Electric engines are roughly 3-4 times as efficient as gasoline ones. So you get 3-4 times the effective energy density out of batteries.
More importantly you don't need that much energy, almost all car rides are short and electricity can be recharged at home unlike gasoline.
Oh and you math geeks, figure out how many pounds of coal was burned to charge that battery halfway.
Less pollution wise than you'd get from gasoline, someone did look into it. Natural gas is a lot better, and used in quite a few places, but even coal beats out gasoline engines.
There's QA of a bugfix and then there's sitting on it for months or years. Apparently Microsoft likes to do the later often enough to annoy people.
People have apparently tried to give Microsoft some time between to fix bugs before making them public. Microsoft promptly attacked them for being hacked, cyberterrorists and all that jazz.
In other words, Microsoft thought they could strong arm people and those people decided to show Microsoft that being an asshole has repercussions.
Why would they go through all that trouble just to get Verizon customers?
Because they want to sell more iphones and make even more money? I mean seriously, it's like asking why would Apple go through all the trouble of launching the iphone anywhere but the US. After all they could do quite well by just staying in the US.
Yet anecdotal evidence from companies suing Dell is perfectly valid and holds true for everyone?
It's not an 'assumption' at all, if you had read the article, you'd know it was a confirmed practice, exposed during the legal proceedings described therein.
The article does nothing of this kind, it only says that at one point Dell was replacing faulty motherboards with faulty motherboards. I does not say it did so for most replacement or that it even knew it was doing so. In fact, since it was apparently a Dell hired contractor hired to look into the problem that noted this the most likely explanation is that Dell didn't know it was doing so before the contractor's report. That's not even going into the absurdity of using an unattributed sentence from a newspaper article slanted against Dell to prove this sort of point.
Making a horribly implausible scenario does not prove your point, only your ignorance of how the internet actually works.
In reality, any such stream would be cached since you can amazingly enough cache things in real time. It'd be in fact, cached by each ISP as is done with any large content nowadays. Look up akamai. You'd end up with a tree of data propagation so the core servers might only need to send out data to a couple thousand destinations. Those send data to a couple thousand more destinations and those send it on to users.
If I can't find a job to pay the rent, why do I care what the economic output is?
Shouldn't matter to most people capable of planing, a combination of savings and unemployment benefits should ensure you don't have much difficulty till you land your next job.
Low but equitable economic output is preferable to high but inequitable economic output.
Low economic output means poor. Go look at any poor nation when a disaster strikes or when someone needs medicine. Or when it's bad year for the crops. Or when some disease strikes the cattle. Or how many hours they need to work just to survive. High but inequitable means that the lowest members of society can still get better services for free than the low but equitable you seem to love so much.
Also, in another post you complained about people who are dissatisfied with their jobs, well which do you prefer? You want a society where by necessity almost all jobs are unpleasant? If you want just a job than that's not that difficult even in today's economy, supermarkets and construction hires regularly.
With dividends you can easily and mathematically show what a stock price is trying to estimate and why. In cold hard rational thinking. However the explanation requires the profits to directly impact the shareholder.
Which means in the end you still own the profits, but not in the form of cold, hard cash.
If you cannot touch the profits you do not own them, practically speaking. Or said otherwise, if a the profits have no way to flow back to you why do you really care what they are? Rationally and economically speaking. That was the GPs concern. You're doing circular reasoning "stocks are the best guess of a companies value because people use them as best guess of a companies value." A ponzi scheme combined with mass delusion if one looks at it. In that case the stock market is just a bunch of stamp collectors, stock prices are more determined by the whims of the people rather than how a company performs. Hilarious but headache inducing to think about.
That's not the case, of course, as both my post and someone else's noted. However that's because profits do have a way of going back to investors directly in certain cases. Economists seem to just hand wave away the explanation too often which is somewhat annoying. How can you trust people who do not even seem able to answer the most basic questions about what they're studying? People who appear to assume things are a certain way because they were told they are without even considering why they are as such? Essentially, the sort of faith based and zealous thinking that goes against rational thought and science. That cannot help but give rational people a bad taste in their mouths about the stock market which is rather sad.
What is your point here? That because we can never be perfect that we shouldn't even try? That 10% unemployment doesn't matter because rich people are making out ok?
No, my point is that unless you know of a solution there's little use for what you're saying.
All I'm saying is that we need to measure success with a metric that relates in some way to something that actually matters. It doesn't mean shit if the DOW goes to 20,000 if people can't get jobs.
The economy implodes on it's own every 30 years anyway.
No, it slows down every decade or so. Implode is what happens in places like Zimbabwe.
Now you're just begging the question. Money is important because we live in a capitalistic society where money is important.
No I'm not. There are reasons for choosing capitalism and in capitalism there are reason for using money as a metric. In other words you want to remake all of society to run on something other than capitalism or to run very inefficiently. Historically the ends badly.
This is simply an article of faith.
No, it's based on math and various assumption. As I've already said, I'm not going to explain high school economics to you.
BTW, Bhutan would disagree with you about what can and cannot be measured.
You can define any metric you want, doesn't mean it makes sense. Stalin claimed people in the USSR were all quite happy, especially the ones voluntarily working in Siberia. China claims it's doing the best for Tibet, and by their own measure everything is great.
Then again the logic of using a non-industrialized nation with 80% farmers and a life expectancy of 62 years as a basis is amusing in itself. And the high infant mortality. And the decent risk of disease. Not to mention the large payments from India for their national budget. Tell me when you've got an example with a country that's actually got an economy.
I understand the foundations of society just fine. Well enough to see the flaws. If there's one thing that everyone should have learned from the recent crisis it's that economics is not settled science. It's really sad to see people not take home that basic lesson.
No, it's not settled science in certain scales which is part of my point. In various other sense it is settled science and even with arguable assumptions it does work. In fact, as a whole what we have now works fairly well. Some more socialism might be nice but the basic tenants work. Works better than every insane attempt at heavy socialism, communism and so on.
Not quite, it will effect the economy in the sense that the economy should, theoretically, solve the problem efficiently. Assuming competition and all that jazz. Price gouging is an inefficiency that the market should mitigate. One guy wants 5 tons of gold, another sells it for $5 and so on. Soon you've got caravans of water going to all the people in the desert. If they can afford paying for water everything is fine. If they can't, they either must move away or die. If they can't pay to move out, someone may loan them money for travel or the "market" may decide to let them die. Even then likely some entity would try to get donations to move them, by essentially selling the good feeling of helping someone.
In short: you're an idiot. In long: you're delusional and an idiot. Seriously, there's so much wrong without post it's hard to know where to start.
Pensions. Pensions pay out a fixed amount at some point in the future. How they are invested does not matter. The risk is taken on by the employer or investor. Then they usually get insurance in case they mess up the numbers and their constant reviews of their investments fail to detect problems. Long term the stock market provides a very good return on investment so it's the logical place to put money. Even then enough of the money is likely in bonds, and other stable investments, to ride out any short term market fluctuations. Of course, companies are run by short sighted bastards which is why the "guaranteed" return may not in fact be so guaranteed. They may end up in jail but you'll end up broke. Which leads to:
401k. The new great thing, you invest your own money for retirement. Your employer, who just moved to a non-extraditing country, can't screw you over. The stock market is a long term investment. Everyone says so. Your employer will say it, your 401k fund will say it, your pastor will say. Short term it's a risk. So if you're nearing retirement you move your investment into bonds. Bonds are stable. Preferably you move your money when the market is high. They even have nifty formulas for the percentages you should have.
No one says stocks always increase. However the stock market as a whole has historically done so over long periods of time. IT beats inflation by something like 7%. That is why people put money into it. Individual stocks aren't guaranteed. Neither are short term returns. If you're risk averse, by nature or need such as encroaching retirement, move your money into a safer investment. Stocks aren't the only form of investment.
Tell that to the 10% of the US population that's underemployed and you'll get a taste of reality.
And many people are homeless, many are in poverty, many are miserable and so on. Nothing is ever perfect or is going to be perfect. Your point being? No seriously, what are you trying to say? Do you have a solution that doesn't make thing even worse or implodes the economy in thirty years?
Why should we care what the value of companies are beyond how many people they employ and how good those jobs are?
Because we live in a capitalistic society where the economy is driven by investment and money. The rest works out from there but is not the essence of things. In a capitalistic model, money is used as a proxy for most things which is why it matters when talking about the economy or society in general. Which, by the way, after some sanity checks works out much better than any insane scheme to tie things to "employment" or "quality of jobs." Money can also be measured easily while everything else can't (that's can't rather than "it's difficult to do").
If you do not understand the basic foundations of the society you live in then either don't argue about them or go read a book about them. As someone else in this thread said, we're not your wet nurses, we're not going to describe all of basic economics just because you're too lazy to read a book (I found Intermediate Microeconomics by Varian quite good for getting a grasp on things).
I was discussing just this with an economy major a few weeks back. The problem with your view is that a stock price is clearly tied in many ways to a companies performance, as in if a company does badly the stock goes down, so it's hard to argue it's all just gambling. Pure gambling would surely decouple into some insane mess by now since there's no way a self-perpetuating delusion of this scale could hold for this long.
The economist, by the way, was of no use which was saddening. "The market determines a companies value." "Why?" "Because that's what a stock price is." "God damn it."
Anyway, best I can figure out for why stocks aren't pure gambling is this. Dividends are essentially just events which which convert stock into money of some other sort. Thus stock is just the future sum of all those events as best predicted. But they're not the only event that does that. A company can be bought out, go private, go bankrupt and so on. Not anywhere near as stable as dividends I'm guessing but it still would force stock price to correlate with the performance of a company.
So if all the jobs were replaced with sweat shop ones that paid 5cents an hour run by Chinese companies you'd say the economy has not changed at all? Because that's what you're arguing.
Unemployment doesn't particularly matter, not every job is equal and most of them don't matter that much. Welcome to reality. The stock market, theoretically, measures the value, including future potential, of companies and thus of the market.
You apparently are insane and have no knowledge of economics much less what capitalism and free market actually mean (hint: they're not mutually exclusive and pretty much tied together). Also, another hint, the United States is not a purely capitalistic society. So I don't see much reason to talk to you.
I will leave you with one question, how did that other competing firm will acquire the initial money to enter the market? And why would anyone provide it to them?
Ads are making their way into every form of media we use, including our self-produced stuff.
Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
I'd love to see a similar law passed for consumer transactions.
Apparently you don't understand capitalism, how sad. Ignoring various other problems, seriously I could go on for pages, you'd kill investment in any remotely risky company. Congratulations. Have fun learning Chinese in 20 years. High risk requires high profits in whatever investment actually succeeds.
Let's say a group of individuals invests in into twenty new cutting edge small companies with revolutionary products. Let's say it's startups. Of those twenty, nineteen fail miserably and they lose all investment. One succeeds. The profits for that one are, let's say, 100%. Nonetheless the product is so nifty people pay the premium. You might say the profit is excessive however it's there to make up for the high risk. The investors may only make a 10% return on investment overall due to the other 19 companies failing.
That exactly what they did. They didn't predict an earthquake, that's the whole point. They said that given the data they cannot say an earthquake will happen. That does not mean it won't happen only that there's no indication of one being more likely than usual from the data. And usual does not mean no earthquakes but simply random chance of an earthquake.
