Or maybe they're using exactly the types of communication we're steadily moving toward: fiber optics for long distances, lots of low power transmitters for short distances. If they've expanded beyond their home planet, interplanetary communication would probably use lasers, so very very highly directional. All of these signals would of course be digital, not analog.

Anyone in a distant star system listening for messages would hear absolutely nothing.

Even the simplest calculation shows how absurd that claim is. The U.S. population is a bit over 300 million. Let's say 200 million are "working age". 50 million being out of work would be an unemployment rate of 25%. Ok, some people "aren't working" because they don't want to work. Perhaps they're staying home raising their children, while their spouse supports them. Though I'd argue being a full time homemaker is "working", especially if you're caring for children.

In any case, his number is clearly nonsensical. It has nothing to do with actual unemployment, the sort he's arguing this would make worse.

Exactly! Couldn't have said it better myself.

Are you suggesting I should instead write something like any_of(c.begin(), c.end(), [&e](int i){return i==e;})? (I'm not sure if I got the syntax exactly right. I haven't used lambdas yet.) That's even worse to type, harder to read, and more likely to contain errors.

Speaking just about STL, I'd have to say it's one of the worst designed container APIs I've worked with. It just goes out of its way to make your code painful to write and hard to read.

Suppose you want to determine if a collection c contains an element e. In any other language, you'd write something like c.contains(e). But the STL designers, in their infinite wisdom, decided instead you should write c.find(e) != c.end(). Because that's just so much more readable. Suppose you want to determine if a string s ends with some suffix t. In any other language you would write something like s.endswith(t). But in C++ you write s.rfind(t) == s.size()-t.size(). I think? I'm not 100% sure I didn't make a mistake in there.

C++11 tried to fix some of the worst aspects of STL, but they didn't redesign it from scratch, which is what it really needs.

Really interesting prejudices on display here. Why is there no option for "I'm already retired"? Whoever wrote this poll, it never even occurred to them any retired people might be reading slashdot.

No, that is not at all what the study found. Let me quote directly from the abstract:

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

Let me state that again: the only interest groups with substantial influence are those representing business interests. All other interest groups have "little or no independent influence". Organizing a grassroots movement is not an effective strategy.

And the whole point of this cover is to be a joke - showing a "future" computer that is clearly completely impractical, because you would need a magnifying glass to read the tiny text on it, and because it would be completely impossible to actually type on a keyboard that small. The artist was having fun by pretending computers would just get smaller without changing in any other way, when this clearly couldn't happen in real life.

It doesn't exist in anything. That's the point: mathematics is independent of any context. When we say a piece of mathematics "exists", what we really mean is that certain consequences follow from certain definitions. It doesn't matter whether anyone has yet derived those consequences, or whether anyone has written down those definitions, or even whether there exists a person who could write them down or a surface on which to write them. It still remains true that certain consequences follow from certain definitions. And "the universe", according to the MUH, is the consequence that follows from some (currently unknown) definition.

Here's the Wikipedia page on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.... I tried to include that in my first post, but it looks like Slashdot beta has changed how you specify links. :(

The best, and really only, answer I know for that question is the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. It says the universe is a purely mathematical structure that exists in an abstract, logical sense because by definition, it must exist. That's a hard concept to wrap your brain around, but it's the only approach I know of with even a hint of being able to answer your question. It gives you existence without needing God, quantum fluctuations, or anything else to bootstrap it. And so far, it's the only game in town.

Sounds to me like really bad public policy. But nothing in the Constitution bans congress from passing that law.

Encouraging people to buy health insurance certainly counts as promoting the "General Welfare of the United States". That's about the vaguest, least limiting wording I could have imagined. Allowing the government to collect taxes to promote the "General Welfare" is pretty much a blank check allowing it to do so for any purpose whatsoever.

You may not like that. You may think Article 1 should have been much more explicit and restrictive in its wording. That's fine. You're allowed to disagree with the Constitution, and you're allowed to campaign to get it changed. But for the present, it says what it says, and you don't have the right to pretend it says something different from what it plainly does say. (Morally speaking. Legally, I suppose you have the right to pretend whatever you want, but that doesn't make it true.)

Suppose that instead of calling it a fine for not buying insurance, they had simply described it differently. Suppose they decided to tax everyone by a fixed amount, and then offered a tax rebate to anyone who bought insurance. Would you still feel that was unconstitutional? The government has the right to levy taxes - no question about that. And they have the right to spend money however they want, including giving it out as tax rebates to encourage particular behaviors. Yet the two situations are completely identical as far as money is concerned. The only difference is how they describe it. What makes the first unconstitutional and the second not?

Anyway, your claim about the Supreme Court is simply wrong. They've ruled that choosing to spend money in particular ways in particular circumstances is protected free speech, but they've never made any blanket claim that money=speech. For example, they still allow lots of restrictions on donations to political campaigns. You can't donate more than a fixed amount to any one candidate, and while you're allowed to buy political advertisements on your own, you can't coordinate with the campaigns you intend to support. And much more relevantly: so far as I know, they have never ruled in any context that you have a right to refuse to pay taxes or fines levied by the government.

That's exactly right. I just finished reading the paper. He's basically saying that we don't know what the Schrodinger equation predicts for macroscopic systems, because it's completely impossible to do the calculation and find out. Actually, whether P=NP doesn't really matter as far as that goes. Whether or not it will some day be possible to do the calculation, thus far we haven't done it, so we don't know what the result is. We shouldn't go around making claims about half-dead/half-alive cats when we have no idea whether QM predicts that or not.

There's a bit more to the paper than that. It has two main parts. The first is a proof that solving the Schrodinger equation is NP-hard. He then considers the case of a simple test system (for which we can solve the Schrodinger equation) coupled to a complex environment (for which we can't). He makes some heuristic arguments based on a set of reasonable sounding approximations, and shows that they lead to the standard probabilistic behavior and wavefunction collapse for the test system.

I don't think any of this is really new. It's just a different way of looking at decoherence. Still, it makes interesting reading.

I remember reading about this!

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook...