People might use Wikipedia for the same purpose as Google, that doesn't mean we should compare them.
Arguably, it does.
It is often much more important what a product actually does compete with than what it is intended to compete with. Now, of course, in comparing them, you will may that, because of their different design goals, Wikipedia has some areas where it is much stronger than Google and Google has many areas where it is much stronger than Wikipedia. You may even find that Google and Wikipedia are for many purposes best used together.
The people who expect every Google search to work in Alpha are wrong. Those who expect genetic, scientific, or mathematical comparisons to work in Google as it is now are equally wrong. Hell, Alpha doesn't even search the internet, it has its own information database.
That last bit, of course, is true of Google as well. Of course, its databases are built, in part, by crawling the web.
How are the two comparable again?
They are comparable to the extent that one can use them to attempt to answer the same types of questions. Of course, they aren't likely to be equally good for questions, and each is likely to have its own areas of strengths and weakness, but that's usually what a good comparison reveals.
And any defendant who thinks that attempting to bankrupt the opposing party's law firm is a good response to losing their case...
I don't think they are trying to hurt the law firm at all: any costs to the law firm in the performance of their responsibilities in the case are, one would presume, billable costs to the client, who is the real target.
through the way distant objects affect objects within our light cone.
a galaxy cluster just outside of viewing range may impact one closer
If you are saying that we can "see" the effect of objects which are not within our past light cone by observing impacts on objects which are within our past light cone, that would appear to be false. Because in order to affect something within our past light cone, an event would have to be within the past light cone of the thing it was affecting, but if we have an observer at one point in space-time, and an event at a point in space-time that is in the past light cone of the observer, and another event in space time that is in the past light cone of the first event, then the second event is, necessarily, also in the past light cone of the observer. So anything that could affect anything within our past light cone would also itself be in our past light cone.
Your nitpick is wrong. Initial light traveling from the big bang point of origin at the standard speed will be 2 light years away from light traveling in the exact opposite direction after one year of travel. One photo goes left, one photo goes right. After a year, they are 2 light years apart.
That would be the case, if our universe was one in which classical mechanics was an accurate description of the way relative velocities worked.
Of course, if our universe was such a universe, then we'd all be making fun of that kook Einstein and his crazy theories of relativity, rather than hailing them as important (if potentially incomplete) insights into the way space-time works.
However, relative to each other, C observes A and B moving away from each other faster than the speed of light.
Wrong. C observes A and B moving at speeds relative to C that if added up as if they were in a universe where classical mechanics held would suggest that tehy were moving faster than the speed of light relative to each other.
But one of the fundamental things about relativiity is that the velocity vector of A relative to B is not, contrary to classical mechanics, the velocity vector of A relative to C minus the velocity vector of B relative to C.
And at this point you wonder if scientists who make claims about objects moving faster than the speed of light are not taking this fact into account.
Yes, scientists making claims about frame dragging in the early universe, in the area near rotating black holes, etc., are, as a general rule, taking relativity into account when they talk about relative velocities greater than that of light, since the effects they are talking about are a lot more involved applications of relativity than the one needed to reject the very simple appeal to classical mechanics you are making.
Two photons are emitted from a stationary point in opposite directions. What is the speed of photon A relative to photon B? I had assumed the answer would be 2*c, but if I understand you correctly you're telling me it's no more than c.
Essentially correct.
This doesn't make sense to me...
It doesn't make sense, at least on the intuitive level, to most people, including, I would suspect, many people who understand, on an intellectual level, that it is true. Classical mechanics is intuitively very appealing, and relativity, though we can see that it works in lots of places, isn't really intuitive in the way having an object A with speed x in one direction relative to a reference object, and object B one with speed x in the opposite direction having speed 2*x relative to each other is.
As for many things, Wikipedia provides a decent starting point.
Next question asked is WHY has Microsoft have to invent one when there are others available already?
Microsoft had to invent one because there are others available that (a) don't come from Microsoft, (b) don't target Microsoft platforms preferentially or exclusively. If, say, Erlang catches on for implementing the core of concurrent systems, there are a lot of ways people might provide interoperability with that core, but using.NET isn't really likely to be one of them. So Microsoft needs its own concurrent programming tightly integrated with.NET to keep.NET in the game.
