talking about.
Burning Man is NOT anarchy and has never claimed to be. Its not a free market, quite the contrary. Rules exist for a damned good reason, and this one in particular is supported by an overwhelming majority of participants. Until people think its "cool" for Fox News to broadcast live coverage from the Playa, until people think its "cool" for 2-bit pornographers to shoot footage of naked people for profit, that rule is not going to change. People go to Burning Man to have fun, not to be the animals in a media circus.
Yes, Burning Man is a (non-profit) corporation. They annually raise and spend millions of dollars on the event. They deal with nasty legal problems and miles of beurocratic tape to make it happen. Comparing them to Disney is totally absurd.
If you don't agree to the terms then don't go there. Everyone knows the rules. They are published well in advance on their website. If you don't agree, then don't go. Its called a choice. If you are a pro photographer and you want to shoot naked people in funny costumes without rights-encumberment, then hire some models.
Check the specs on the drive to see if the drive is rated for 100% duty cycle or not. If not then to maximize drive lifespan the drive should be powered down (or sleeping) for about 50% of the time (usually when you are sleeping, too). If you use one of these drives in a 100% uptime environment (e.g. web or e-mail server) it will usually fail prematurely (within about 2 years in my experience). The engineering of the motors, actuators and bearings simply cannot withstand abuse (probably a combination of insufficient heat management and less precise tolerances in the manufacturing of parts and/or cheaper technology).
In the fine print of the Seagate warranty they mention that they won't cover this type of failure unless the drive is rated for server use.
Somehow I always found those concepts to be more intuitive than complex functions. Actually I'm not sure if I *ever* found complex functions to be intuitive. :)
It also says "24/7 reliability" which I think means "100% duty cycle" so ostensibly they are not designed to be used less (as most ide desktop type drives are).
IIRC Seagate is the only other company to offer a 5 year warranty on ide type drives (also subject to proper use -- no desktop drives in servers).
Due to fluid dynamic bearings, better motors and other former SCSI-only technology the reliability of ide type drives has gone up a lot in recent times (thank god).
how big a leap is it to say "exp(x) can be extended to the complex plane so that exp(ix) = cis(x)"
I dunno, kind of a big one I think because its not immediately intuitive. IIRC in complex analysis it was proved using a taylor expansion in the complex plane. I think you would need at least two semesters of calculus to understand that on a basic level. Really you need quite a bit more (e.g. analysis/topology) just to understand the significance of taking a derivative in the complex plane.
accessing the data is not really the issue -- claiming the discovery is. i'm sure its not a *criminal* act but it is a form of plagarism and probably grounds for termination from employment at a university or other scientific institution, and certainly grounds for the IAU to rescind the attribution.
also; most other forms of art can be explained in roughly the same terms, with some variation on the definiton of #1 (e.g., two dimensional spatial organization of matter == painting). due to the enormous amount of effort it takes to master pts 2 and 3 within a given mode of expression (pt 1), it is necessary for artists to specialize in a fairly narrow set of forms.
scientific domains, engineering (production of goods/services etc), advertising, politics, programming etc are distinct from art forms in that their product in terms of cognitive availability/influence (or physical availability/function) is constrained to fit within a certain form -- respectively, information derived from repeatable initial conditions, a fintely defined product or service that meets a requirement, stimulation of a compulsion to participate in the economy, influence on morals, functionality etc. some forms fall into multiple categories (e.g. industrial design, mainstream pop music, political art, perl poetry, etc...). the reason art is interesting is that it is underconstrained -- it resonates with or stimulates consciousness (i.e., roughly, free will).
music is:
1. characterized by temporal arrangement of energy (organized vibration of matter in various states).
2. cognitivly availble and influential to the listener (though strictly speaking the listening does not necessarily happen through the ears -- vibration is perceptible through various senses such as touch as well)
3. created by the composer/performer using an intentional process -- and the intentional process must be guided by knowledge of its effects on #2 -- this is why playing scales, random environmental sounds, and a stereo playing with no-one listening are not music, why it is *possible* to have music generated by a computational process, and why badly practised performers (and wolframtones) create bad music (because they lack intentional control and/or lack the understanding of their actions on cognitive availability/influence wrt. the audience)).
