A friend of mine once told me about optimal stopping theory.
He said if you could go on 100 dates,
and had choose to one to marry,
and you had to make the decision after a date,
and without being able to choose a previous date,
when should you stop.
The answer for some sample size 'n' is to automatically discard the first n/e dates.
Then choose the first date that is better than the best one already seen.
100/e is 37.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

It is still n(log n) average case. I'll grant you that if speed is super critical, that you're going to want an in place algorithm, in a language like C++.

Without any added explanation it is of course gibberish. However, I think with an additional fairly brief explanation of symbols in the example, it would be quite clear to somebody with decent mathematical/logical thinking skills. And if the person doesn't poses those skills, then there is really no point in trying. It is certainly a nice addition to a description in English as it removes any ambiguity. Conciseness is often nice, because it doesn't allow any room for extraneous stuff. Of course, sometimes very concise code can still be difficult to understand.

Slashdot messed up my post. Well, it was meant to be the 2 liner Haskell quicksort.

Should have paid attention to the preview, dang it.
quicksort [] = []
quicksort (x:xs) = quicksort [y | y x]

quicksort [] = [] quicksort (x:xs) = quicksort [y | y x]

If they are sentient, and require the same resources as humans, and are more intelligent than humans, it seems safe to assume they will want all the resources for themselves. If they are smarter, then its not hard to imagine them attempting to eliminate humans.

Not only that, it really sounds like a couple people just did it on their vacation time because it personally annoyed them. Microsoft was not interested in actually putting it on a schedule to be fixed.

The dirt above the rock looks a bit like a schnauzer with the face being in the very upper right.

The closure was over four days. It is not believable that Christie was unaware of this the entire time.

I am being to think that this right here is the reason to abolish the patent system entirely. Clearly we don't want things that are obvious being patented. However, we have no formal test for what is obvious. Since we can't test for obviousness, both the patent office and the courts have decided to ignore obviousness, thus destroying any possible usefulness of a patent system. Now if there could somehow be a useful test for obviousness that could be applied, then we could possibly reconsider the merits of having a patent system. I don't see a formal test for obviousness ever coming to fruition though.

I wish it would go a step further and not give any apps access to the contacts. It seems to me that an app that needs a contact should make a request to the operating system. The operating system could present the contacts to the user to select one, and then the operating system could return an opaque handle representing the contact to the app. The opaque handle could then be used to send email or what not.

There are a few things with question 1 that are not clear.
"A full coffee cup labeled with a 6 and the world whole"

Does this mean there are currently 6 pennies in the cup?
Does this mean that the capacity of the cup is 6 pennies?
Does this mean that the capacity of the cup is 6 pennies and there are 6 pennies in it and thus no more can be added to it?

What do pennies have do with coffee?
Does the cup hold 6 ounces of coffee?

Did the 5 pennies come from the cup, leaving 1 in the cup?
Do you have 5 pennies but the cup is empty?

What is missing from what?
Do I need to put the 5 pennies back into the cup to make it whole?
Are there only 5 pennies in existence, and therefore I am missing 1 to fill up the cup.
Were 5 pennies removed from the cup and therefore I am missing the penny in the cup.

What a terribly worded question.

Although of the 4 choices, 1 is the only thing that could possibly work.
Multiple choice is a really dumb idea here too.

Personally, I think plasmas look better in the dark and LEDs look better once any amount of room lighting is added. I think a lot of people do most of their watching with some lighting on.

Are they trying to say through this analysis that your potential maximum life span would be N years and that you are some percentage of the way there?