The theory is that, at the time of the big bang, space was expanding faster than light, so that one year after the big bang particles would be more than 1 light-year apart from each other.
Just a nitpick... you mean "more than 2 light-years apart from each other". Think of a circle with a radius of 1 light-year...
Your nitpick is wrong. More than one light-year away from each other after one year would require a relative speed greater than light speed, which would be sufficient to demonstrate an exception to the general principle that light speed is the greatest possible relative speed.
"The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it's not moving at all. It's the space-time that's moving." One reason this idea seems credible is that scientists think it may already have happened. Some models suggest that space-time expanded at a rate faster than light speed during a period of rapid inflation shortly after the Big Bang.
Its also worth noting that, as well as the inflationary period shortly after the big bang, this is also believed to occur in close proximity to the event horizon of rotating black holes (specifically, within the ergosphere of such an object.)
OTOH, a tricky part of Star Trek-style warp drive is coming up with a way of generating such an effect that will selectively move the object you want moved at FTL speeds over a vast distance without disrupting a vast swath of the universe near the path of movement. While generating a rotating black hole with an ergosphere large enough to accommodate your starting and ending location may get you from point A to point B at better than light speed, its going to cause a lot of collateral damage in the process, even if you can somehow "turn off" the black hole when you have arrived.
Textbooks are expensive only in small part due to the hardcover / high quality paper they're printed on. The IP of the authors is what costs the most money.
You are focused too much on the supply side; the reason textbooks are expensive has little to do with the cost (either of materials or the IP making up the content) and much to do with the fact that price is not a significant factor in purchase decisions -- they aren't assigned, for the most part, based on a cost:value analysis, and once they are assigned, there generally is no acceptable substitute. Books that are sometimes incidentally used as textbooks whose material quality and IP is no less expensive than other textbooks, but which are also marketed to a wider audience and thus have to be priced to sell to people who have a choice about whether or not to buy them, are often substantially less expensive than textbooks that are marketed only as textbooks.
Here's more progress: people don't know their neighbors and can't let their kids wander the neighborhood.
They may choose not to more now, but to the extent they do it is largely due to media-driven hysteria; while the actual incidence of the kinds of crime that are the focus of the fears behind that decision has declined while the perception of the incidence of those crimes has increased.
To submitter: "proof" and "hope of proof" are rather different things.
But, really, "hope of proof", even if it is what is in TFA, is an understatement. The results clearly do prove "that their T. rex discovery 'was not a unique occurence'," even if it is less clear that they prove that the T. rex findings were not modern contamination.
After all, if it is repeated in a different context, whether or not it is meaningful, it is not "unique".
Yeah, but children's soccer balls can be much smaller than regulation.
Even a Size 3 soccer ball (typical for the youngest age groups) is about 7-1/4 to 7-1/2 inches in diameter, which is substantially larger than a 5-6 inch ostrich egg.
The key here is that Ray bases this prediction on past observation of things like Moore's law. Even though he does cherry pick and that there is no guarantee that it would always continue in such a fashion, the idea that distributed system improvements are exponential isn't that far fetched.
Since there are physical limits involved, it would intuitively seem vastly more plausible to suggest that the improvements would, in the long term, be logistic rather than exponential (and, of course, a logistic growth curve looks, in its early phase, just like an exponential curve.)
Of course, a logistic curve could still support predictions of a "singularity" of sorts, the difference is that things would "settle down" to a new normal after an abrupt transformation, rather than continuing with accelerating change forever.
The newspapers only being available outside the dead tree delivery area is stupid. Christ, the WaPo, NYT, and others would save money if they delivered electronically rather than on dead tree.
Probably would, but why compete with yourself. If Kindle DX delivery seems to work well, expect the "home delivery area" for participating newspapers to shrink and eventually disappear entirely, but subsidizing DX sales in their existing home delivery area would further weaken the viability of home delivery (which relies on having lots of readers in an area for viability), and might make it impossible to maintain. So the newspapers choose to let the medium prove itself before subsidizing it where it would compete with their existing home delivery system.