Cage understood music as such and challenged the prevailing assumptions (e.g. "music is X, X a member of the set {string quartet, jazz trio, etc}") in order to reveal the core definition -- and he did it by force -- by pushing music right out to the extreme limits of the definition (which made many people uncomfortable (I have a historic live recording of a Cage piece where after it is finished, half of the audience is wildly cheering and the other half is booing).
On pt. #1 -- that the organization of energy could include the total lack of energy (e.g. four and a half minutes of silence), which regardless still has a profound effect on the listener. That temporal arrangements could include intentional disarrangements (by the influence of chance to create non-repeatable performances).
On pts #2 and #3 -- that the degree of cognitive availability could include intentionally steering the music to be totally unavailable (another byproduct of using randomness as a source for composition).
The mind seems to have an automatic system for fuzzy categorization of phenomena, which produces incomplete paraconsistent semantics. As long as the definition of a concept/phenomenal-set remains incomplete there is a proliferation of philosophically useless question-begging and circular reasoning (i.e. "don't be a fuckwit", as you put it). However many such things are eventually resolved in the light of new information (e.g., the recent advances in the theory of consciousness). Cage was truely a pioneer in this sense by presenting some rather startling new information. That said I don't particuarly enjoy listening to much of his music, but that is mostly a matter of personal taste.
I've always felt there is something really captivating about the sound of random accents on a regular rhythmic pattern -- there is something interesting about the unpredictability combined with the absolute regularity.
The wolfram tones stuff, on the other hand, sounds like bad elevator music. Calling it a "New Kind of Music" is criminal.
David Cope at UCSC (and perhaps others) has been a major innovator in this area for years. His programs can analyze scores and learn to compose music in the style of various composers. He has a book about this called "Virtual Music" and a slew of other publications.
The idea of algorithmic composition has been around for a long time. There are a lot of interesting aspects; use of statistical modelling (markov processes, machine learning, etc), computational models of music cognition (Temperly, Lerhdal and Jackendorf et al).
Since NKS there have been a number of attempts to use CA processes for musical generation (e.g., multiple papers at ICMC 2004 on this). None of it thus far has been terribly convincing (IMHO). As various people have pointed out, these sorts of attempts to use various arcane mathematical/computational models as the basis for music generation introduce a vocabulary to music which is fundamentally non-musical -- its not grounded in any perceptual theory, there is no evidence to support that it has any meaning with respect to a human listener. It might be acceptable if the audience is a gaggle of mathematicians, but until that bridge is crossed, its all of dubious value aesthetically for "the rest of us". Unfortunately WolframTones does not get us any closer.
there is no mandate to *listen* but free speech is the right to make noise (i.e. to be heard by those not wearing ear plugs) in public space (within reasonable limits (which is where we get the debate about if protestors should be confined to certain zones for "security" (or whatever BS reason the man cooks up next))).
telemarketers want the right to be heard in *private* space -- on the phone line that you pay for. coke and pepsi ads are also private space (at least, last I checked they are not tax-payer funded). apples and oranges... there is simply no comparison.
needless to say whoever has been running the show in NO is a giant turd, probably of the extremely smelly variety, and probably maintains close ties with various other breathing piles excrement.
It is well known that for various small problems the less efficient algorithms are actually faster. e.g., sorting when n < 5 or so is faster using a naive approach. Big-O analysis includes worst/best/average case analysis as well as input constraints. Maybe your software engineers partied too much in school (or didn't go at alll) because Big-O done right is not just a matter of drilling some mantra.
Rules of thumb; 1) optimize constant factors last (simple economics... witness the massive popularity of scripting languages). 2) benchmark and use a profiler under conditions as close as possible to expected in the real world. To do otherwise is irrational hubris or just plain naive.
Just about any male geek would gladly shower in exchange for sex.
If only things were so efficient.
general practice doctors (i.e. non-specialists) are absurdly overworked... if they had a minute to spare (seriously) they might mention pro-biotics.
As I said before, all of those things add up to a constant overhead. (but maybe you never took a class on algorithms so you don't know what I'm talking about...)
In order to say that an RDBMS is an order of magnitude slower, one most show that as load increases the overhead of the DB grows faster than that of a FS doing the same task. (and, generally, to say that this difference is "an order of magnitude" the spread between them should increase at least linearly).
Doing a trace on a DB for a simple query tells you absolutely nothing about its scalability.