Are you so foolish as to think all the media stories about "X causes exploding head syndrome" are written by scientists? No, the scientists say "there is indication of a correlation between X and exploding head syndrome which should be further investigated." The journalists decide to spice it so they can sell more copies of their newspaper or whatnot.
In this case I'd bet money that the politicians, bureaucrats and journalists who asked the scientists for their analysis were the ones who decides to go from "no more likely than usual" to "no chance of one happening."
Of course, since the prosecutor is good friends with them, guess how they're trying to protect their own asses?
Pretty much. Every building seems to have a "something in here may cause cancer" sign. Yeah, if I chug the gasoline in all those cars in the parking structure I'm sure it will give me cancer but why the fuck would I do that? I seriously need to get a "the sun is known to cause cancer" sign on the inside of my front door.
Since almost all the signs are worthless, any which do matter get ignored by me as well since I have no way to differentiate between them.
Now you're creating assumptions and a new problem definition after the fact. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. The GP explicitly failed to define such a hierarchy and explicitly talked of only two levels of cache. Two levels with a single constant access time difference between them. Within that framework he made an absurd statement about what running time is and how it deals with constants.
That is the context in which I posted my reply. Of course it's wrong if you change the problem we're dealing with but that's irrelevant. A hierarchy will cause the effect you want and probably is a saner way to think about this mathematically. It's nonetheless not what was being discussed as far as I could tell.
After all, the article concerns a modern computer which has a very limited hierarchy of caches. In other words the worst cache access time is known and is a constant independent of n.
Except it's a bounded increase. That's my whole point. There is nothing slower than the hard drive to cache from. You can assume every operation has the worst possible access time and you'd still end up with the same O() running time.
Sigh. No, the GP doesn't know what he's talking about. And apparently neither do you. If he did he would not mention something as idiotic as cache making the algorithm go from O(n) to O(n^2). It makes it go from O(x*n) to O(100*x*n), both of which are O(n). But if n is 50, O(x*n^2) would come out faster.
You're both confusing the very real issue of the constant running time of operations and O algorithm scaling. The algorithm is still O(n) however for the data sets in question it's slower than an O(n^2) algorithm. The worst case O performance is identical, that is simply a question of scaling to data sizes. However the practical constant factors are now much larger than one would normally expect and they vary based on other factors.
It's a simple distinction, really, which is why I'm confused at people's inability to grasp it.
I said nothing about the article in question or anything related to it on purpose. That is because none of the stuff you mentioned had really anything to do with that. Not specifically and the article makes no claims that agree with you. This is simply an argument about what worst case and O notation refers to.
The article essentially is about finding a way to reduce the constant factor in an algorithm. The O notation makes no sense in this case. It's still O(n) or whatnot. Except it's now 10 times faster.
Honestly, slashdot keeps letting me down these days. Sigh.
No, you're missing the point. And wrong. And also missing a lot knowledge about what O() means.
It doesn't matter how many orders of magnitude slower an operation is. O() is about SCALING for input size n. That's all. Constant factors do not matter. The GP already said this, please pay bloody attention next time. The running time of each operation is just a constant and has no impact on the O() performance. An order of magnitude or fifty is all the same. You talk about 1/100 speed and compare n to n^2. Hahahaha. Take n = 1000000. You know what the difference between n and n^2 is then? 1000000. Your puny factor of 100 is irrelevant against six orders of magnitude performance difference.
The worst case performance does not change. It's still O(n) or O (n^2). In fact it's quite possible for an O(n^2) algorithm to be faster than an O(log(n)) algorithm for small n under certain conditions. O is all about n being so bloody large that constant factors don't matter anymore.
This is all basic introductory algorithms stuff, please read up on it before trying to chime in on any arguments related it it in the future, okay?
Slashdot Mirror
Electric engines are roughly 3-4 times as efficient as gasoline ones. So you get 3-4 times the effective energy density out of batteries.
More importantly you don't need that much energy, almost all car rides are short and electricity can be recharged at home unlike gasoline.
Oh and you math geeks, figure out how many pounds of coal was burned to charge that battery halfway.
Less pollution wise than you'd get from gasoline, someone did look into it. Natural gas is a lot better, and used in quite a few places, but even coal beats out gasoline engines.
There's QA of a bugfix and then there's sitting on it for months or years. Apparently Microsoft likes to do the later often enough to annoy people.
People have apparently tried to give Microsoft some time between to fix bugs before making them public. Microsoft promptly attacked them for being hacked, cyberterrorists and all that jazz.
In other words, Microsoft thought they could strong arm people and those people decided to show Microsoft that being an asshole has repercussions.
Patents are not copyrights.
So you're saying that if not for Hulu he wouldn't have an internet connection?
Why would they go through all that trouble just to get Verizon customers?
Because they want to sell more iphones and make even more money? I mean seriously, it's like asking why would Apple go through all the trouble of launching the iphone anywhere but the US. After all they could do quite well by just staying in the US.
Anecdotal evidence only goes so far.
Yet anecdotal evidence from companies suing Dell is perfectly valid and holds true for everyone?
It's not an 'assumption' at all, if you had read the article, you'd know it was a confirmed practice, exposed during the legal proceedings described therein.
The article does nothing of this kind, it only says that at one point Dell was replacing faulty motherboards with faulty motherboards. I does not say it did so for most replacement or that it even knew it was doing so. In fact, since it was apparently a Dell hired contractor hired to look into the problem that noted this the most likely explanation is that Dell didn't know it was doing so before the contractor's report. That's not even going into the absurdity of using an unattributed sentence from a newspaper article slanted against Dell to prove this sort of point.
Making a horribly implausible scenario does not prove your point, only your ignorance of how the internet actually works.
In reality, any such stream would be cached since you can amazingly enough cache things in real time. It'd be in fact, cached by each ISP as is done with any large content nowadays. Look up akamai. You'd end up with a tree of data propagation so the core servers might only need to send out data to a couple thousand destinations. Those send data to a couple thousand more destinations and those send it on to users.
If I can't find a job to pay the rent, why do I care what the economic output is?
Shouldn't matter to most people capable of planing, a combination of savings and unemployment benefits should ensure you don't have much difficulty till you land your next job.
Low but equitable economic output is preferable to high but inequitable economic output.
Low economic output means poor. Go look at any poor nation when a disaster strikes or when someone needs medicine. Or when it's bad year for the crops. Or when some disease strikes the cattle. Or how many hours they need to work just to survive. High but inequitable means that the lowest members of society can still get better services for free than the low but equitable you seem to love so much.
Also, in another post you complained about people who are dissatisfied with their jobs, well which do you prefer? You want a society where by necessity almost all jobs are unpleasant? If you want just a job than that's not that difficult even in today's economy, supermarkets and construction hires regularly.
With dividends you can easily and mathematically show what a stock price is trying to estimate and why. In cold hard rational thinking. However the explanation requires the profits to directly impact the shareholder.
Which means in the end you still own the profits, but not in the form of cold, hard cash.
If you cannot touch the profits you do not own them, practically speaking. Or said otherwise, if a the profits have no way to flow back to you why do you really care what they are? Rationally and economically speaking. That was the GPs concern. You're doing circular reasoning "stocks are the best guess of a companies value because people use them as best guess of a companies value." A ponzi scheme combined with mass delusion if one looks at it. In that case the stock market is just a bunch of stamp collectors, stock prices are more determined by the whims of the people rather than how a company performs. Hilarious but headache inducing to think about.
That's not the case, of course, as both my post and someone else's noted. However that's because profits do have a way of going back to investors directly in certain cases. Economists seem to just hand wave away the explanation too often which is somewhat annoying. How can you trust people who do not even seem able to answer the most basic questions about what they're studying? People who appear to assume things are a certain way because they were told they are without even considering why they are as such? Essentially, the sort of faith based and zealous thinking that goes against rational thought and science. That cannot help but give rational people a bad taste in their mouths about the stock market which is rather sad.
What is your point here? That because we can never be perfect that we shouldn't even try? That 10% unemployment doesn't matter because rich people are making out ok?
No, my point is that unless you know of a solution there's little use for what you're saying.
All I'm saying is that we need to measure success with a metric that relates in some way to something that actually matters. It doesn't mean shit if the DOW goes to 20,000 if people can't get jobs.
The economy implodes on it's own every 30 years anyway.
No, it slows down every decade or so. Implode is what happens in places like Zimbabwe.
Now you're just begging the question. Money is important because we live in a capitalistic society where money is important.
No I'm not. There are reasons for choosing capitalism and in capitalism there are reason for using money as a metric. In other words you want to remake all of society to run on something other than capitalism or to run very inefficiently. Historically the ends badly.
This is simply an article of faith.
No, it's based on math and various assumption. As I've already said, I'm not going to explain high school economics to you.
BTW, Bhutan would disagree with you about what can and cannot be measured.
You can define any metric you want, doesn't mean it makes sense. Stalin claimed people in the USSR were all quite happy, especially the ones voluntarily working in Siberia. China claims it's doing the best for Tibet, and by their own measure everything is great.
Then again the logic of using a non-industrialized nation with 80% farmers and a life expectancy of 62 years as a basis is amusing in itself. And the high infant mortality. And the decent risk of disease. Not to mention the large payments from India for their national budget. Tell me when you've got an example with a country that's actually got an economy.
I understand the foundations of society just fine. Well enough to see the flaws. If there's one thing that everyone should have learned from the recent crisis it's that economics is not settled science. It's really sad to see people not take home that basic lesson.
No, it's not settled science in certain scales which is part of my point. In various other sense it is settled science and even with arguable assumptions it does work. In fact, as a whole what we have now works fairly well. Some more socialism might be nice but the basic tenants work. Works better than every insane attempt at heavy socialism, communism and so on.
Not quite, it will effect the economy in the sense that the economy should, theoretically, solve the problem efficiently. Assuming competition and all that jazz. Price gouging is an inefficiency that the market should mitigate. One guy wants 5 tons of gold, another sells it for $5 and so on. Soon you've got caravans of water going to all the people in the desert. If they can afford paying for water everything is fine. If they can't, they either must move away or die. If they can't pay to move out, someone may loan them money for travel or the "market" may decide to let them die. Even then likely some entity would try to get donations to move them, by essentially selling the good feeling of helping someone.
In short: you're an idiot. In long: you're delusional and an idiot. Seriously, there's so much wrong without post it's hard to know where to start.
Pensions. Pensions pay out a fixed amount at some point in the future. How they are invested does not matter. The risk is taken on by the employer or investor. Then they usually get insurance in case they mess up the numbers and their constant reviews of their investments fail to detect problems. Long term the stock market provides a very good return on investment so it's the logical place to put money. Even then enough of the money is likely in bonds, and other stable investments, to ride out any short term market fluctuations. Of course, companies are run by short sighted bastards which is why the "guaranteed" return may not in fact be so guaranteed. They may end up in jail but you'll end up broke. Which leads to:
401k. The new great thing, you invest your own money for retirement. Your employer, who just moved to a non-extraditing country, can't screw you over. The stock market is a long term investment. Everyone says so. Your employer will say it, your 401k fund will say it, your pastor will say. Short term it's a risk. So if you're nearing retirement you move your investment into bonds. Bonds are stable. Preferably you move your money when the market is high. They even have nifty formulas for the percentages you should have.
No one says stocks always increase. However the stock market as a whole has historically done so over long periods of time. IT beats inflation by something like 7%. That is why people put money into it. Individual stocks aren't guaranteed. Neither are short term returns. If you're risk averse, by nature or need such as encroaching retirement, move your money into a safer investment. Stocks aren't the only form of investment.