Where in the hell is it in the Constitution that this is a function of government.
First off, this seems pretty clearly within the scope of the interstate commerce power (in Art. I, Sec. 8).
Second, the Constitution isn't Holy Writ. That something isn't consistent with the Constitution isn't, in and of itself, an argument that it should not be done (its an argument that the government should not do it unless the Constitution is changed, but that's a very different thing: the first step for arguing that the Constitution should be changed to is to establish that there is something should be done which the current Constitution does not allow.)
Easy solution. Legalize non-competes, but require the company to pay the employee while bound by the non-compete.
That's actually already legal everywhere, I'm pretty sure; I don't think anyplace (at least, any US jurisdiction) outlaws non-compete terms in employment contracts that only apply while you are employed, which is what that amounts to.
And so did GeoCities and AOL but that didn't work out too well for Yahoo and Time Warner respectively.
Time-Warner didn't buy AOL, they were bought by AOL. So the value of the userbase considerations weren't really comparable to the Apple-Twitter rumor or the Yahoo!-Geocities deal.
White sugar is just brown sugar with the molasses separated out.
That used to be true, but now the opposite is true. Modern brown sugars are almost without exception fully refined white sugars with molasses added in after they have been refined.
Corporate taxes are exactly the same as raising income tax, except you are paying at the point of purchase rather then the point of earning.
What is proposed clearly is not the same as raising personal income taxes for several reasons, three of the most significant of which are: 1) Increasing corporate income taxes is not equivalent to raising personal income taxes in general. Even assuming, for the sake of argument (at least till we get to the next item), that raising corporate income taxes had exactly the same effect as raising personal income taxes on the income earned by employees of those corporations, not all personal income comes from employment in entities that pay corporate income taxes since people are employed by tax exempt nonprofits (whose income isn't taxed at all), sole proprietorships, certain classes of partnerships, and S corporations (whose income is subject to personal, not corporate, taxes), and federal, state, and local governments. 2) Increasing corporate income taxes isn't even equivalent to raising personal income taxes on the employees of the taxed corporations. This equivalency would require the assumption that corporations are paying wages that are above what the market will bear by at least an amount sufficient to cut wages by the exact proportion of the increase in corporate taxes. This assumption is clearly flawed. 3) Narrowing the opportunities for one form of tax avoidance is not the same as raising marginal rates for the same tax. Making it harder for corporations to avoid certain taxes using mechanisms some (but far from all, or even the majority) have chosen to utilize is not the same raising the rate of corporate taxation, since it has no effect on those entities subject to corporate tax that have not chosen to avoid taxes using the mechanism being attacked. It only negatively impacts those entities currently using the particular tax avoidance measure, not corporations in general.
Taking advantage of the uncertainty surrounding Oracle's acquisition of Sun, IBM has doubled the monetary incentives they are offering to ditch Sun gear.
If I have to double the bribe I'm paying to get somebody to abandon a competitor's product from what I was previously offering, that doesn't sound like there is uncertainty in the market that I am taking advantage of, it seems like I've suddenly become desperate that if I don't convince people to leave right now I'm never going to be able to.
And it makes sense: Oracle with Sun, once it finishes integrating its product lines, is going to have a lot more capacity to compete with IBM in offering complete solutions than pre-Sun Oracle or pre-Oracle Sun on their own could.
In reality, their biggest mistake was not containing costs 10 years ago (slowly) to reflect the structural shift of information to a different medium.
I would argue that the biggest mistake of newspapers was the opposite, its not that they did too little to contain costs but that they did too much (or, at least, too much of the wrong things), and thereby eliminated much of their value at the time where they had a whole host of new competition. Newspapers made themselves irrelevant through cut backs in the newsroom that have crippled reporting (especially, in many cases, local reporting in papers that merged into bigger and bigger conglomerates) and turned the papers into conduits for press releases and wire reports, functions for which there are easy cheap substitutes.
