When we (academics) do experiments on people however trivial we usually have to go through ethical clearance, get informed consent etc. I think its skipping that part that people are uncomfortable about.

You do realize that you yourself conduct such "experiments" on your friends every day? While making conversation in the lunch room you ask, "Hey, anyone wanna see Planet of the Apes tonight?" That elicits a lukewarm response, so you then ask "Well what about How to Train your Dragon?" You get a lot of interest in that one, so next time you ask about watching movies you're more likely to make suggestions where they can bring along their kids.

I think the dividing line between when you need to get informed consent is when the experiment begins to make people do things they wouldn't have done anyway. Tweaking how people get paired up for dates is fine if they were looking for a date anyway. Forcing them to go on a date when they weren't planning to would require informed consent (and probably compensation).

A "combined score" for speed and ratio is useless, as that relation is not linear.

A combined score could be quite useful when implementing, for example, compressed swap. Obviously you'd need to calibrate it for the specifics of a case.

So you're saying that no benchmark is meaningful because no single benchmark can be relied upon to be the final word under all circumstances? By that logic, measuring speed is not meaningful, because it's not the final word in all circumstances. Measuring the compression ratio is meaningless because it's not the final word in all circumstances. The footprint of the code is meaningless because it's not the final word in all circumstances.

Isn't it possible that a benchmark could be useful for some purposes other than being the final word in all circumstances?

Depending on what you're talking about, providing a huge table of every possible test doesn't make for easy comparisons. In the case of graphics cards, I suppose you could provide a list of every single game, including framerates on every single setting on every single game. It would be hard to gather all that data, and the result would be information overload, and it still wouldn't allow you to make a good comparison between cards. Even assuming you ad such a table, it would probably be more helpful to add or average the results somehow, providing a cumulative score. Of course, then you might want to weight the scores, possibly based on how popular the game is, or how representative it is of the actual capabilities of the card. But if that's the result that's actually helpful, why not design a single benchmark that's representative of what games do, rather than having to test so many games?

true, i took the ** to note hyperbole but perhaps i shouldnt have made that leap

Seem more like emphasis to me. And besides, there is a qualitative rather than just quantitative difference between "many things", "most things" and "all things", so hyperbole is just a fancy term for lying in this case.

Metrics often don't provide a definitive answer about what the best thing is, with universal agreement. If I tell you Apple scores highest in customer satisfaction for smartphones last year, does that mean everyone will agree that the iPhone is the best phone? If a bunch of people are working at a helpdesk, and one closes the most tickets per hour, does that necessarily mean that he's the best helpdesk tech?

It's true that a lot of people misuse metrics, thinking that they always provide an easy answer, without understanding what they actually mean. That doesn't mean that metrics are useless.

Yeah, but that's a really dumb metric since most people don't actually care what the top speed of a car is. Or to be more truthful, only morons care about top speed unless it's below 80mph, since you basically shouldn't be driving your car that fast. So really, in a metric like this, the "top speed" isn't a metric of "faster is better". It's a metric of "fast enough is good enough".

But if you were in the habit of doing car reviews, it might make sense to take a bunch of assessments, qualitative and quantitative, like acceleration and handling, MPG, physical attractiveness, additional features, and price (lower is better), and then weigh and average each score. That would enable you to come up with a final score which, while subjective, makes some attempt to enable an overall ranking of the cars. In fact, this is the sort of thing that reviewers sometimes do.

You want contradiction. That's down the hall.

The Weissman score is actually unitless. When one divides "log seconds" by "log seconds" the units cancel.

That is because it is presented as the ratio of the figure of merit of the candidate algorithm to the figure of merit of some bullshit "universal compresser", times a completely useless "scaling constant". To strip away the obscuration, all you have to do is see that for a completely transparent effectless compresser, r is unity and log t is log 0, or unity. 1/1, and it drops out.

The underlying figure of merit once you cut through the bullshit is r / log t. r is the compression ratio (unitless) and log t is log seconds. So yes, the units of the underlying figure of merit are reciprocal log seconds.

You need learn to cut through the hocus pocus and analyze the actual underlying equation before the Oz Sauce is ladeled on. You can well imagine that those who actually understand programming metrics are holding their sides laughing at those who are taking it seriously.

When we (academics) do experiments on people however trivial we usually have to go through ethical clearance, get informed consent etc. I think its skipping that part that people are uncomfortable about.

The operative word being "usually", which implies there exist cases where you don't. The discomfort come from people not grasping the existence of the "usually", and that businesses are not academics and product testing is not held to the same standard.

Ask yourself what backs the value of UPS shipping labels, that people are willing to give substantial sums to obtain one? Intrinsically the label is just sticky paper with some printing on it. The answer is the UPS network of trucks and distribution terminals. They enable a package with a label on it to get from one place to another.

In a similar way, the Bitcoin network of p2p nodes, mining hardware, desktop apps, merchants accepting it, and user wallets enable moving money from one place to another.

In other words, Bitcoin is precisely what I said - a medium of exchange, a coupon, a token, not a currency.
 

The network makes bitcoin balances useful, and therefore have value.

So? Having value [being useful] does not equate to having value [monetary worth]. They're two different things, though I can see why BTC fanboys would like to obscure the existence of that distinction - because it's existence demolishes their entire theory.

As to the balance of your reply, it's just more of the same... handwaving, smokescreens, and you using words that don't mean what you think they do.

Your claim about the number and frequency of rocket attacks is essentially false. There has been a steady stream of rocket attacks this year, as there are most years.

Does that link include asterisks next to the all the provably false-flag "rocket attacks"? Y'know, like today'd "hospital" attack that used munitions far more powerful and accurate than anything Hamas has, which the UN categorically denied as coming from a UN-controlled hospital, and in response to which Israel announced an immediate escalation of hostilities?

Tough to pick the more evil side in this one, but shit like that makes it a lot easier.

At least the Drake equation attempts to count something. I think people are missing this important fact about this bullshit compression rating: It isnt counting anything.

And these are very good arguments why such a metric should not be taken as an end-all be-all. Isn't that generally the case with metrics and benchmarks?

For example, you might use a benchmark to gauge the relative performance between two video cards. I test Card A and it gets 700. I test Card B and it gets a 680. However, in running a specific game that I like, Card B gets slightly faster framerates. Meanwhile, some other guy wants to use the video cards to mine Bitcoin, and maybe these specific benchmarks test entirely the wrong thing, and Card C, which scores 300 on the benchmark, is the best choice. Is the benchmark therefore useless?

No, not necessarily. if the benchmark is supposed to test general game performance, and generally faster benchmark tests correlate with faster game performance, then it helps shoppers figure out what to buy. If you want to shop based on a specific game or a specific use, then you use a different benchmark.

World discovers A/B testing
Freaks out
Until the next reality tv show comes on

How does traffic generated within verisonz ASN, and exists within the same verizon ASN, even need BGP to function?

This discussion is all about data going from: Netflix --> Level-3 --> Verizon

How are you getting Verizon --> Verizon out of this, and how is that relevant to Netflix?