This related to the stock market how exactly? Or are you unable to differentiate between the government, corporations and the stock market?
Tell that to the 10% of the US population that's underemployed and you'll get a taste of reality.
And many people are homeless, many are in poverty, many are miserable and so on. Nothing is ever perfect or is going to be perfect. Your point being? No seriously, what are you trying to say? Do you have a solution that doesn't make thing even worse or implodes the economy in thirty years?
Why should we care what the value of companies are beyond how many people they employ and how good those jobs are?
Because we live in a capitalistic society where the economy is driven by investment and money. The rest works out from there but is not the essence of things. In a capitalistic model, money is used as a proxy for most things which is why it matters when talking about the economy or society in general. Which, by the way, after some sanity checks works out much better than any insane scheme to tie things to "employment" or "quality of jobs." Money can also be measured easily while everything else can't (that's can't rather than "it's difficult to do").
If you do not understand the basic foundations of the society you live in then either don't argue about them or go read a book about them. As someone else in this thread said, we're not your wet nurses, we're not going to describe all of basic economics just because you're too lazy to read a book (I found Intermediate Microeconomics by Varian quite good for getting a grasp on things).
I was discussing just this with an economy major a few weeks back. The problem with your view is that a stock price is clearly tied in many ways to a companies performance, as in if a company does badly the stock goes down, so it's hard to argue it's all just gambling. Pure gambling would surely decouple into some insane mess by now since there's no way a self-perpetuating delusion of this scale could hold for this long.
The economist, by the way, was of no use which was saddening. "The market determines a companies value." "Why?" "Because that's what a stock price is." "God damn it."
Anyway, best I can figure out for why stocks aren't pure gambling is this. Dividends are essentially just events which which convert stock into money of some other sort. Thus stock is just the future sum of all those events as best predicted. But they're not the only event that does that. A company can be bought out, go private, go bankrupt and so on. Not anywhere near as stable as dividends I'm guessing but it still would force stock price to correlate with the performance of a company.
So if all the jobs were replaced with sweat shop ones that paid 5cents an hour run by Chinese companies you'd say the economy has not changed at all? Because that's what you're arguing.
Unemployment doesn't particularly matter, not every job is equal and most of them don't matter that much. Welcome to reality. The stock market, theoretically, measures the value, including future potential, of companies and thus of the market.
You apparently are insane and have no knowledge of economics much less what capitalism and free market actually mean (hint: they're not mutually exclusive and pretty much tied together). Also, another hint, the United States is not a purely capitalistic society. So I don't see much reason to talk to you.
I will leave you with one question, how did that other competing firm will acquire the initial money to enter the market? And why would anyone provide it to them?
Ads are making their way into every form of media we use, including our self-produced stuff.
Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
I'd love to see a similar law passed for consumer transactions.
Apparently you don't understand capitalism, how sad. Ignoring various other problems, seriously I could go on for pages, you'd kill investment in any remotely risky company. Congratulations. Have fun learning Chinese in 20 years. High risk requires high profits in whatever investment actually succeeds.
Let's say a group of individuals invests in into twenty new cutting edge small companies with revolutionary products. Let's say it's startups. Of those twenty, nineteen fail miserably and they lose all investment. One succeeds. The profits for that one are, let's say, 100%. Nonetheless the product is so nifty people pay the premium. You might say the profit is excessive however it's there to make up for the high risk. The investors may only make a 10% return on investment overall due to the other 19 companies failing.
That exactly what they did. They didn't predict an earthquake, that's the whole point. They said that given the data they cannot say an earthquake will happen. That does not mean it won't happen only that there's no indication of one being more likely than usual from the data. And usual does not mean no earthquakes but simply random chance of an earthquake.