Sure, that profiler might say that you are taking n% of your time in it, but how are you going to objectively know that that n% can be reduced significantly?
I think GP isn't saying the profiler tells him that it can be improved, only that it is a waste of time to even begin thinking about whether a bit of code can be optimized until (a) it works correctly, and (b) there is a performance problem, and (b) a profiler reveals that a lot of time is spent in the particular bit of code at issue.
Then you can analyze what your correct-but-time-consuming code is doing and see if there is a faster way of doing it that remains correct.
If less than 1% of your time is spent in a particular bit of unoptimized code that could be made hundreds of times faster, that's less of a problem than if 99% of your time is spent in another bit of code that could be made 5% faster.
I don't get it.. how did they even find out that the value gets replaced? don't you just do "hash[key]" and the value "magically" reappears again? why would they even go into the debugger after that?
Probably they ran into some other, unrelated, problem, had no idea where it came from, dropped into the debugger and set a bunch of watches and looked for something that didn't look right to them, and instantly focussed like a laser on the first "odd" (to them) thing that cropped up.
I'll agree with you for most of what you said, but I disagree that programmers should learn to implement sorting algorithms. Unless they're doing serious research on the subject it's doubtful that Joe Programmer is going to be whipping up a sorting algorithm that's better than the one provided.
Given the proliferation of languages that aim to make certain tasks easier and that often offer (initially, at least) only a limited array of "good-enough-in-most-cases" basic support for sorting and datastructures, its probably not all that uncommon that someone merely basically familiar with C (or Java or whatever lower-level language is appropriate for the platform) and basic algorithms and data structures could greatly enhance a program written in one of those languages by implementing a well-understood algorithm from the literature without much difficulty. I would say that the skills to recognize such opportunities and have some idea of what is needed where they arise is a pretty important one.
Slashdot Mirror
Arguably, it does.
It is often much more important what a product actually does compete with than what it is intended to compete with. Now, of course, in comparing them, you will may that, because of their different design goals, Wikipedia has some areas where it is much stronger than Google and Google has many areas where it is much stronger than Wikipedia. You may even find that Google and Wikipedia are for many purposes best used together.
That last bit, of course, is true of Google as well. Of course, its databases are built, in part, by crawling the web.
They are comparable to the extent that one can use them to attempt to answer the same types of questions. Of course, they aren't likely to be equally good for questions, and each is likely to have its own areas of strengths and weakness, but that's usually what a good comparison reveals.
I don't think they are trying to hurt the law firm at all: any costs to the law firm in the performance of their responsibilities in the case are, one would presume, billable costs to the client, who is the real target.
If you are saying that we can "see" the effect of objects which are not within our past light cone by observing impacts on objects which are within our past light cone, that would appear to be false. Because in order to affect something within our past light cone, an event would have to be within the past light cone of the thing it was affecting, but if we have an observer at one point in space-time, and an event at a point in space-time that is in the past light cone of the observer, and another event in space time that is in the past light cone of the first event, then the second event is, necessarily, also in the past light cone of the observer. So anything that could affect anything within our past light cone would also itself be in our past light cone.
That would be the case, if our universe was one in which classical mechanics was an accurate description of the way relative velocities worked.
Of course, if our universe was such a universe, then we'd all be making fun of that kook Einstein and his crazy theories of relativity, rather than hailing them as important (if potentially incomplete) insights into the way space-time works.
Wrong. C observes A and B moving at speeds relative to C that if added up as if they were in a universe where classical mechanics held would suggest that tehy were moving faster than the speed of light relative to each other.
But one of the fundamental things about relativiity is that the velocity vector of A relative to B is not, contrary to classical mechanics, the velocity vector of A relative to C minus the velocity vector of B relative to C.
Yes, scientists making claims about frame dragging in the early universe, in the area near rotating black holes, etc., are, as a general rule, taking relativity into account when they talk about relative velocities greater than that of light, since the effects they are talking about are a lot more involved applications of relativity than the one needed to reject the very simple appeal to classical mechanics you are making.
Essentially correct.
