One idea is to look overseas for at least a proper diagnosis. You might be able to do it much cheaper even with the airfare. The rates the medical industry charge in the US are highly inflated.

nothing is going to stop doctors from providing it and profiting on it.

You can stop the doctor from profiting on it by giving them a fixed salary and removing their ability to be financially vested in the testing companies. Kind of like how it is done in England (the location of the anecdote) and almost all of the first world.

Your entire rant about Intel has been rectified. First AMD sued Intel, that case was settled over a year ago. Then the FTC gave Intel an anticompetitive smack down on top of that, which was settled nearly a year ago.

Unfortunately, according to people looking at the compiler, things haven't changed

The old AT&T did a few good things: the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system...

I interpreted it as a cheeky way for a Marx Brother's fan to encourage people to watch all the movies. Clearly it doesn't work on people with no sense of humor.

It's *extremely* common for people to underestimate their random errors by a factor of 2. That means the the 4.9-sigma result is only a 2.45-sigma result. But 2.45-sigma results happen about 1.4% of the time.

I'm not sure what you mean by underestimating random error. For simple experiments, one has a control to control random errors. They compare the control sample distribution to the test sample distribution. There is no explicit estimation of random error. Do you mean they use an improper distribution to model things? Perhaps they incorrectly use a normal distribution when the real distribution has heavy tails.

Yes, some industry is bad. Some is good. Same goes for parts of government.

What's your point? Clearly in this case they are completely different kinds of bad. If the government fails to regulate properly for whatever reason then yes this is bad. If a company knowingly releases a product it knows is damaging to the environment then this also is bad. However, in no sense are they equal or even comparable.

In this case, the government is only failing to prevent a industry from creating a problem. They aren't directly creating the problem. In fact, it's reasonable to assume that without any regulation even more companies would get away with similar abuses. It's even reasonable to assume that no regulation is perfect and some problems will always be missed, but we can't compare against Utopia.

As a liberal, I have to say mcrbids was being a bit of an arrogant ass, and I don't see why that's not reason enough to be pissed at him. Let's stick to reality and not play the pundit game.

As for oil from bacteria, this is not the first time this theory has been proposed, so instead of calling someone an idiot why not go into the research. As for sustainability, the point is not that one should wait for the old wells to refill, but that there might be a lot more oil deeper in the earth. Of course, even if there is a lot more oil that doesn't mean it's a good idea to burn it.

We can't as far as I'm aware even get a strongly non-trivial result of the form for some explicit constant C, "No NP complete problem can be solved in polynomial time with a polynomial of degree at most C."

I'm curious to know the best lower bound for any decision problem. I don't even know any good lower bounds for problems where the output must be at most linear in the size of the input.

NP is a set of problem. The main issue is about two subsets of NP: P and NP-complete. We have lots of examples of problems in each subset. We think that these subsets are disjoint, but no one has proven that fact. We have proven that if they are not disjoint then they are equal. Therefore one way to prove that they are equal is to show a problem is both in P and NP-complete.

Also, I'm not sure we want labor controlled by the free-market. There is no magic reason that the free market will pay people a decent wage. It's easy to envision a future where industry does not profit by paying a decent wage for most labor. Real capitalism comes from being an owner, and in such a future only the owners would survive with the existing free market labor model.

You don't need to simulate the Turing machine. You just need to encode it as a boolean formula. That's part of what Cook's theorem shows; it shows how to encode a non-deterministic Turing machine as a boolean formula with at most a polynomial increase in size. Now that the problem is in a NP-complete form just follow the reductions until you get to the NP-complete algorithm that has a P algorithm. In this way you can solve any NP problem in P time as long as you solve one NP-complete algorithm in P time.

Please don't feed the trolls.

The bottom 50% of the population still don't pay any taxes at all.

Any references for this? Make sure it includes payroll and sales taxes. Also remember that many payroll taxes are effectively doubled since the employer matches the amount.

at best you're just cotton-headed naive, at worst your in danger of ethnocentric and prejudicial thinking

He's asking for evidence to justify your human psychology theory. If you don't have any real evidence then fess up. It's not enough to give anecdotes that don't really address the issue. It's even worse to come up with some bizarre theory on his thought process that doesn't seem to amount to more than an ad hominem attack.