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Comment Re:Simple.... Odds are even (Score 1) 167

by Carewolf (#46676221) Attached to: A Rock Paper Scissors Brainteaser

Bullshit..

Any answer that eliminates one of the three options for any of the players, have not been thought through.

If you eliminate one option, the opponent will have optimal strategy guaranteeing no loses.

Any optimal playing strategy will need a percentage of all threes.

Btw, the question is a teaser. There is not optimal solution as there is no equlibrium, any chosen strategy will have an answer by the opponent that makes it sub optimal.

Submission + - Under Revised Quake Estimates, Dozens of Nuclear Reactors Face Problems (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Owners of at least two dozen nuclear reactors across the United States, including the operator of Indian Point 2, in Buchanan, N.Y., have told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that they cannot show that their reactors would withstand the most severe earthquake that revised estimates say they might face, according to industry experts.

As a result, the reactors’ owners will be required to undertake extensive analyses of their structures and components. Those are generally sturdier than assumed in licensing documents, but owners of some plants may be forced to make physical changes, and are likely to spend about $5 million each just for the analysis.

Submission + - MH370: Chinese patrol ship detects pulse signal (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: A Chinese search ship has detected an electronic pulse in an area of the southern Indian Ocean where it is believed the missing Malaysian Airlines plane crashed, state media has announced.

"Chinese patrol ship Haixun 01 searching for flight MH370 discovered a pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5kHz per second in south Indian Ocean waters Saturday," the official news agency, Xinhua, said.

The single-sentence story is the first potentially positive sign in the race against time to find the Malaysian aircraft's black box. But there is as yet no indication of whether the pulse is in fact connected to the plane, and no wreckage has been found in the area despite a massive international hunt.

Comment Re:Why Ubuntu?! (Score 1) 208

I'm sure you haven't seen a red boot on a cable in many years!

Check you backend equipment. It is an error catching mechanism. You need to connect the upsteam ports to downstream ports, etc. If they autonegotiate you could connect them wrong and expose your intranet to the internet. If you for some reason want to connect it in a non-standard way you need a crossed cable.

Comment All hail the multi-verse. (Score 1) 199

by goombah99 (#46662465) Attached to: P vs. NP Problem Linked To the Quantum Nature of the Universe

I wonder, if they framed this research another way, if it could solve the question of whether or not the universe is a simulation.

Enough with your silly dichotomies! it's both. In multi-verse theory, there must be some realities in which our universe is a simulation, and ones in which it is not a simulation.

Submission + - Most expensive aviation search: $53 million to find flight MH370 (smh.com.au)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: The search and investigation into missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is already the most expensive in aviation history, figures released to Fairfax Media suggest.

The snippets of costings provide only a small snapshot but the $US50 million ($54 million) spent on the two-year probe into Air France Flight 447 — the previous record — appears to have been easily surpassed after just four weeks....

The biggest expense in the search has involved ships, satellites, planes and submarines deployed first in the South China Sea and the Malacca Straits, and then in the remote reaches of the southern Indian Ocean.

Submission + - P=NP Problem Linked To The Quantum Nature Of The Universe

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: One of the greatest mysteries in science is why we don't see quantum effects on the macroscopic scale; why Schrodinger's famous cat cannot be both alive and dead at the same time. Now one theorist has worked out why and says the answer is because P is NOT equal to NP. Here's the thinking. The equation that describes the state of any quantum object is called Schrodinger's equation. Physicists have always thought it can be used to describe everything in the universe, even large objects and perhaps the universe itself. But the new idea is that this requires an additional assumption--that an efficient algorithm exists to solve the equation for complex macroscopic systems. But is this true? The new approach involves showing that the problem of solving Schrodinger's equation is NP-hard. So if macroscopic superpositions exist, there must be an algorithm that can solve this NP-hard problem quickly and efficiently. And because all NP-hard problems are mathematically equivalent, this algorithm must also be capable of solving all other NP-hard problems too, such as the travelling salesman problem. In other words, NP-hard problems are equivalent to the class of much easier problems called P. Or P=NP. But here's the thing: computational complexity theorists have good reason to think that P is not equal to NP (although they haven't yet proven it). If they're right, then macroscopic superpositions cannot exist, which explains why we do not (and cannot) observe them in the real world. Voila!

Comment Re:So why use trees? (Score 3, Insightful) 112

by goombah99 (#46658575) Attached to: Cheaper Fuel From Self-Destructing Trees

algae has many great aspect. It's achilles heels are 1) separation is very expensive 2) it's hard to get enough C02 into the water to do this at scale 3) it can get infected easily 3) inhomgenous growth requires active stiring or other tricks to bring a pond to harvest all at the same time 4) it's not that fast to grow-- poplars and switch grass are more efficient bio mass producers. Ethanol can be made from waste products too.

The upside of algae is that were starting to learn how to use some of it's byproducts and this offsets the costs. and incremental progress is being made on all these aspects. We haven't been growing algae as long as plants so there's potential headroom to grow. It can grow in seawater. lipids are better fuel than alchohol. And finally it's potentially less energetically expensive to sperarate lipids from water than alchohol from water. That step accounts for something like 1/3 of the cost of ethanol.

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