It doesn't make sense, at least on the intuitive level, to most people, including, I would suspect, many people who understand, on an intellectual level, that it is true. Classical mechanics is intuitively very appealing, and relativity, though we can see that it works in lots of places, isn't really intuitive in the way having an object A with speed x in one direction relative to a reference object, and object B one with speed x in the opposite direction having speed 2*x relative to each other is.
As for many things, Wikipedia provides a decent starting point.
Microsoft had to invent one because there are others available that (a) don't come from Microsoft, (b) don't target Microsoft platforms preferentially or exclusively. If, say, Erlang catches on for implementing the core of concurrent systems, there are a lot of ways people might provide interoperability with that core, but using .NET isn't really likely to be one of them. So Microsoft needs its own concurrent programming tightly integrated with .NET to keep .NET in the game.
Your nitpick is wrong. More than one light-year away from each other after one year would require a relative speed greater than light speed, which would be sufficient to demonstrate an exception to the general principle that light speed is the greatest possible relative speed.
Its also worth noting that, as well as the inflationary period shortly after the big bang, this is also believed to occur in close proximity to the event horizon of rotating black holes (specifically, within the ergosphere of such an object.)
OTOH, a tricky part of Star Trek-style warp drive is coming up with a way of generating such an effect that will selectively move the object you want moved at FTL speeds over a vast distance without disrupting a vast swath of the universe near the path of movement. While generating a rotating black hole with an ergosphere large enough to accommodate your starting and ending location may get you from point A to point B at better than light speed, its going to cause a lot of collateral damage in the process, even if you can somehow "turn off" the black hole when you have arrived.
You are focused too much on the supply side; the reason textbooks are expensive has little to do with the cost (either of materials or the IP making up the content) and much to do with the fact that price is not a significant factor in purchase decisions -- they aren't assigned, for the most part, based on a cost:value analysis, and once they are assigned, there generally is no acceptable substitute. Books that are sometimes incidentally used as textbooks whose material quality and IP is no less expensive than other textbooks, but which are also marketed to a wider audience and thus have to be priced to sell to people who have a choice about whether or not to buy them, are often substantially less expensive than textbooks that are marketed only as textbooks.
They may choose not to more now, but to the extent they do it is largely due to media-driven hysteria; while the actual incidence of the kinds of crime that are the focus of the fears behind that decision has declined while the perception of the incidence of those crimes has increased.
But, really, "hope of proof", even if it is what is in TFA, is an understatement. The results clearly do prove "that their T. rex discovery 'was not a unique occurence'," even if it is less clear that they prove that the T. rex findings were not modern contamination.
After all, if it is repeated in a different context, whether or not it is meaningful, it is not "unique".
Even a Size 3 soccer ball (typical for the youngest age groups) is about 7-1/4 to 7-1/2 inches in diameter, which is substantially larger than a 5-6 inch ostrich egg.
Since there are physical limits involved, it would intuitively seem vastly more plausible to suggest that the improvements would, in the long term, be logistic rather than exponential (and, of course, a logistic growth curve looks, in its early phase, just like an exponential curve.)
Of course, a logistic curve could still support predictions of a "singularity" of sorts, the difference is that things would "settle down" to a new normal after an abrupt transformation, rather than continuing with accelerating change forever.
Probably would, but why compete with yourself. If Kindle DX delivery seems to work well, expect the "home delivery area" for participating newspapers to shrink and eventually disappear entirely, but subsidizing DX sales in their existing home delivery area would further weaken the viability of home delivery (which relies on having lots of readers in an area for viability), and might make it impossible to maintain. So the newspapers choose to let the medium prove itself before subsidizing it where it would compete with their existing home delivery system.
First off, this seems pretty clearly within the scope of the interstate commerce power (in Art. I, Sec. 8).
Second, the Constitution isn't Holy Writ. That something isn't consistent with the Constitution isn't, in and of itself, an argument that it should not be done (its an argument that the government should not do it unless the Constitution is changed, but that's a very different thing: the first step for arguing that the Constitution should be changed to is to establish that there is something should be done which the current Constitution does not allow.)
