To expand a little, most container ships use bunker crude, which is borderline sludge. It even needs to be heated before being pumped out. But it's cheap and at the size, pressure, and speeds these engines run at they get most of the energy out of just about any fuel.
An important note: as much sulfuric pollution as all the cars in the world. Which is bad enough, but -- for instance -- cars are (probably) still winning on CO2 emissions.
For those who don't follow the link, the 16 ships in question burn the sludge that's left over after refining all the cleaner burning bits out of petroleum. So it's not so much a "quantity of fuel burned" problem as it is that they're burning the worst possible thing you can burn, as far as this sort of pollution goes.
I concur, it's an almost perfect application. So much that most aircraft carriers already use it, not sure what's holding back the private sector (probably safety concerns).
I read somewhere that container ships' fuels are the dirtiest of all fuels used everywhere, which made buying electronics really non-green (since they're all come in ships from the other side of the globe). Anyone here knows how accurate this is?
Well of course you're getting a speed difference, look at how much extra work you're doing in the std::string code! The char[64]s are allocated once but you reallocate the std::strings every time. By pulling the declaration of s1, s2, and s3 to the top, I'm getting equivalent speed (g++ 4.4.7 with -g, 0.02s each time, clock() isn't any more accurate). And for essentially no runtime cost, you're getting memory safety and exception safety.
C++ is all about low-cost abstractions. Any speed difference between the C++ way and the C way should be very small, and the C++ way is safer. Use std::string (and std::vector and all the rest) unless you have a very good reason not too, and then you should probably just write your own custom implementation. Reverting to the C way is just asking for issues.
Carrier attack groups have a refueling ship along with all the cruisers/attack ships. It probably makes sense, just going by the size differences the carrier would use more conventional fuel than all of its escorts combined, so having the carrier be nuclear powered doubles your range.
Is this comment real? You made this comment on a site that most people use to waste time, and where one of the top posts is an Assembly implementation of Flappy Bird.
Fun fact: HFT has an annual revenue ~1/50th[1][2] of Google's. What's worse: a few hundred people wasting their time moving prices of select stocks a few pennies, or several thousand wasting their time collecting scary amounts of data about you to try and get you to click an ad?
That's not entirely true. The salary cap is because if teams paid the fair market value, the teams with a larger budget would be able to run away with it like the Yankees did in baseball (with over twice as many World Series titles as the next best). It keeps the league artificially competitive.
Keeping the business world artificially competitive is an interesting idea, and not as bad as I initially thought.
Technically, in baseball, the lower market teams get paid out of the luxury tax. Sometimes those payments exceed their team salary. The competitive argument sounds nice, but is more for the owners than competitiveness.
"Keeping the business world artificially competitive is an interesting idea, and not as bad as I initially thought."
I have no understanding of why it is a good idea or how, given CEO's and businesses are not teams competing for a trophy how it is even relatable.
They are teams competing for trophies, though; the trophy is your money/market share.
But beyond that, artificial competition could be a good thing. The large companies have a lot of advantages over the smaller companies, like economies of scale and name recognition, but they also have an incentive to stifle innovation (either directly or indirectly through the Innovator's Dilemma) and erect barriers to entry. Allowing smaller companies to "steal" CEOs helps offset some of those advantages. Even if they aren't well suited to that role, the name recognition alone can be an advantage (just look at SolarCity).
But I keep going back and forth on this. Set the salary cap too high, and the small companies can't steal the CEO away. Too low and it doesn't properly reward them for the difficulties of managing 200k+ person companies. A proper middle ground, if it exists, would be hard to find and need constant adjustments.
The only ones would could regulate CEO salaries in this manner is government and given the job they do with taxi cab medallions, I do not believe they are competent to do anything but screw it up.
If that's what made him your favorite, you really need to read his earlier post that really blew up in popularity. It's a great read. http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
Photons have no rest mass, but one of the key points in GR is that mass and energy are interchangeable by E=mc^2. Mass-energy equivalence is how Fission bombs work.
"Relativistic mass" is one of those concepts that was considered, bandied about in the 70s for a while, then ultimately discarded as not helpful.
Photons have no mass, period. An ensemble of photons may have a non-zero invariant mass, but there's just no way in which it's correct to say a photon has a mass.
This has nothing to do with saying that you can't convert mass to energy. Electron-positron pair creation from ultra high energy gamma rays has been a known thing for a long time. Pulsars are thought to run partly off of pair creation off the magnetic field, etc.
Stupid question maybe, but if you can create mass from photons, wouldn't that start to affect the shape of the universe if it happened enough? Could you use this, in theory, to turn an ever expanding universe into one that contracts? Just keep turning energy into mass?
Nope. In GR, energy has as much "gravity" as the equivalent mass, so it won't affect anything. (Energy is more tied to the expanding universe, though, as the wavelength increases too, so it's an important distinction in early-universe cosmology.)
The second point is actually a point for hedge funds. The S&P 500 went from a high of 1576 near the end of 2007, to a low of 666 in the beginning of 2009 (October 07 to March 2009, specifically). Commodities had similar losses. If hedge funds only lost 20% when the general market lost almost 60%, they are a pretty good hedge against risk.
This is one example of a number of ways the article is weirdly disingenuous. Thea author compares returns to equities but risks to nothing, as you point out. Separately, when he cites an estimate of 3.01% annual return from alpha and 4.62% from beta, all he has to say is that "most" of the returns are from beta and that fees are high, pretending not to understand that returning 3% per year due to alpha after fees would actually be quite impressive and valuable.
>Gross of fees, the annual return to investors over the period from 1995 to 2009 was 11.42 per cent. Management and performance fees reduced this figure by 3.79 percentage points.
to 7.63 combined from alpha and beta
>Over the same period, the S&P 500 generated an annual return of 8.04 per cent.
The author's point is that saying '%3 per year due to alpha after fees' is disingenuous since the returns aren't actually higher.
It's pretty disingenuous to compare numbers from two different time spans. I don't know where the authors numbers come from but he says the drop was 20% in 2008.
You're right, the period was "hand picked", but that's because I was looking at a 5 year graph with the high and low marked, and just used those numbers. The movement before/after 2008 wasn't the 40 percentage points that would be needed for the hedge funds to do as poorly as the market, so I didn't bother.
But I just looked the exact numbers up. The S&P 500 opened January 2nd at 1467.97 and closed December 31st at 903.25. A 38.5% loss instead of the 60% I said, but that's still almost twice the loss of the hedge funds.
