Even if an 11km-high tower were feasible (given that it would be 20 times the tallest tower ever built) and sufficient (given that reaching escape velocity within 11km would require a steel-crushing, organ-liquefying 560 Gs of acceleration), there's still the fact that you'd end up traveling at orbital velocity at an altitude where the air still has fully 1/5 of its sea-level density. Result: fireball.
NBC is the controlling interest in Apple customer-friendly intellectual properties How about "NBC owns the copyright to Apple-customer-friendly shows"?
There is no such thing as "non-polynomial time". Yes there is. It's usually called EXPTIME (or one of its big brothers, EXPSPACE, EXPEXPTIME, etc.) You don't tend to see them all that often outside a few research areas because they're very badly behaved on real-world problems. Ok, I spoke hastily. There are problems that are provably not in P. I guess they could be said to run in "non-polynomial time".
Yeah, I wasn't trying to say it was reasonable to use in that context... you just said "there's no such thing as non-polynomial time". It was with that specific assertion that I was disagreeing. Ok I see what you mean. I guess a specific algorithm can be said to run in "non-polynomial time".
I agree with everything you have to say, with one nitpicking exception: non-polynomial time seems a reasonable term to use. An algorithm that is O(N^N) takes time that is not polynomial in N, hence it is non-polynomial time. I disagree. They're not talking about an algorithm here; they're talking about the Traveling Salesman Problem. They called the TSP "non-polynomial", and that is by no means certain. If you could prove that the TSP has no polynomial-time solution, you'd get the Turing award.
To our knowledge it is the first time that a method for the reduction of non-polynomial time to quadratic time has been proposed. This is far from the first time that someone has claimed to solve an NP-complete problem in P time by limiting the size of the problem. It's not that hard to design a circuit that solves TSP in polynomial time if you get to put a limit on the number of edges.
Also, "NP" doesn't stand for "non-polynomial". There is no such thing as "non-polynomial time". It's Nondeterministic Polynomial time.
These guys may know their optics, but they're amateurs in complexity theory. This is most painfully obvious in their concluding sentence:
Since for practical (non-pathological) problems by purely electronic means very good solutions to even large size problems can be found, our proposed method is not meant to solve real-world traveling salesman problems but rather as a gedankenexperiment to show how photons and the laws of physics can considerably reduce the computational complexity of difficult mathematical problems. It does no such thing. All it does is parallelize the computation.
You can't forget about the extreme cold. Space is a very, very cold place. One might think frostbite could be an issue. If one might think that, then one might want to read the article.
For a stock whose P/E ratio is below 20, this means that if they were to pay 100% of their earnings as dividends and their stock never went anywhere, I would be paid more than if I bought treasury bills. BTW, you don't need to suppose that they will pay all earnings as dividends. Retained earnings increase the portion of the company you own. That's why P/E is the relevant number rather than P/D (price-dividend ratio).
Cash is not the same as wealth. Wealth can disappear even if cash doesn't. Wealth is not created when someone acquires money; it's created by the activity the person did to earn that money.
The current P/E of NASDAQ is 24. That's a tad high; with bond yields around 5%, a P/E more than 20 must be based on growth speculation. I could reasonably see the NASDAQ losing 20% of its value in one shot. However, during the bubble, the P/E of the NASDAQ was over 100.
It's hard to overemphasize the difference between these two numbers. Look at the ratios between the NASDAQ P/E numbers and bond yields. Our current ratio is 1.2, which is 20% "too high". The bubble ratio was over 5.8, which 480% too high. The two situations are not even comparable.
If the NASDAQ actually lost over 75% of its value, like it did when the dot-com bubble burst, I'd be buying as much of QQQQ as I could get my hands on.
I tried one for a while and found that if you try to move, say, down and then left, with your thumb starting in the center of the ball, the "left" movement just rotates the trackball clockwise, and the cursor doesn't move left. A big, sensitive trackball doesn't have this problem because you can move pretty much as far as you want without moving your fingers far from the center.
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Thanks for pointing out that "predator" backward is "rotaderp". That deserves +5, Funny all by itself.
Your > trick doesn't work for me, using bash on Red Hat. It just creates an empty file and exits immediately. Am I missing something?
Even if an 11km-high tower were feasible (given that it would be 20 times the tallest tower ever built) and sufficient (given that reaching escape velocity within 11km would require a steel-crushing, organ-liquefying 560 Gs of acceleration), there's still the fact that you'd end up traveling at orbital velocity at an altitude where the air still has fully 1/5 of its sea-level density. Result: fireball.
I have an engineering degree (two, in fact) and I never call myself an engineer. I usually say I "write software".
Is there anything else to stall for?
Something tells me you don't know what midichlorians are.
You must be a student if you measure code in pages. :-)
Thanks for the laugh.
There are way better voting systems out there than that one.
US copyright law says nothing about redistributing. You're confusing it with the GPL.
Personally I find that once I get to a certain level of typing proficiency, my typos are whole words.
Also, "NP" doesn't stand for "non-polynomial". There is no such thing as "non-polynomial time". It's Nondeterministic Polynomial time.
These guys may know their optics, but they're amateurs in complexity theory. This is most painfully obvious in their concluding sentence: Since for practical (non-pathological) problems by purely electronic means very good solutions to even large size problems can be found, our proposed method is not meant to solve real-world traveling salesman problems but rather as a gedankenexperiment to show how photons and the laws of physics can considerably reduce the computational complexity of difficult mathematical problems. It does no such thing. All it does is parallelize the computation.
This is not insightful. It's the Broken Window Fallacy.
Cash is not the same as wealth. Wealth can disappear even if cash doesn't. Wealth is not created when someone acquires money; it's created by the activity the person did to earn that money.
Here's an idea: why not RTFA? It's not long.
The current P/E of NASDAQ is 24. That's a tad high; with bond yields around 5%, a P/E more than 20 must be based on growth speculation. I could reasonably see the NASDAQ losing 20% of its value in one shot. However, during the bubble, the P/E of the NASDAQ was over 100.
It's hard to overemphasize the difference between these two numbers. Look at the ratios between the NASDAQ P/E numbers and bond yields. Our current ratio is 1.2, which is 20% "too high". The bubble ratio was over 5.8, which 480% too high. The two situations are not even comparable.
If the NASDAQ actually lost over 75% of its value, like it did when the dot-com bubble burst, I'd be buying as much of QQQQ as I could get my hands on.
Thanks for the tip. Maybe I'll try a newer one.
I tried one for a while and found that if you try to move, say, down and then left, with your thumb starting in the center of the ball, the "left" movement just rotates the trackball clockwise, and the cursor doesn't move left. A big, sensitive trackball doesn't have this problem because you can move pretty much as far as you want without moving your fingers far from the center.