bossrat's comments

the other reply explained BBC's style guide, but even if it were not a case of quoting, note that the US Supreme Court has ruled (Dowling v. United States) that copyright infringement cannot be considered stealing under the law regarding interstate commerce in stolen property, and in other rulings US courts have barred plaintiffs from using the terms "piracy" and "theft" to describe copyright infringement, so in the US at least, the terms do deserve quotes.

Not my opinion, just the facts.

(other people have answered you already, and their answers seem quite knowledgeable, but I sense their answers are actually off the point of your question, i.e. I think there is a better answer than you have been given. However, I learned this material long time ago and the precise answer is not fresh in my mind, so hopefully I can give you the gist, we'll see, but apologies in advance for all my hand waving)

it's like this: if I give you a large number and say "factor this", you will work hard figuring out the answer, but if I give you a set of factors and say multiply them together and see if they equal the big number, you can do that fairly quickly. i.e. you can check the answer a lot easier than you can find the answer.

An NP complete optimal routing problem is the same way, it's hard to find an answer, but if somebody gives you the optimal solution, it is easy to check that it is optimal by substituting segments from the solution set for segments that are not in the solution set, and trying to incrementally improve on it: if you have a solution, none of your substitutions will piece-wise be an improvement, furthermore, you can do it in an orderly way that "proves" your route is best precisely without duplicating all your work. This is the part I don't remember but it's something like "find the longest segment on your route, is there some shorter way to accomplish what that accomplishes? no there isn't. or look at the shortest segments, are they penny-wise but pound-foolish, no they aren't." i.e. the part I do remember is that it is polynomial time to confirm the answer, and it is not polynomial time to find the answer. This is what is in fact meant by "non-deterministic polynomial", it's polynomial only if you magically know the answer in a non-deterministic way. Polynomial to check, but in a deterministic way it is not polynomial to determine.

Again, sorry for all the handwaving, but I'm pretty certain that's right.

Oh, and while I'm here, what was the most irritating thing about this article is that P vs NP is not a huge "assumption". Call it a conjecture, call it a hypothesis, call it a problem to solve, but it's not an assumption, it's been tested long and hard by a lot of really smart people and it's the fringes of our knowledge. That's not what is typically meant by the word "assumption".

you are exactly on point.

the unix way is simplicity and transparency. systemd is complex and opaque.

it's ok to have systemd's goals, but an additional goal should be "not a huge monolith"

"the US" is not criticising diesel cars, that is one article on vox.com

Of course, it was in the US where the widespread European diesel cheating was discovered :) but again, that was a small number of Americans measuring, and they don't speak for the whole country either.

And I did pretty much answer the question, it was asked if there are more big cars in the US as rumored, and I didn't say "no", I said "...it's because of these reasons"

Europe is more densely populated and the cultures tend to be less "mobile", so people don't need to transport as much stuff as far, and Europe has more old infrastructure with narrow streets, so larger vehicles are not practical; the US has space galore, and was a generally wealthier place during the period of highway and suburb construction.

people need to stop thinking that Americans are so different than Europeans, and especially that there is so much superego-tic morality attached to everything we each do.

right, which shows you the value of Big Data. Probably the best measures of real estate value trends are available not to real estate experts, but to Google starting with everybody's inboxes, combined with search, geolocation, etc.

your conundrum is that you have a distinctly minority opinion, but you would like to influence the outcome "more than your share"? so, instead of advocating unequal income distribution, you favor unequal outcome?

you are simply wrong to run around diagnosing people as having schizophrenia based on your anecdotal experience. As I explained in another reply to you, the symptoms described do not match the criteria for schizophrenia. Call that a vague platitude if you want.

On margin, more people experience brief episodes of psychosis than who experience chronic psychotic illness, so again, you are just plain wrong.

the diagnosis of schizophrenia is a diagnosis of an extreme form of mental illness, regardless of its prevalence; cancer kills a lot of people, but it does so in an extreme form: the prevalence has nothing to do with the extremity.

What you describe can have many explanations, and is nowhere near an extreme diagnosis such as Schizophrenia.

Anybody's brain can react the way yours did to stress; many brains are less able to handle stress; stress comes in many forms, including PTSD, drugs, alcohol, anxiety, and even lack of sleep.

You shouldn't be taking Adderol without medical supervision and whoever is supervising you taking needs to be qualified to handle this.

OP, I would advise you to get help in person from professionals, not from friends, family, and the internet.

Ziles88, while you are sincerely trying to be helpful, the DSM-5 criteria for Schizoaffective Disorder requires 2 continuous weeks of psychotic symptoms without mood symptoms, not 2 days accompanied by mood. The criteria were changed precisely because it was being diagnosed incorrectly.

but even better is to stick with actual symptoms and stay away from labels; the labels cover broad ranges of symptoms in a way that is useful to trained professionals who understand the nuances and limitations, but individuals don't show such ranges.