personal opinion of the status of the various ideas labelled "multiverse", inappropriately presented as fact. There is certainly not a consensus view that these opinions are correct, as you might mistakenly infer. In fact, "..., with different Big Bangs but very likely with the same fundamental laws and constants" -- it seems to me the weight of professional opinion is actually more on the other side here. His views on Everett's many-worlds interpretation are also counter to those of most people who accept it as valid in the first place. Perhaps most egregiously, if he is going to borrow (linking to) Tegmark's categorization of the different levels of multiverse, he should at least get them right. But he refers to Tegmark's level 1 as level 0, level 2 as level 1, and is a little confused about the distinction between 1 and 2. If you want a much more thorough, and objective, discussion of the various multiverse ideas, you want to read Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality. And of course Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe is the latest entry into this field, a manifesto of sorts.

Generalized (NxN) sudoku is NP-complete. That's the only sense in which any puzzle is computationally intractable.

This is very fascinating work, but I am skeptical. I design puzzles like this, with computer assistance, and automatically gauging how difficult a puzzle is seems to be basically impossible. The fundamental problem is that the logical structure of a puzzle is not in itself sufficient to gauge difficulty. A huge amount of it is in the presentation, and how the player conceptualizes the puzzle, and how much of the problem can be handled automatically by visual processes. There are puzzles with trivial game trees that I have watched players get totally lost in, because the game tree is not apparent in the puzzle manifestation.

If this research addresses this problem, I will be very impressed.

I probably wouldn't renew at $119. And without free shipping, I would order less stuff from Amazon. That doesn't sound too good for the shareholders.

Not going to get into all the arguments here. Yes, it is more complicated in detail than the simple model Walker lays out. But in practice, *if* you count calories as prescribed, *then* the model is good enough.

I'd like to provide an update here. I read about the Hacker's Diet first on Slashdot, in fall 1999. I followed it, and during 2000 I lost 50 pounds. I've kept it off for 13 years now. A few years later I started running. I've now run 96 marathons and ultramarathons, heading towards my 10th consecutive Boston Marathon, I've broken 3 hours four times, and I've run three 100 milers, including Western States. Couldn't be happier with that part of my life.

The running has been a bigger life change than losing weight. But I couldn't have done it, no way, without losing the weight first. And I have the Hacker's Diet to thank for that.

And yes, running 60-70 miles / week, I *still* have to count calories.

I would guess that you've never entered one of these competitions. To do well, it is not sufficient to come up with quick and dirty solutions; these will generally fail. You have to be able to find a good algorithm, quickly, and implement it, catching all the edge cases. These are certainly valuable real-world skills.

Disclaimer -- I was on the Rice team that took 3rd in 1986 (before there were any international teams at all).

... sort of. And it is established physics. See Swimming in Spacetime: Motion by Cyclic Changes in Body Shape, Science, 2/27/2003, by Jack Wisdom.

But this mechanism relies on general relativistic effects, and only works in curved spacetime. Momentum conservation is not violated, because while the location of the object changes, its momentum (thus velocity) does not -- it simply cyclicly translates itself through space.

My first thought reading about the EmDrive was that Shaywer had found a way to reproduce this effect using a microwave cavity. But unless I'm mistaken, this does not appear to be the case, and I don't follow the arguments that Shaywer's drive should work.

Character count: 126

*Raises both hands, jumps on desk, starts howling*

I have that same drive, and the 500GB before it. LOVE 'em. My MacBook Pro 15" has two drives, one is the 750GB Momentus hybrid, and the other is a slow 1TB HD. What I really want is two 1TB hybrids. This seems to be achievable much sooner than with SSD, and the speed is "good enough".

Beyond just going to 1TB, the other thing Seagate could do is go with massively increasing the SSD portion, and making it a full volume instead of cache, say, 128GB or more, and then allowing us to use that as a boot/app volume.

This seems physically possible today, but would add a couple hundred dollars or so...but would be totally worth it.

I see hybrids becoming even more valuable in the future as the SSD portion can grow to become even more useful before SSD-only becomes available at reasonable prices in the capacities we need.

(For the love of God, please don't reply to this comment with the word "cloud" anywhere in the post... we're talking TBs here)

I hate those people. Now I have to put up with Anti-WiFi Wallpaper, which I'm all kinds of allergic to!

If you have a job where all you need is connectivity, then take advantage of being able to work anywhere/anytime. This won't work for all jobs, but a couple of years ago I found myself in this situation. My "office" is my MacBook and my iPhone. I did a couple of Eurail trips and it works great being able to work, even on the train. I've had a few other trips as well, and it's a really cool thing, as long as you can get the work done, and stay up late to do so if needed.

"iPhone 4S, iOS 5, iPad 2...nothing new...out of ideas"

I'm guessing whenever any new Apple product comes out, you comment, "it's not good enough and far behind the competition". The product takes off and then when the new version of the product comes out you say, "it's a disappointing update, nothing new". All the while you talk about "lack of real innovation". Meanwhile from the iPod to the iPad, we've seen overwhelming success after success, including not only new products, but updates to products as well.

Don't expect 5 years from now that the iPad is going to be significantly different from the original iPad...thin, display, touch, about 10", glass, etc... There's only so much you can, or more importantly *should*, do with that. However, do expect it to be selling well, and to be getting very high marks in customer satisfaction.

For the informed: maybe the shares are CHEAP compared to what they will be in the future. Really, given the growth rate of Apple, I don't see how the shares could come back down any time soon, unless there's some major end-of-world-like catastrophe.

"My best estimate is that Apple shares should be priced around $130-$150/share"

What the hell is your estimate based on? The P/E ratio is already about average for the market if going by TTM (trailing 12 months), which is flawed since Apple's business has been doubling every year. Still, be conservative and go by TTM and Apple is right where it should be.

Your estimate of $130 a share, even with a conservative TTM approach, gives it a P/E ratio of 3.5! It gives it a market cap of $117 Billion, which is just about what their cash on hand will be at the end of next quarter.

Forgetting the cash on hand, you're still estimating Apple's market value to be *less* than the projected revenue for the year...not smart for a company with a profit margin that's over 25%.

"If I had the cash to short Apple stock over the long term, I would do that."

I wonder why you don't have the cash. /s

Look, we get it, you're an anti-apple fanboy, but you're better off sticking to the one-button mice comments.