That's actually already legal everywhere, I'm pretty sure; I don't think anyplace (at least, any US jurisdiction) outlaws non-compete terms in employment contracts that only apply while you are employed, which is what that amounts to.
Time-Warner didn't buy AOL, they were bought by AOL. So the value of the userbase considerations weren't really comparable to the Apple-Twitter rumor or the Yahoo!-Geocities deal.
That used to be true, but now the opposite is true. Modern brown sugars are almost without exception fully refined white sugars with molasses added in after they have been refined.
What is proposed clearly is not the same as raising personal income taxes for several reasons, three of the most significant of which are:
1) Increasing corporate income taxes is not equivalent to raising personal income taxes in general. Even assuming, for the sake of argument (at least till we get to the next item), that raising corporate income taxes had exactly the same effect as raising personal income taxes on the income earned by employees of those corporations, not all personal income comes from employment in entities that pay corporate income taxes since people are employed by tax exempt nonprofits (whose income isn't taxed at all), sole proprietorships, certain classes of partnerships, and S corporations (whose income is subject to personal, not corporate, taxes), and federal, state, and local governments.
2) Increasing corporate income taxes isn't even equivalent to raising personal income taxes on the employees of the taxed corporations. This equivalency would require the assumption that corporations are paying wages that are above what the market will bear by at least an amount sufficient to cut wages by the exact proportion of the increase in corporate taxes. This assumption is clearly flawed.
3) Narrowing the opportunities for one form of tax avoidance is not the same as raising marginal rates for the same tax. Making it harder for corporations to avoid certain taxes using mechanisms some (but far from all, or even the majority) have chosen to utilize is not the same raising the rate of corporate taxation, since it has no effect on those entities subject to corporate tax that have not chosen to avoid taxes using the mechanism being attacked. It only negatively impacts those entities currently using the particular tax avoidance measure, not corporations in general.
If I have to double the bribe I'm paying to get somebody to abandon a competitor's product from what I was previously offering, that doesn't sound like there is uncertainty in the market that I am taking advantage of, it seems like I've suddenly become desperate that if I don't convince people to leave right now I'm never going to be able to.
And it makes sense: Oracle with Sun, once it finishes integrating its product lines, is going to have a lot more capacity to compete with IBM in offering complete solutions than pre-Sun Oracle or pre-Oracle Sun on their own could.
I would argue that the biggest mistake of newspapers was the opposite, its not that they did too little to contain costs but that they did too much (or, at least, too much of the wrong things), and thereby eliminated much of their value at the time where they had a whole host of new competition. Newspapers made themselves irrelevant through cut backs in the newsroom that have crippled reporting (especially, in many cases, local reporting in papers that merged into bigger and bigger conglomerates) and turned the papers into conduits for press releases and wire reports, functions for which there are easy cheap substitutes.
I think GP isn't saying the profiler tells him that it can be improved, only that it is a waste of time to even begin thinking about whether a bit of code can be optimized until (a) it works correctly, and (b) there is a performance problem, and (b) a profiler reveals that a lot of time is spent in the particular bit of code at issue.
Then you can analyze what your correct-but-time-consuming code is doing and see if there is a faster way of doing it that remains correct.
If less than 1% of your time is spent in a particular bit of unoptimized code that could be made hundreds of times faster, that's less of a problem than if 99% of your time is spent in another bit of code that could be made 5% faster.
Probably they ran into some other, unrelated, problem, had no idea where it came from, dropped into the debugger and set a bunch of watches and looked for something that didn't look right to them, and instantly focussed like a laser on the first "odd" (to them) thing that cropped up.
Given the proliferation of languages that aim to make certain tasks easier and that often offer (initially, at least) only a limited array of "good-enough-in-most-cases" basic support for sorting and datastructures, its probably not all that uncommon that someone merely basically familiar with C (or Java or whatever lower-level language is appropriate for the platform) and basic algorithms and data structures could greatly enhance a program written in one of those languages by implementing a well-understood algorithm from the literature without much difficulty. I would say that the skills to recognize such opportunities and have some idea of what is needed where they arise is a pretty important one.