Are you so foolish as to think all the media stories about "X causes exploding head syndrome" are written by scientists? No, the scientists say "there is indication of a correlation between X and exploding head syndrome which should be further investigated." The journalists decide to spice it so they can sell more copies of their newspaper or whatnot.
In this case I'd bet money that the politicians, bureaucrats and journalists who asked the scientists for their analysis were the ones who decides to go from "no more likely than usual" to "no chance of one happening."
Of course, since the prosecutor is good friends with them, guess how they're trying to protect their own asses?
Pretty much. Every building seems to have a "something in here may cause cancer" sign. Yeah, if I chug the gasoline in all those cars in the parking structure I'm sure it will give me cancer but why the fuck would I do that? I seriously need to get a "the sun is known to cause cancer" sign on the inside of my front door.
Since almost all the signs are worthless, any which do matter get ignored by me as well since I have no way to differentiate between them.
Now you're creating assumptions and a new problem definition after the fact. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. The GP explicitly failed to define such a hierarchy and explicitly talked of only two levels of cache. Two levels with a single constant access time difference between them. Within that framework he made an absurd statement about what running time is and how it deals with constants.
That is the context in which I posted my reply. Of course it's wrong if you change the problem we're dealing with but that's irrelevant. A hierarchy will cause the effect you want and probably is a saner way to think about this mathematically. It's nonetheless not what was being discussed as far as I could tell.
After all, the article concerns a modern computer which has a very limited hierarchy of caches. In other words the worst cache access time is known and is a constant independent of n.
Except it's a bounded increase. That's my whole point. There is nothing slower than the hard drive to cache from. You can assume every operation has the worst possible access time and you'd still end up with the same O() running time.
log(n)*COMPARRISON_COST + log(n)*MEMORY_ACCESS_COST log(n)*COMPARRISON_COST + log(n)*MEMORY_ACCESS_COST_MAX CONSTANT*log(n)
Sigh. No, the GP doesn't know what he's talking about. And apparently neither do you. If he did he would not mention something as idiotic as cache making the algorithm go from O(n) to O(n^2). It makes it go from O(x*n) to O(100*x*n), both of which are O(n). But if n is 50, O(x*n^2) would come out faster.
You're both confusing the very real issue of the constant running time of operations and O algorithm scaling. The algorithm is still O(n) however for the data sets in question it's slower than an O(n^2) algorithm. The worst case O performance is identical, that is simply a question of scaling to data sizes. However the practical constant factors are now much larger than one would normally expect and they vary based on other factors.
It's a simple distinction, really, which is why I'm confused at people's inability to grasp it.
I said nothing about the article in question or anything related to it on purpose. That is because none of the stuff you mentioned had really anything to do with that. Not specifically and the article makes no claims that agree with you. This is simply an argument about what worst case and O notation refers to.
The article essentially is about finding a way to reduce the constant factor in an algorithm. The O notation makes no sense in this case. It's still O(n) or whatnot. Except it's now 10 times faster.
Honestly, slashdot keeps letting me down these days. Sigh.
No, you're missing the point. And wrong. And also missing a lot knowledge about what O() means.
It doesn't matter how many orders of magnitude slower an operation is. O() is about SCALING for input size n. That's all. Constant factors do not matter. The GP already said this, please pay bloody attention next time. The running time of each operation is just a constant and has no impact on the O() performance. An order of magnitude or fifty is all the same. You talk about 1/100 speed and compare n to n^2. Hahahaha. Take n = 1000000. You know what the difference between n and n^2 is then? 1000000. Your puny factor of 100 is irrelevant against six orders of magnitude performance difference.
The worst case performance does not change. It's still O(n) or O (n^2). In fact it's quite possible for an O(n^2) algorithm to be faster than an O(log(n)) algorithm for small n under certain conditions. O is all about n being so bloody large that constant factors don't matter anymore.
This is all basic introductory algorithms stuff, please read up on it before trying to chime in on any arguments related it it in the future, okay?